Hey guys, I hope everyone’s doing well. What a year. I’m writing this announcement as a plea to the community to solicit your help covering our monthly server fundraising costs. These costs are our monthly expenses required to keep WritingForums.org online which are payed each month to our web hosting company. During the month of September we fell $40 short of our monthly goal. For October, we only received $38 in donations/subscriptions, leaving us $154 short of our $192 monthly hosting costs. This puts us approximately $194 overdue on our web hosting bill, with another $192 due before the end of the month. (Our monthly server costs have increased slightly due to a mandatory increase of our cPanel subscription.) Normally I would just pay this out of pocket (I have occasionally in the past). However, due to coronavirus I lost my job and am currently unemployed. I’m receiving less than $200/week in unemployment benefits, which doesn’t even cover half of my personal bills. We really need your help to stay online. We need to raise $194 ASAP to cover our outstanding server bill, plus an additional $192 before the end of the month. Please, please consider donating to our fundraiser or purchasing our Supporter membership. You can help cover our overdue bill here and our upcoming server bill here.
It might be an idea to alter the sidebar to reflect what's actually needed. Right now, because the donations have exceeded the one-month requirement, it's showing as being 134% ...as if you've received more money than you need. But in fact, you need quite a bit more. I only noticed this announcement by accident. There will be lots of people who see that sidebar and think, oh, they've got all they need now.
@Daniel, I didn't donate but I purchased supporter membership, so I hope that helps a little. I realise you have many, many more important things on your mind right now, and you must concentrate on providing for yourself and your family, but I do urge you, if possible, to spend a little time resolving some of the outstanding issues on the forum that only you have access to.
Is there any way you could allow people to pay directly with their credit/debit card? Instead of using Paypal? Or am I missing an option somewhere?
As far as i know theres no easy way to make a random donation except via paypal (you can contact daniel to pay by bacs etc but his message account is not closely monitored), however you can buy supporter membership using stripe https://www.writingforums.org/account/upgrades
When I clicked on "pay by paypal" there was a link for "pay by credit card" right there. Worked just fine.
good point - thats a paypal page rather than a WF page which is why i'd forgotten they did that... but yes, you can donate 'via paypal' without actually having a paypal account... you basically use your credit/debit card to pay money into the WF paypal account
I made a little contribution. Good luck Daniel. We are in this together. I also lost my job at the end of September.
I was out of work for 8 months due to Covid so I feel you. I finally am working again and have discretionary funds, so I donated a bit.
I'm rolling in cash like Danger Diabolik, so I sent you some. I'd tell you not spend it all in one place, but you probably should. There used to be an option to subscribe and have that counted to the total. I wish that was still there.
it is - its just that the link isn't terribly intuitive https://www.writingforums.org/account/upgrades
Does it get counted as part of the monthly total? I know it's a silly thing, but I like it appearing in there. I did it once, but I don't remember if I did something special to show up in the monthly server costs.
I don't think it does - it all goes towards it, but it only shows in the totaliser if its actually donated through the fundraiser (I think @Daniel can add it in manually)
