A monthly donation can make a real difference to RISC OS

I was looking at the LinuxMint donations page yesterday – https://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php and it seems to have a lot of donors each month.

If we agreed to put a few £’s per month then then it really starts to add up very quickly. The difference it could make to RISC OS would be huge.
The bounties would attract developers, and we’d could have native partition support with access to different file systems, full wifi support and a secure system for internet use. It would be awesome.

Benefit of donations after 12 months

• £10 x 20 donors = £2,400
• £20 x 50 donors = £6,000

I know ROOL has already setup a online process for this here – https://www.riscosopen.org/bounty/polls/24

So how about as many of us here agree to signup to the $20 per month and see what we can achieve? How about it?

I’m putting my name down for £20 per month now. Who else is with me?
C’mon, it will be awesome to see how small donations can make such a huge difference.

Please reply to this message if you agree to become a monthly donor.

Already doing it.

I’ve been pitching in with the odd tenner now and again but I’m keen to see progress so will make it a regular donation from this month.

One question for ROOL, though: when I make one-off donations I see the RISC OS General bounty tick up the next day. There clearly are regular monthly donors so why don’t we see the RISC OS General bounty increase on a monthly basis; it’s often static for months?

I suggest that the more reflective this figure is of all donations, the more of an incentive it is for others to contribute.

I already donate 20 UKP every month since the invention of the “RISC OS General” bounty.

I just signed in for £10 a month.

There have clearly been more than the 16 reported donations this year, then. It would be nice to see the true total!

I am also making a regular modest (pensioner-size) donation since the last time it was highlighted in these forums.

Great to see some new donors as well as existing donors helping RISC OS. It really does make a difference, and I can confirm that I signed up yesterday at £20 per month.

So, anyone else that’s reading this please do become a monthly donor and give what you can to make RISC OS great.

I set up a monthly donation on Monday but the bounty total has remained the same. I suspect only one-off donations are adding to the bounty total on the site. That would explain why this year’s general bounty total seems so small in comparison to previous years: many have switched to giving monthly rather than in one-off payments; the true total is likely to be much higher, as the posts on this thread suggest.

There may be no appetite to fix this (and it would be perverse to chew up donations to… properly display the total of donations!) but I suggest it is still a low priority bug with the site nonetheless.

As a workaround, maybe the total could be corrected manually at the end of 2017, so we can all see the positive contribution monthly donations are making?

maybe the total could be corrected manually at the end of 2017, so we can all see the positive contribution monthly donations are making?

I agree, I think it would be good for transparency that we got a better picture of how much is being donated.

Any more people who wish to donate >>>>> Become a RISC OS Rockstar

I agree, I think it would be good for transparency that we got a better picture of how much is being donated.

When I got wheeled out to do the Wakefield 2016 talk for ROOL I asked a similar question in preparing the slides.

The basic problem is that PayPal handles recurring donations differently (in terms of how they’re notified) to normal shopping cart items (which is how the other bounties work), so a load more code would be needed to get them to automatically totalise. I think the antipodean webmaster probably has better things to do.

The numbers are flushed out at the end of each period (not sure if that’s VAT period, accounting period, or calendar period) so you can make an educated guess: in 2016 for example, £1555 has 14 donations. That’s probably 13 random donations of about £20, plus £1295 in recurring donations consolidated into 1. Take that with a pinch of salt; I’m reading between the lines a lot.

Already doing it and have been for years. It would be great to see a big increase from Alan’s appeal. Come on the rest of you stingies. :-)

There’s also the BBC Children in Need appeal to which I have made my modest contribution tonight.

Admittedly slightly more than I’ve committed to ROOL for the year, but there it is.

Perhaps Alan could consider “managing” the totals of regular contributions himself: Whilst shy of revealing the actual amount of my contribution here in public, I would be quite happy to reveal this to him if he were to take on the responsibility of publishing a running total.

I imagine that all such contributors subscribe to and read these forums.

Edit: I have webspace if that’s a problem.

Perhaps Alan could consider “managing” the totals of regular contributions himself …to take on the responsibility of publishing a running total.

I’m just a user like yourself and don’t have any access to the ROOL PayPal account, so not really possible unless ROOL gave me access or at least a spreadsheet of donations each month. But I like the idea of having a page showing the donation amounts and names (just like the Linux Mint page I linked to earlier – https://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php)

Come on the rest of you stingies. :-)

I realise some people are hard of cash during these times and that’s understandable, but for those that can afford a little each month, it would be great to see them donating. After all, RISC OS is compact and efficient, and a delight to use on daily basis. And I really want to see it flourish in the years to come. I still believe it can.

So Please donate it you can

Become a RISC OS Rockstar

Become RISC OS Royalty

Have we already discussed anywhere the possibility of getting H.M.Gov to add 20% to our contributions by having some charitable status somewhere?

If so, please give a reference as I could contribute more by this means.

If so, please give a reference as I could contribute more by this means.

Yes, it’s been discussed before and when it was I gave a link to relevant information.

In short it would be difficult to justify the status with a reasonable set of charitable aims plus the work required to administer the created charity would probably far exceed the available manpower.

Not knocking the enthusiasm for a means of increasing available development funding, just being realistic.
The one thing we don’t need is for ROOL to fall foul of some quirk of charity law and then be on the wrong side of the VAT-man.

Done.

Both Netsurf and OBrowser fail when I try to donate to a bounty. I get to the first Paypal page, but no further – nothing happens after entering the amount of my donation and opt to pay by card. I don’t even get to this page with Netsurf, just a page saying “please wait”, with or without javascript enabled.
I didn’t have this problem previously.
A way round this is for ROOL to allow donations by bank transfer.