A lot of newer FReepers (say less than 5 years) really don’t have a clue about the financial and legal underpinnings of FR. They don’t understand why we can’t have advertising, or why we can’t charge a fee for posting privileges, etc. They also don’t know about the big legal bills of the past, ongoing legal bills for dealing with nuisance threats and suits, or even have a picture of the operating budget. If each of those automated “Please donate” posts that appear on every thread during a FReepathon contained a link to a good summary of this info, I think that would help a lot. It also would help to include a summary of the number of donors vs. number of active posters.
I saw a number of posts during the last FReepathon asking things like “Why don’t we just sell ads?”, and needing somebody to spell it all out for them individually (an awfully inefficient process), and these weren’t from people who’d just joined in the past few months. And I’m sure many more just thought this sort of thing to themselves, and never asked, and so never understood, and didn’t see the need to donate.
I like the idea. Of course, we can expect questioning of the line items. Personally, I am not that interested.
I am interested in seeing the expenses covered and paying my part of them.
That is why I started the