rom a vague "Maybe people will give me money for this?" dream to the painful "Christ, just $20 again this month." reality, begging for donations to support this website, or at least cover my hosting costs, have been quite the wild ride. I initially hatched the scheme in early 2003, after seeing lots of other sites ask for money, and some of them even get it. At that point I created the donations page, listed my expenses, and hoped for the best. And sometimes, I even got it.

The donations page is updated monthly, this page is updated with blog entries about donations, when the update is something more interesting than "Please give me money this month."

Also see the Banned by Pay Pal article, for blog entries on that subject.

More recent updates are on top of the page.

December 2, 2003

Amazon.com's Honor System info tells me that they take $.15 per transaction, and then 15% on top of that.  I thought that was ridiculously high, but after PayPal determined this was an adult site (for reasons still to be explained) and gave me the boot, I didn't see any other options, since no one seems interested in just sending me a check directly (the PO Box is listed on the donations page).  However, as the $91.39 balance in my account attests, they took only about 5% out of the total $97, made in four donations.

I now look at their FAQ (which I read quite closely before signing up) and see that it says:

Amazon Honor System fees
The Amazon Honor System charges minimal transaction fees. The fee schedule is very simple. The person making a payment is not charged any fees at all. The person receiving a payment is assessed 5% of the total payment per transaction plus $.19. The Honor System is designed to be self-service for your convenience. That way, our limited customer service costs allow us to keep your transaction fees low.

I have no explanation for this change, but I'm certainly not complaining.

Secondly, the little chart on my Amazon account page still says the target is $25 and that it's been met, and I can't find any way to change it. I thought that it could be set to reset each month, which was why I put $25 for the goal.  I can see how to reset it or hide the amount of donations received, but I'm trying to do this with transparency for the donor, so I'm not sure what to do now. Perhaps I'll just reset it each month; after all, archived totals of all donations ever received can be seen at the bottom of my Donate Page already.

And yes, that worked, so it's been reset for December.  The suspicious among you may now conclude that I got a $8235 donation on Monday and reset it Monday night to hide that fact and try to weasel another $20 or $30 in donations just to cover the optional monogrammed leather floor mats in my new Ferrari Enzo.

December 5, 2003

In site news, the stupid donation progress chart thing on Amazon.com is annoying me.  I can't see any way to make it reset monthly, or at all, and since I don't want to show nothing about donations given, since that would make me suspicious if I were you, I've just changed it so the total goal is $500, which puts the $97 so far received into perspective.  Sort of.

The other stupidity of it is that it still shows $107 in donations, despite $10 of that being rejected at the time, and donated again later by the same guy.  As I said a couple of weeks ago, anyone could just make a dozen $50 donations, cancel every one of them as soon as they went through, and make a site's donation meter read $600 donated and turn off every other donor for the immediate forever.

Come to think of it, this might be partially why so few sites have the stupid progress bar enabled in the first place...

October 25 and 31, 2003

See the banned by Pay Pal entries from October 25 and October 31 on the banned by Pay Pal article page.

March 12, 2003

I have updated the Donors page with the March donations.  Also, my Amazon.com affiliate request has been approved, so if you are dying to go on a mad DVD spree, please do it through the link from my site. Using the one on top of the nav bar would probably be easiest.

According to the Amazon.com affiliates info, I should get 5% of the purchase price of everything you buy via a link from here, and up to 15% if you buy things from Amazon.com that no one ever buys from Amazon.com; things like tools and furniture and home electronics, etc.  That's 15% if I have a direct link to the item or type of item you want to buy.  Apparently some books, like new hardcovers, are also 15% if I have a direct link to that particular book.  Not just the general purpose link.

Yeah, it's sort of a pain in the ass, and how likely are you guys to sort through a bunch of links and be sure you click just the right one?  I doubt I'd be bothered with that if I were the one shopping. Nevertheless, I'll be adding direct links to various things from the reviews pages, or maybe a daily update if I talk about a new DVD or book or whatever, just in case.

There are some cool account features on Amazon.com, where I can see which links from me to there were clicked on, what was viewed once you were there, what you bought, etc. I don't see who was doing the clicking though, so don't worry about me keeping track of your book browsing or anything like that.  Of course Amazon.com (and every other merchant on earth) does keep track of that, as does Google, your ISP, every store you've ever used a credit card or membership card in, etc.  My point, other than depressing you by shattering any lingering illusions of security, is that even if I could see your browsing (which I can't), Fluxypoo is about the last person you need to worry about knowing that you are browsing books on coming out of the closet or kicking alcohol or prostate cancer treatments.

