The discussion revolves around the integration of payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal into the default Discourse installation. TotalSoft suggests an official plugin for Stripe and PayPal, citing examples from Invision Community, and proposes improving the default design, drawing inspiration from Stripe or DigitalOcean.
HAWK responds that there are no plans to change the default theme and points to an existing Stripe plugin. codinghorror questions the need for additional payment gateways, given the existing Patreon integration.
toby counters that not everyone wants to rely on third-party platforms and inquires about accepting PayPal donations without Patreon. HAWK confirms that there is no current support for PayPal donations and that expanding the subscriptions plugin is not a short-term priority.
simon suggests adding support for Google Pay, which could also enable PayPal payments, to cater to Android users and those without credit cards.
Better design on default installation – I don’t know, but the current theme seems unfinished. Stripe or DigitalOcean looks amazing. You can be inspired by these two sites.
Nope. We like this theme. You’re welcome to use those sites as inspiration to create your own theme. If you don’t have the skills, put up your cash in the Marketplace and I’m sure someone will take the job.
Why are you even bothering to self-host a forum? Not everyone wants to be a slave to the same 3rd party platform. This is not a constructive answer to the question which was posed.
Is there any way to accept PayPal donations, outside of using a 3rd party like Patreon? If not, is there any plan to add support for additional platforms, such as Ko-Fi?
I don’t believe there is at the current time and expanding the subscriptions plugin isn’t on our short term roadmap but we are aware of its current limitations and it will need to be properly overhauled some time soon.
Supporting Google Pay would be great for Android users. Paypal can be added to a Google Pay account. I think Apple Pay works in a similar way. Online services are leaving a lot of money on the table if they only support people with credit cards.