Aye, it definitely caused surges (especially when they happened during fundraising time) it just felt very dirty :)

I'm totally ok with the social media links though, especially if we commit to trying to keep the ones we link to up to date with info about outages.

James Alexander
Legal and Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation
(415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 1:37 PM, Victor Grigas <vgrigas@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I also recall that there was one pre-2011 outage (when the fundraising ask was there) that turned out to be the biggest fundraising event of the year, so we could gain a ton of subscribers to our social media accounts by placing links there.

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 4:35 PM, Victor Grigas <vgrigas@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 2:37 PM, James Alexander <jalexander@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 9:34 AM, Victor Grigas <vgrigas@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Is there a reason that we don't have a fundraising ask in the error / down message? I think we used to.


We did used to, I think it came down in the rename for a couple reasons:

1. People were always uncomfortable with it. It made it sound very strongly like we were down BECAUSE we didn't have enough money or similar and even led to some people worried (on social media and directly) that we had come down specifically to ask for donations).

2. We cant' send them through the normal donation flow, because the donation services may well be down too (and, in fact, often are. They were down for this downtime as well) . So we only gave them a paypal email address which ends up with random amounts of money being dumped into our account directly without any good ways for us to track where they came from or give the users a good donation experience.

3. I know in 2011 (after we made this change) we worked to stop random donations sent directly into our paypal email address because we weren't able to track it and they were starting to become problematic (100s of donations so small that we lost money on them for example). I don't know what the case now is though.

James Alexander
Legal and Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation

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Maybe then, instead of pointing people to donate (which it sounds like there are good reasons to remove) we could instead point people to our social media accounts, where they would 

1.) likely be able to be updated

and 

2.) 'like' us

?



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