Anyway, I'm asking that everyone who has nothing better to do give the banner a click and then click around some on Amazon.com, just for the hell of it.  You don't have to buy anything, I just want to see what the stats show and how accurate or useful they are.  And if anyone buys anything and you aren't embarrassed to say what it was, mail me?  Just so I can check on what Amazon.com is doing and if it's really giving me credit, etc.  I won't post anything about your purchases on the site.  Unless you really want me to, anyway.

March 6, 2003

Thanks to a couple of generous regular visitors, I had $25 in donations by the time I even got the update online yesterday.  They sent me money just based on the little pay pal box in the nav bar.  Nice guys, eh?

And yes, I did at last update yesterday, and I think it was a pretty good one, so click back to it if you gave up at noon or something. *cough*

Once I did update two more donations came in, $10 each, though one of those is pending still, whatever that means.  I had to upgrade to the PayPal premium account to get the credit card donations, so the three that have cleared were for $35, which netted me $33.67 after PayPal's skimming off the CC donations.  I'm happy; I was afraid I'd go to the trouble of the donations page and it would sit there with $0 donated for, well... forever.

Here's a funny mail on the subject from a fellow calling himself Scott:

I don't know about giving you money, I hardly know you. But you do have the funniest begging page I've ever seen.

I guess that's praise.  Sort of.

No word from Amazon.com yet about the sell through thing, so if you're dying to go on a DVD splurge and want to earn me 5% of it, wait another day or two, please.

And this is the last I'll talk about this until the end of the month.  I hope.  Actually that's probably not true, since I find the whole thing interesting, having never done it before.

I'll get the donations page updated tomorrow, with the Donor's names and the amount given, etc.  And also will mail you guys the URLs for the secret donor reward pages.  *cues spooky music*

And the rest of you freeloading sons of bitches can go to hell. *cough*

March 5, 2003

One of the new pages is the Donations Page, which has been accessible since last night (about the time a proper update should have been online) since I added it to the nav bar and uploaded that to test how it looked. Ironic isn't it?

The day I finally put up the PayPal donations page, hoping for some gifts that are entirely dependent upon the generosity of my readers, the daily update is 12 hours late. *cough*

Anyway, the donations page is online and it lists expenses and asks for gifts and offers special rewards for them. I'm not going to make a big speech or spiel about it, and I hope to not have to bore everyone with regular begging for money.  I'm not going broke running this site, and to be honest, I'm going to keep doing it even if no one donates a cent.

I'm some salesman, huh?

But it would be nice if you guys chipped in a few bucks a month.  As everyone says in instances like this; if everyone reading this gave me a dollar a month, I could cover my hosting and practically live on it.  Since that never happens with free content, no one on the Internet is living on anything via donations.  But anyway, this is your chance to give back, etc etc.  If you do not have a paypal account, and you sign up for one via the link on my donations page, I get $5 just for that.  So even if you can't afford to chip in a few bucks, you can make a donation just by signing up with PayPal.  And yes, the sign up process is somewhat intrusive.  Ask them to warm their hands first, if you know what I mean.

I will have one of those Amazon.com sell through things set up as soon as Amazon.com approves me for one of those sell through things.  Hopefully in a day or two.  Once that's up you can click to Amazon.com from here and anything you purchase will earn me 5% or more of the purchase price. I'll treat this just like a donation since I don't care if you give me $10, or if you spend $200 on books and DVDs and I get 5% of it.  Beggars can't be choosers.  Etc.

Note that donors of more than $10 get access to a couple of site pages that aren't available to anyone else.  One is the full Quote of the Day Archive, if you enjoy the quotes there are more than 400 of them and counting.  The other is a directory of all of the news images pages that I've posted over time.  They are only accessible from each day's update at this point, so you'd have to dig through the archives to find them. (Just like the quotes.)  I was going to put both of these pages up for anyone who wanted them, but decided it would be cool to have some special stuff just for donors. Also, the news images page is (obviously) very bandwidth heavy, and if everyone could easily browse those to their heart's content, I would need a bigger hosting package, and more donations. More irony!

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.