And thus Zikzak’s long con of putting hundreds of hours of work into this forum for a few dollars is complete. We’ve been had.
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not sure if the admins are interested, but consider verifying unstuckpolitics.com with Brave, and accept a few bucks via BAT Crypto
i have some monthly BAT donations setup to Wikipedia and a few others, it accumulates probably around $25/month or so, i just direct it to donation supported sites. it feels legit enough to me, but if it looks like a scam to you, do let us know.
I have never dealt with crypto of any kind. How much effort would it be for me to get up and running on this?
it’s pretty point and click from what i understand, i just went through it yesterday. you may need to verify your wallet with “uphold.com”. quick search seems to indicate it’s not a scam, but may have comparatively higher fees.
I cancelled my recurring donation on Patreon because we seem to be financially solvent for the time being and my PayPal account has had a lot more going out than in lately but don’t feel shy about asking me to re-up if we ever need it.
Financial update time. I missed last month because I was lazy. Sorry.
Expenses, a couple of changes:
- The biggest expenses were the previously-discussed honorariums to @anon46587892 and @zikzak. This was SUPPOSED to have been $200 each. But @anon46587892 had to be paid in Canada-money, so there was a $4.99 paypal charge added.
- Reimbursed @zikzak $160 for two months of hosting fees.
- We’ve lowered the hosting level back down to what it was before the election craziness. We’ve also increased the cloud storage that we have. The net is that we’ve gone from $80/month to a little less than $50/month. (The January invoice was $47.69, but I’m not sure if that’s going to vary month to month.) If you have questions about hosting or storage space, @zikzak is probably the one to ask.
- The hosting fees are now paid directly by me, on my credit card. Previously they had been paid by @zikzak and I reimbursed him.
Donations:
- 3 paypal donations since the last update.
- On Patreon we have 22 active patrons, which brought in a gross of $131.66 in the most recent month, and a net of $114.64.
- No gift card donations
Current Balances:
Patreon: $1,888.75
Paypal: -$17.88
Total: $1,870.87
The negative paypal balance is a little odd, but here’s what it means:
- Most of our donations come via Patreon. But I’ve never actually withdrawn any money from that account. Every dollar that has been donated to Patreon (net of fees) has just accumulated in that account.
- All of our expenses are paid out through my Paypal account. For a while, that was no problem because people had made cash donations through paypal so the balance was always positive. But with the most recent reimbursement to @zikzak, plus the big honorariums, the Paypal balance went negative and I had to pay some from my own account.
- This is obviously not a problem overall, since the Patreon account has plent of funds. But it does mean that at some point I’m going to withdraw from that account.
The Ad balance continues to sit in a Google account, un-gettable by us despite @zikzak’s many efforts. If anyone has any personal contact at Google that might be able to help us out, please let me know.
So that’s it for the finances. If anyone wants more detail or has interest in taking over as treasurer, let me know.
As always, thanks to all of you who have donated - it’s very generous of you. I enjoy this community and I’m glad to play a small part in keeping it running. At this point, I think the best donation you can make is to recruit more smart/funny/interesting people to join the community.
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It kind of seems like a) they’re just not paying us and b) we don’t need their money. Can’t we just drop them? Sorry if this has been gone over exhaustively.
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Whether or not we need the money, I hate the idea of letting Google keep what we’ve earned. The balance is roughly $500, which to me is a big enough number to be irritated about. I mean, even if UP is financially stable right now, there are infinite people/entities who need that $500 more than Google does.
Not sure what you mean by dropping them.
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Not sure I do, either, honestly. Are we hosting ads? Can we stop?
Y’all can’t figure out if we’re still running ads yourselves?
No, I dropped them as soon as it became clear that we weren’t going to be paid.
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What’s is the reason why the funds can’t be accessed? Even if it is not something that is used now, it might be a good idea to figure out how to use it should it become necessary in the future. Of course, if it’s not something you just can’t be arsed up to deal with, that’s understandable as well.
Yes, you should have a private message from me from 4 days ago.
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just wanted to remind you, there’s some money in this for unstuck if you setup the site with a BAT wallet.
Ok, I think I need some help from @jmakin here. In order to set up the site to receive BAT tokens, I need to have access to the actual website, which I do not. @jmakin, can you make either of these work?
Or do I need to work with @simplicitus, since he’s the one who has the domain registered?
looks like either method should work.
Can you tell me in as much detail as you can what you need? Maybe some documentation? I have access to the domain and can probably get what you need.
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As background, what I’m doing is verifying I/we actually run unstuckpolitics. The basicattentiontoken.org site is asking me to download a verification file (brave-rewards-verification.txt) and upload that verification file to the ‘.well-known’ folder on the domain (which has to be created if it’s not there). Once that file is added, I’ve got to click a link back at basicattentiontoken.org to verify it.
So I think the only question is how you want me to transfer this file to you. Then you just need to tell me when it’s uploaded to the domain.