Please report any bugs you find in this donation system in this forum thread. Feel free to discuss it as well and tell us what you think.

I think it's great, and I want to do it. Here is my one problem: You're doing it monthly. I don't want 12 transactions. I want to make a single annual donation. If I make a monthly donation of more then $2, I'm advertising free for that month. I want a second option: If I make a single donation over a certain amount, that you will make me ad free for a year. Just to be fair, let's say that annual minimum to be ad free would be $24.

JuliaGotz,

right now the system isn't setup to do that.. if you donate that amount let me know and I can force it for a year

What happens if you donate 10$. Will that be for 5 months?

@ bamommy,

No, currently the donations are by month. However, we'll be upgrading the system soon to accomodate for these various donation types. Thanks.

I agree with julia and would also love to donate for the year, so I'll tell you. Jen

I don't see paypal.... or is it too small ?
I would enjoy using it instead of putting my credit card number... is it possible ?

@jendayee,

That payment system is via paypal. If you click the button, it will take you to paypal and you can choose the payment method

Thanks!

"right now the system isn't setup to do that.. if you donate that amount let me know and I can force it for a year"


I'd appreciate that as I don't like using paypal and so didn't want the hassle of donating every month. And also someone (who has a similar donation thing set up) told me once that it costs him a lot more to have little monthly consecutive donations than one bigger one. Don't know if that's really the case, but it sounds plausible.

I thought I just made a one time donation for the whole year. I didn't check the box for it to happen monthly.

I like this site, I prefer it to flickr (I have never had a paid flickr account...it's just too annoying). However it would be helpful if you spelled out what this site's business model is. Ad supported? (I guess this isn't working?) Subscription? Mix? What is your vision of the future? I

the site was always ad supported. That was working fine will google decided to change the way their system works and our revenues from ads were almost cut.

So I'm giving people the honest truth here. The site is run by two people. The other Michael who is the owner/designer/semi-PHP guru. Then there is me who does mainly development. Now we have never made 1 cent off the site. We do it in our spare time as almost a hobby. We do have a lot of plans for the site. It will never go pay for what you are using now and the goal is to always keep it free.

I have some plans for very advanced features that pro photographers might be interested in using but we will always upgrade and add new features to the free section.

My goal is to make this my full time job. My problem now is I don't have the needed time to make a lot of these things live. I know if I were to work on the site full time people would see some amazing things.

We are planning on adding more features for people that donate but they aren't features the average photoblogger would miss if they did not donate.

Running a image hosting site is again very expensive to store all the images and provide backups in case of a disaster so we can bring back up the service with little downtime. We hope to get dedicated advertisers in here so we don't have to worry about adsense's pay per click or pay per impression.

So if anyone has a few million dollars laying around and wants to make history let me know

@dkelly:

Still?

I fixed the ad issue.. it was the LB ad

It's a great idea! But I would agree and said I did want my donation to be a yearly thing rather than monthly, because as such, it's like a little present to you both to thank you for your time and work, but monthlly it makes it become a business, and I much prefer it looking like a gift .
Thank you both for all your work for a great photoblog, and listening to our comments too!(and my annoying ones )

in the section "support photoblog" when it mentions the advantages of being a donator it says only:

- no ads

but there seems to be a second advantage that could be mentioned here:

the 50 photos post, right?