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.
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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.
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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
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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:
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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.
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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
24 posts were split to a new topic: Building Community Through Compensated Contributions
With the original topic for transactional mail sending I have been happy with Brevo for that with their free tier for low-volume sending up to 300 e-mails per day.
Other good news is have two discourse instances running on low budget cloud servers at about $7 per month, that is working ok with low-activity but believe more memory is important for more active sites and server cost for that can be double around $14 per month.
The talk does seem to be going off-topic, but also sort of related in talking about if members are wanting to make donations to other members or the site itself to cover server costs that can help to build a stronger community.
In my experience people like to get what they can for free and don’t usually want to make spontaneous payments for quality intellectual talk.
4 Likes
Yes Brevi is decent and if you use alternative SMTP plugin you could almost double that with Lark. Though Lark setup is a bit more complicated iirc it gives approximately 450/day so with the plugin decide if you want Hotmail or Gmail diverted to the other SMTP. Iirc you can also add other domains to divert other outgoing email as well
not many people would donate, i was thinking you should prob find an old PC like a box you do not use and just install Ubuntu or any distro that has good instructions for this and just set it aside for Discourse, and add your own mailserver and buy a domain/setup dns.
Will end up saving you the $14 dollars, and you do not need to toss away old hardware, might be the obly way to get by for a free community, unless you go back to phpbb, etc
But you would then need to run that computer 24/7. Electricity, not to mention the fact that your ISP may disallow running a server running at home.
4 Likes
ISPs usually don’t care, as for electricity it is highly region dependent, for example, here in India it makes a lot of sense to host our own servers if we have solar rooftops, because our generation supersedes the consumption so even after hosting ~5 N100 mini PCs, It still costs less than what I would pay for roughly equivalent compute in the cloud.
2 Likes
If you don’t need high specs for your community, I see more drawbacks to hosting a server at home than renting a fairly priced VPS.
You must take care of your own hardware, availability, bandwidth use, can’t easily rescale, and must have higher technical knowledge overall (hardware, email server…). Also in my case, my public IP is shared among multiple customers, so I’d need to ask my ISP to get me a unique IP address 
.
At least for me, for a 5-10, even 15$ a month, the choice is obvious. I tend to count in sandwiches.
« I need a 10$ server to host my community, that’s about two sandwiches. Very well then, I shall buy 2 fewer sandwiches a month and I’ll prepare myself a healthy salad instead ».
Just to be clear… I’m not talking about starving in order to be able to host a community, just that costs can be put into perspective. When I look at my daily spending, saving $10 a month for something useful matters less than the pointless financial choices I already make 
This way of looking at things might not work for everyone, of course, but it works for me 
7 Likes
Are you talking about this lark:?
Haven’t heard of that before, are you saying they offer a higher volume threshold for free tier transactional mail sending?
Lark email sending limits start at “450 emails per day” & “200 external recipients per day.”
Most of their language around email services sounds like it’s intended for organizational email, not necessarily for volume SMTP relay..? 
It’s been tried, though, and it sounds like @Heliosurge is still using it. You might read through this topic if you’re considering it:
1 Like