[ANSWERED] Why AS did not receive the donation from members in forum?

[shinichi kudo]

I wonder Why AS did not receive the donation from members in forum?I think a lot of members really want to donate for forum to keep forum work well and develop.

[hitozumarabu]

Maybe because AS allows adult material and sites like Paypal or Alertpay doesn't accept donations or payments for adult sites.
Of course, is not like Paypal checks every single account created and every single movement, but if they decide to audit the account they can close it and retain all the money in there (forever).
I know that many other sites like AS accept donations, someone can contact with them to know how they deal with donations.

[chivien999]

Same forum.nihonomaru, they accept donation form members ! and they only use paypal for donations.

i think we can do it

[corocoro]

There is currently no interest from staff members to accept donations. Checkmate and Ignis can give a more detailed explanation later.

[alexsdu]

Wasn't there's a similar thread regarding member's donation somewhere in here before?
Coz, if I'm not mistaken, someone had already mentioned why ASF don't ask for donation yet.

[Checkmate]

Consider this an official statement.

I highly appreciate the sentiment, but the harsh truth of the matter is that donations rarely work in the long term. Either because people stop donating or because whoever has access to the funds abuses them for personal gain. I don't really want to talk bad about other forums, but the data I have makes it obvious quite a few used donation money to cover the owner's private expenses.

However, it's not that we don't have plans for donations. Various discussions regarding donations (how they should be done, how to use to funds, etc.) have been conducted on a regular basis. While I cannot disclose many details, our plans include an open financial statement showing all donors the amount gathered, spent, and allocated for future expenses. When money comes into play, everything should be recorded in detail.

Right now Anime-Sharing still remains affordable, thanks to the excellent negotiation powers and skills of its executives. We saved a lot of money running the forum on a tiny, highly-optimized server coupled with a lot of cheap offloading services. This helped us to keep afloat until now. But while I can perform a lot of optimization I can't use magic - and only magic would enable us to reliably run a forum of our size on the current server.

Given how bumpy access during the last month was we are planning to upgrade our infrastructure. The projected costs for an upgrade of this size would be between $8,000 and $10,000 during the next quarter. After that the funds allocated to the Anime-Sharing project will be nearly used up, and monthly expenses will start to rely in large parts on staff donations and maybe even open donations.