It's Christmas. Even if just one member in our community gets a single donation then I would be happy to keep it running.
Sure , and it has been a very nice initiative from you.
The point is that IF any member actually wanted to donate something to another member, he/she would have surely found a way to do so.
This is not (with no offence intended whatsoever to the mentioned categories) a board dedicated to butchers or carpenters, rest assured that IF some member actually had that intention he/she would have been perfectly capable of:
- finding a way of contacting directly the "target" member
- making a new thread like "I really feel the urge to donate something to developer XY, how do I do it?"
And to the latter someone would have ( very possibly in a grumpy manner) posted something like:
PM the guy/gal and arrange something, what do you think that the board's Personal Messaging (or Private Messaging) system is for? To communicate personally with some other member.
On the other hand, members that actually would have liked/wished to receive donations (again not butchers or carpenters) have already setup on their homepages such a feature, since a long time, and those who could not, would have made a thread like "I really need a few spare bucks, but I cannot afford a home page and/or I don't know how to put into it a link to my paypal account, why don't we have a central "donation system" on the board?"
Remember that this is a test, if I see that nobody is really interested then of course it gets disabled with as time passes.
Sure, and when this happens the few people will need to get back to the PM way, so it would be better to teach them how to use that.
More seriously, I doubt that having or not having an "ad personam donation system" can increase the actual probability that anyone will receive a donation.
Wonko