Don’t forget, you can be awarded a badge multiple times (the anniversary badge is an example.)
But a badge for a second donation, or for five years of donations, that could work.
4 Likes
You can move to Hetzner and pay probably about 50% of that for the same or alike specs.
You don’t need a CDN for your traffic, pick a server closest to your community and you’ll be fine.
3 Likes
I think this depends on the community. As I mentioned above, one of mine the members actually insisted on the badges not being permanent to encourage repeat donations.
On the other hand I do have forums where we grant a badge but don’t revoke them.
One of the latter forums actually has a set of badges.
Every fifth donation grants a special silver badge, and every 50th donation it grants a gold one.
In addition to those badges we also track the lifetime donations of each member and grant a special badge to anyone whose lifetime donations hits $500, which is the annual hosting cost of that instance. 
We don’t use it any longer, but in the past we did use ko-if’s API on the forums where the badges are temporary so it shouldn’t be too difficult in theory to setup a progress bar.
The main thing is you just need a way to record the total and target amount and render the bar based on those numbers.
4 Likes
In our community, I suspect that users will prefer to stay anonymous, both in terms of whether they donated at all and definitely at what amount. So badges wouldn’t be appealing.
One clever user has suggested buying Visa gift cards and sending the codes to the primary community manager (Discourse liaison) for invoice payment or reimbursement, thus preserving community anonymity and eliminating the need to set up a bank/online payer account. cc @Tallytony
3 Likes
Since I got a PM to know how I made the hidable donation button, I am sharing my (hideous) component here:
The description started here:
7 Likes
We have certainly thought about this. Micro transactions are tricky business there are so many cuts taken along the way. One refund on a 2 dollar donation can end up costing you 1 hour in time, totally erasing the value of 20 other donations that follow.
My feeling here is that the only way to offer a service like this to our customers would be by introducing a virtual currency of sorts (eg: roblox or discord boosts) then you would spend that virtual currency to donate. This allows for larger blocks to be purchased and heavily simplifies refund situations (where it would not costs us actual money, only time to refund a mistaken donation)
That said, nothing like this is on the roadmap yet, it would be a gigantic project.
8 Likes
You can use Hetzner and Bunny for ~5 bucks. I’m a happy customer, not working at all with those companies.
They have top notch services, excellent customer support (VPS has only technical one, don’t expect they guide you how to install Debian) and more than 5 years working like a charm.
I suggest to do your own research, Reddit has a lot of feedback and you can search in a lot of Discourse forum instances too.
Hetzner and Bunny are not made for enterprise but I suspect they can do better than a lot of enterprise focused but marketed ‘more used’ options around.
I was trying their services in our initial state (I like to call the beginning of every project like a testnet) and we will continue using them if we scale unless we can’t do it.
I tried almost all the options for our budget around and that’s the better I found. They allow you to scale, without drawbacks or malicious contracts.
You will found there super price and super service
I can give you referral links but I prefer to invite you to see the beta on our community and give me your feedback to improve (just if you want to do it).
2 Likes
We will build (if not builded over time) something similar you mention on top of Monero Discourse subscriptions.
That’s a third party plugin that move subscriptions from Stripe to self-hosted, anonymous and censorship resistant currency.
But the donation system would be used too by all services around.
2 Likes
Hi,
I am using this component:
Since the last Discourse upgrade on my test site I got a red error/warning message about the donation-icon-toggle and in development console I see the following:
[THEME 52 'donation icon toggle'] TypeError: (intermediate value).property is not a function
at theme-field-380-common-html-script-1.js:61:13
at Ne (plugin-api.js:2760:12)
at Object.initialize (theme-field-380-common-html-script-1.js:15:22)
at n.initialize (app.js:208:28)
at index.js:145:1
at e.each (dag-map.js:191:1)
at e.walk (dag-map.js:120:1)
at e.each (dag-map.js:66:1)
at e.topsort (dag-map.js:72:1)
at e._runInitializer (index.js:158:1)
at e.runInstanceInitializers (index.js:143:1)
at u._bootSync (instance.js:86:1)
at e.didBecomeReady (index.js:602:1)
at invoke (backburner.js.js:280:1)
at h.flush (backburner.js.js:197:1)
at p.flush (backburner.js.js:358:1)
at B._end (backburner.js.js:798:1)
at B._boundAutorunEnd (backburner.js.js:523:1)
k @ client-error-handler.js:125
Any clue how to fix this? I’m totally in thin air when it comes to code here. 
I’m still a PHP guy.
1 Like