Donations

narF

Hello and congratulations to all the devs for the release of Twine 2.0!

In the presentation video, I saw the end note about donations. I'm seriously inclined to give some money, but before I do, I just wanted to know a little more about how the money will be used and that kind of stuff. Also, from what I understand, it looks like the money is going only to Chris? Is it somehow shared across all devs working on the project? I'm sure Chris do a fantastic job, but I wouldn't want the other devs to feel left off.

Anyway, those are very small concerns. I'm filled with joy right now at how much Twine is evolving.

Keep up the GREAT WORK!!!

klembot

Those are very valid questions! I'm trying to do things in a equitable and open manner, but this also my first time navigating these waters so it's totally possible I am not getting everything right. I want to make sure that everyone significantly involved with Twine on an ongoing basis has a chance to be rewarded for their work.

So-- right now the number of people working on Twine 2 is fairly small, if you go by the commit history. I've obviously accepted pull requests from folks to fix bugs, but right now there are just not a lot of regular contributors. I do consider Leon a core dev on Twine since he has been so instrumental with 1.4 as well as Harlowe (the default story format in 2). I asked him in the past if he would like a donation link to be included for himself, but he said no thanks. If that changes in the future, I'm happy to add that.

I will also add I have been so head-down on Twine 2 that I have not been watching development on 1.4, and it looks like there are some people working on that branch I should have contacted -- I'm going to do that now. I also don't want to minimize the work of folks like TheMadExile on things like SugarCube. The way I'm looking at the twinery.org/donate link is, though, that it's specifically for people working on the core Twine app.

... which brings me to that URL, http://twinery.org/donate. Right now it is just a redirect, but I did it that way instead of directly linking myself so that if multiple devs do want to accept donations in the future, we can build a landing page there with appropriate links without any fuss.

The final question, I think, is what I personally would do with donations. I would like a donation to be considered a gift from folks who appreciate the work I'm doing, and would like me to do more of it . If I had a specific purpose for donations, I think I would've set up a Kickstarter instead. I can't even say that donations, strictly speaking, would go towards hosting twinery.org as I use the same hosting plan for my own personal site, so that doesn't feel completely ethical.

Hope that answers your questions!

narF

Cool. Thanks for the answer!

narF

Oh, it seems there's a problem with your payment system:

see attached file

klembot

Whooooooops. I coulda sworn I had activated that. It should work now.

writer_

@narf
I had same problem

@klembot
it appears to be working now... and what about gratipay?

klembot

I used Gratipay for a few weeks before the 2.0 launch but I decided to shift over to Tilt/Open for two main reasons.

• Gratipay doesn't allow for one-off donations, just recurring ones. I totally understand why that's a choice Gratipay has made, but people had been asking me about one-offs, and it was frustrating to say I had no way to do it. Tilt/Open does both.
• Gratipay doesn't have a way to notify you when someone donates to you, and donations are anonymous. When I asked, the people running it say they will eventually get notifications going. As for anonymity, I get how you could abuse a donor list, but I really would like to send a personal thank-you to people who donate to my work.

Because I don't know who has donated to me on Gratipay, I'm not even able to let people who were kind enough to donate to me there know what is going on, which is frustrating.