[Foundation-l] Fundraising totals as of Nov. 15, 2007 @ 12:20 PM (EST)

[Robert Rohde]

On Nov 15, 2007 5:50 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 16/11/2007, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The 2600+ donations under $1 (so far) are now being excluded from both
> that
> > online summary and from the tally in the banner that appears everywhere.
> > Doing that seems to eliminate the biggest PR problem (i.e. appearing to
> > claim many more donors than really made a significant contribution).  Is
> > that your concern, or is it some other issue?
>
>
> Those donations almost certainly come from stolen credit card numbers.
> Ron Paul took a PR hit over the issue (although in his case the
> amounts were somewhat larger) I'd rather we didn't suffer the same
> problem. If you watch #wikimedia-donations the majority of donations
> at the moment are 0.01$.
>
>

While we could, in prinicple, stop 1 cent donations from being accepted by
the initial form at donate.wikimedia.org (i.e. by using javascript), most of
the actual processing is done at Paypal's site and as far as I know there is
no way to stop someone from sending pennies through Paypal.  If the
submission process is being automated (which certainly seems plausible given
the donation pattern), then there is already a level of sophistication that
would probably make it impossible for us to stop.

-Robert Rohde