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liberapay / liberapay.com

Source code of the recurrent donations platform Liberapay
https://liberapay.com/
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Creators can't pause their patrons' donations to them #1745

Open Changaco opened 4 years ago

Changaco commented 4 years ago

I was reminded of this missing feature by https://mastodon.social/@dansup/104016437070987358.

evcheng1 commented 3 years ago

I have some questions for this feature:

  1. For how long should donations be paused for? (e.g. a certain duration such as a month or indefinitely until the creator manually re-enables donations)
  2. How should the donors be notified if their donations are being paused or resumed? (e.g. notifications, email)
  3. What should happen in the case that a patron goes to a project page and tries to donate? Should the donate button be disabled or should the option to donate still be available?

Thank you!

rkingett commented 3 years ago

My answers are below,

For how long should donations be paused for? (e.g. a certain duration such as a month or indefinitely until the creator manually re-enables donations)

I personally think it should be until the creator resumes donations again. That was one thing I disliked about Patreon was that I had to keep logging in to pause my upcoming billing cycle.

On the other hand, I do see scenarios where creators will pause billing then forget about it completely, and forget to unpause it again, so either way would be fine with me but I prefer pausing until the creator resumes billing again.

How should the donors be notified if their donations are being paused or resumed? (e.g. notifications, email)

By email, yes.

What should happen in the case that a patron goes to a project page and tries to donate? Should the donate button be disabled or should the option to donate still be available?

In this case, I think it should still be available to donate because I've had many Patreon supporters still willing to set everything up for when the creator resumes billing again. Perhaps a little text banner on the page could say this creator has temporarily paused billing. You will be charged when they resume billing.

evcheng1 commented 3 years ago

I'm not sure if Patreon does this, but would it make sense to also include the pause feature for a team, if there is no member hierarchy? Or should I focus on implementing it for individual accounts first?

Also, another reason why I'm wondering about this is because there's two places I'm considering putting the option to pause. One is in the Goals section, which I think would be a reasonable place. This is something that exists for both individual creators and teams. The other place I was considering is in the account settings, which seems to only show on the left hand menu for individual accounts (first image), since there is nothing to change for teams (i.e. teams don't have a password that needs to be changed and the account type can't be modified).

image

If both teams and individuals are allowed to pause, then I was considering maybe adding the team/account settings page that currently is not viewable on the menu, so that the pause button could be placed there. It would currently look something like this for an individual account. image

Changaco commented 3 years ago

The Goal page is probably the most appropriate.

For teams, you can either disallow pausing, or implement sending a notification to the other members when the team is paused.