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

Robert Rohde rarohde at gmail.com
Fri Nov 16 02:48:16 UTC 2007


On Nov 15, 2007 6:42 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:

>  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
>

PS. I still think the different pattern of penny donations in this drive
compared to previous drives suggests that, in addition to any stolen credit
cards, there are one or more people trying to pump to the donor counter just
for kicks.

See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wiki_pennies.png, for the penny
pattern as of several days ago.

-Robert Rohde


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