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[trav]

I haven't posted on the forum much, but I've been playing DF for well over a year now and still finding it fun.

I'd really like to help toady along, I dig what he's doing on many levels, both game play and dev wise and business model wise (even if he doesn't want to call it a business model).

My current dilemma is that the two options I can see for donations are not satisfactory. 
Snail mailing money takes regular manual action, as does paypal donations (I quickly investigated their interface and couldn't find a mechanism for monthly donations), and I'm just too forgetful to keep doing that.

I live in Australia and want to donate $10 AUD a month and I want to set it up now and not have to look at it again until I want to cancel it (assuming I ever do which is unlikely).

Is there some way that I can just give toady my credit card (VISA) details and he can charge to it monthly?  Is there an account I can dump the money in?

Also, I'm not an idiot, so don't say something stupid like "yeah just post your credit card details here", or "put your money into this account XXXX", I'll be making pretty sure that my money's going to Toady.

[Toady One]

Somebody actually wrote me a few months ago, and we were talking about monthly donations.  Paypal has a way to do it that is fairly painless, if you are signed up with Paypal, and the only thing that's a bit annoying is that I don't know how to do html forms or anything like that, so I don't know how to set up the amounts or the currencies without manually changing the following links.

The link we used looks like (this is 10USD/month):

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick-subscriptions&business=tarn%2eadams%40gmail%2ecom&item_name=Bay%2012%20Games%20Recurring%20Donation&no_shipping=1&no_note=1&currency_code=USD&lc=US&bn=PP%2dSubscriptionsBF&charset=UTF%2d8&a3=10%2e00&p3=1&t3=M&src=1

or if you want to set a specific number of months, you add a bit to the end (&str=6 is six months):

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick-subscriptions&business=tarn%2eadams%40gmail%2ecom&item_name=Bay%2012%20Games%20Recurring%20Donation&no_shipping=1&no_note=1&currency_code=USD&lc=US&bn=PP%2dSubscriptionsBF&charset=UTF%2d8&a3=10%2e00&p3=1&t3=M&src=1&srt=6

You can change the currency_code to whoever you want, and the amount is the a3=10%2e00, but I wasn't really sure how to set it up with an HTML form.  I can let this slip my mind a little less if more people are interested.  You can use these links directly if you like.  For instance, for 10AUD every month, you can use:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick-subscriptions&business=tarn%2eadams%40gmail%2ecom&item_name=Bay%2012%20Games%20Recurring%20Donation&no_shipping=1&no_note=1&currency_code=AUD&lc=US&bn=PP%2dSubscriptionsBF&charset=UTF%2d8&a3=10%2e00&p3=1&t3=M&src=1

We had trouble with it canceling once after three or so payments, I think, and we never figured that out (paypal was only sort of informative there), but it's easy enough to restart if that's ever an issue.  Subscriptions are very easy to cancel from your Paypal page.  If you don't have a Paypal account and don't want to sign up for one, I'm not sure how to set up something automatic myself.

[trav]

Code: [Select]

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="GET">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick-subscriptions" />
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="tarn%2eadams%40gmail%2ecom" />
Item Name <input readonly name="item_name" value="Bay%2012%20Games%20Recurring%20Donation" /><br/>
<input type="hidden" name="no_shipping" value="1" />
<input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="1" />
Currency Code:<input name="currency_code" value="AUD" />
<input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US" />
<input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP%2dSubscriptionsBF" />
<input type="hidden" name="charset" value="UTF%2d8" />
Amount: <input name="a3" value="10%2e00" /><br/>
<input type="hidden" name="p3" value="1" />
<input type="hidden" name="t3" value="M" />
<input type="hidden" name="src" value="1" />
<input type="submit" />
</form>

There's a html form version of the link you posted.  Remove hidden from any of the input elements to make em visible, the read only thing is there in case you want to show things but not let people edit them.

I'll be signing up for $10 pcm when I get home (I don't do banking/money from work).  It's not heaps, but if 400 people did it you'd be earning a reasonable (although perhaps a little low) living, and 400 isn't that much on the internet

-- edit : added submit button --
-- edit : fixed amount field --

[XmasApe]

Hell, I subscribed for $5/month to an online game I enjoyed less than I enjoy DF because it was convenient. I'd be in for more for DF, partly because it's way better and partly because I know my payment will directly benefit the creator.
I'll admit I'd prefer a form I can fill in over a pre-constructed link - I'd think Paypal would offer a feature to help with that.

[Toady One]

I think the form is working -- I put it up on the support page http://www.bay12games.com/support.html .  For some reason it was changing the %2e into %252, but when I changed them into periods, Paypal was fine with it (I wonder if that'll be fine in all browsers though?).  I couldn't google a list of currency codes that paypal accepts.  It takes USD, EUR, GBP and AUD, but it did not take AFN, the Afghani, so it doesn't take everything from wikipedia (it does take yen JPY and new sheqel ILS, so maybe AFN is a particular case).

Thanks for setting up the form!

[trav]

There we go Toady, signed up and on the wagon.

Makes me happy to be contributing to this, normally I'm anti charity, but I like a lot of what you're doing and what views you seem to have from reading and listening to interviews.  Also I'm aiming to retire and build games myself one day so it's good to see that you can get by on donations if you do something people find enjoyable. 
Of course I'm probably not going to be taking that plunge for many decades yet, I make enterprise software at work and it's just too lucrative to pass up.

Anyhow enough semi drunken blather, the real reason I posted was to add this snippet to the form to make it easier for the truly lazy

Code: [Select]

Currency Code:<input name="currency_code" value="AUD" id="currency_code" /> or chose from
<select onchange="document.getElementById('currency_code').value = this.value">
<option value="AUD">AUD</option>
<option value="USD">USD</option>
<option value="EUR">EUR</option>
<option value="ETC">ETC</option>
</select>

You may want to put real values in those option things and maybe order them alphabetically, but you probably get the idea

-- edit - Removed extra angle bracket (man I make a lot of typos) --

[Toady One]

I finally found a list with the 18 currencies Paypal supports, so I went ahead and made it drop-down menu only, with the names of the currencies in parentheses.  I copied the names Paypal uses, so I'm not sure if the text is correct, but the codes are all fine (I clicked each one).  It's alphabetical by code, but I went ahead and stuck USD at the top since 99% of my donations arrive in USD (though well over half of recent donations have come from outside the US).

[Spelguru]

Neat.
Easy to use.
Doesn't require any memory capabilities what-so-ever.

It's like it was made for insane swedes with the memory capacity of a dead goldfish.

 

[Kogan Loloklam]

Does paypal still take the standard amount? They should take a reduced amount for being given a static amount darnit!



I'll continue with checks whenever I have a bit of free money. Of course anything under 5$ it is cheaper to send it Paypal instead of spending the money for a stamp.

[Toady One]

Yeah, you'd figure they might want to encourage a regular scheduled pumping of money into their system, but the rates are all the same.