Decide what to do about Donations page

[freshreplicant]

The donations page is another place that is rather static and uninviting for people coming across Tuxemon for the first time.

Static elements that need to be removed or updated:

• [ ] Project Balance: this has been stuck on $23.72 forever. It is not clear if this amount is still valid. If it is, it also shows that the project hasn't seen much donations for a long time, which could potentially add to the 'dead project' feel, discouraging contributors, players or donors from getting involved.
• [ ] Current Donations: same as above. If transparency is a concern, then there may be better ways to achieve this.
• [ ] The Patreon page:

Major decisions to make:

Should the current way of donating remain in place (or be the only option)?

Currently, the Patreon link points directly to ShadowApex@gmail.com. Though Shadow Apex is certainly trustworthy and Tuxemon's creator, he is also quite busy and doesn't have as much time for the project as he once did.

Thus, it may be worth looking at setting up alternative donation streams, particularly ones more suited to the Tuxemon project's open source nature.

Possible alternative platforms:

1. https://liberapay.com/:

"What is Liberapay?

Liberapay is a way to donate money recurrently to people whose work you appreciate.

Payments come with no strings attached. You don't know exactly who is giving to you, and donations are capped at €100.00 per week per donor to dampen undue influence.

By default, the total amount you give and the total amount you receive are public (you can opt out of sharing this info).

Liberapay does not take a cut of payments, the service is funded by the donations to its own account. However there are payment processing fees.

Liberapay is an open project, you can help us translate it, improve its code, and manage its legal entity. If you do so you'll be able to join the Liberapay team and receive a share of the money that our users donate to keep the service running."

Pros for Librepay:

• It is possible you are not required to be legal entity to receive donations (while Open Collective does require this)
• Donations can be accepted via PayPal and Stripe (to bank account). Stripe allows anonymous donations.
• One Tuxemon developer is already present on Librepay.
• It may enable a Librepay to be linked directly to the Tuxemon Github repo and therefore present a more unified, community target for donations.

2. https://opencollective.com/: Similar to Librepay but may be require significant more to relieve payments via.

Ideas for what to spend donations on:

1. Commissions for art: Additional, tailor-made Tuxemon tilesets and sprites for the main campaigns and/or alternative playable showcases. Things like statues of Tuxemons, overland sprites for Tuxemon, more banners and promotional material for the website and blogs, sky is the limit. Some of these (tilesets in particular) are badly needed. This would also help with an 'art refactor' to bring disparate assets into closer alignment and polish up rough edges on existing assets.

2. Hosting: For the Tuxemon website, and potentially down the road for official multiplayer servers, or possibly for a "Tuxemon ContentDB" (ala Mintest's own ContentDB) for community members to share their Tuxemon, maps, regions, mods or campaigns.

3. Bug bounties, etc.: More or less self descriptive.

4. Some 'tips' to outstanding contributors: A small portion could be divided up to contributors in the form of non-significant sums as tokens of appreciation/gratitude, perhaps based on amount of commits, big features implemented, etc. This would have to be handled and structured very carefully so as not to be contentious or divisive.

[freshreplicant]

Liberapay now offers 'Teams', to allow you to distribute funds between developers who work on a project:

https://liberapay.com/explore/teams

This could be a FOSS replacement for Patreon and Paypal. Libeapay also offers anonymous payments when using the Stripe payment option.

[bitcraft]

@ShadowApex