setup credit and deduction system

[bevry-archive]

setup credit and deduction system

[balupton]

(current sponsors @Aglezabad @jlgeering) (historical sponsors @scokem @ahdinosaur) as you fellows will be the benefactors of the above system, which options take your fancy?

[balupton]

going to go monthly option, as it can be converted to the daily option at a later time if necessary, but the daily option cannot be converted to the monthly option

[Aglezabad]

I agree with the monthly option and I think it will be easier to do if you are going to use GMT instead of specific time zone.

Sorry for not telling anything before. I was busy.

[jlgeering]

monthly sounds fine if the reward is recognition (being listed as a backer), i.e. wait for next month to be listed. Not sure about the small amount over time vs 1 big lump question, but probably the second option with a single aggregate list. Also it avoids repetition.

But then the "fidelity" aspect gets lost (how long has X been a supporter) ... deleted 2 bad proposals how to address that => no clue how to "fix" it, not sure if it even matters.

PS: I'm actually surprised (in a good way) that you noticed me supporting you ... first time I get a confirmation that Gratipay is working ;-)

[balupton]

cool, thanks for the above, I will get back to this in the next few days!

@jlgeering while I don't have the code up right now, I believe you were pulled in from your open collective donations! as currently gratipay doesn't expose who our sponsors are

:)

[balupton]

Status update.

I've been working on the visual web interface the past few days...

I've also gone and coded a Patreon scraper to get the complete donation records of all the backers - not just the current months ones.

This is what I've concluded...

Monthly billing, tier selection, a credit and deduction system, and their displays, are all issues unique to the time period model - and they are all very complex.

E.g. What happens when you change the tiers you offer? Well, you would need to save them for the next billing cycle. As well as move everyone to the closest lower tier that is related to the one they were previously on. As well as notify everyone of the new fields they need to fill out.

They also make it very hard to develop this thing, as unless one adds in an override ability, then all your changes are queued until the next billing cycle. Which slows down the development of this.

As such...

I'm going to abolish the monthly tier model, and just consider it a legacy of the Patreon system. Instead, we Sponsored will assign tiers to the cumulative amount the user has donated. Users who have donated in the past ~31 days will be rendered in READMEs and Widgets, with a link to see the historical backers.

Backers will be grouped by their tier, and backers be sorted with highest cumulative amount first.

This will:

• drastically simplify the complexity of the system's implementation as well as its conceptualisation
• be fairer on sponsors (no delays in their rendering), and consequently require less legal/accounting issues if we ever screw up the complex rendering of time-based billing cycles
• be quicker for developers/admins/maintainers to revise and improve billing tiers and their rendering
• correctly reward people who have given the most, even if it was over a long period of time
• still incentivise active sponsors vs inactive sponsors

It hits all the goals really well.

Let me know your thoughts. This is quite the radical departure from the way these things are currently implemented.