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How will my
donation be spent?
All GENERAL/UNSPECIFIED
donations will be spent directly on our hosting costs and
other related expenses, i.e. software licenses and hardware upgrades for our servers,
additional bandwidth etc. Basically it
all goes to our web-host.
If
you wish to send a GIFT
donation then please mark it as a gift on the send money form or email
me to let me know its a gift. Gift
donations will be spent on whatever the recipient chooses!
I
can't afford to donate - is there something else I can do to help?
Yes! The
good news is there are things you can do to support the site that don't
cost anything other than a little of your time. We have a
topic on this issue here in
our FAQ which covers things you can do to
help out without a credit card!
Do
I get exclusive downloads if I donate?
In
short no, and here's why!
Any
creation that requires some payment to access it is a
pay file - since we don't have pay files I'm afraid you wont
get anything exclusive in return for your contribution. That would
just contradict the entire principals of Parsimonious!
What
we can do for donors is consider any requests you might have for
new items you'd like to see put on the site, I must be
clear on this point, we in no way
guarantee that we'll fulfill them for a number of practical
reasons. There are many things that we simply can't do
owing to insufficient time, lack of skills in certain areas etc. I'm afraid it is just simply
impossible to say that we'll always do every request made by our
donors, but if you
have some ideas you wish to pass on to us of things you'd like to
see on the site then we'll certainly take those seriously and
we'll do the best we can.
If
you have donated and you have a request please email
me the details and state that you are a donor, make sure you
keep a record of the Pay Pal transaction as you may be requested
to provide the transaction ID if your donation was not made
recently.
Why should I
donate to Parsimonious?
Unfortunately
there's a tendency amongst a lot of Sims community members to
assume that they are entitled to free downloads. Free
downloads are a gift, from their creator to the community,
all of us here at Parsimonious are un-paid, we share our creations
because we choose to and not because we work for
the community! I can't speak for the other creators here, but I
have spent over £8000 (that's equal to
US$16,000) in the past 5 years just on
software which I use specifically for Sim
creating. In itself Sim creating can be a very
expensive hobby even without the extra cost of sharing those items
with the rest of the world.
Although
I am not a fan of the gross greed and profiteering of certain
community pay sites, I do not feel that creators MUST be required
to cover ALL of the costs of sharing their work
ALL the time, in addition to the
costs of being creators in the first place. Whilst I, and many
other creators, enjoy our Sim creating hobby, the actual time and
expense of putting those creations online for others to use is definitely 'above and beyond'
the call of duty! A lot of sites pass on the cost directly to their visitors by having exclusive downloads, premium
members only areas, donor gifts etc. If you
can't access a download without paying for it,
its a pay file, regardless of what fluffy name
it is given and this is something that I've
always felt is dishonest and unnecessary.
I think its important that
visitors do realize the time and effort involved in running a
website, particularly one of any size. It is frequently the case
that I spend more than 60 hours a week directly involved in
managing this site or creating for it in addition to my full time
job and my fairly busy life! In that respect I don't feel it is
unreasonable to think that I shouldn't have to bear the financial
burden alone whilst there are even just a small number of visitors
willing to assist me. After all - we exist for YOUR benefit!
Parsimonious
is a busy site and as a consequence it is
expensive to run - although we're a relatively
small site compared to the big public sites,
our traffic is disproportionately high.
Currently this site ranks 4th out of all Sims
sites in terms of visitor traffic (source: Alexa).
We don't have supporter contributions, pay
files or subscriptions and whilst we do have
more ads per page than both MTS2 and TSR, we
don't run the high paying ad formats
(interstitials, pop-ups or layers) as these
are inconvenient for visitors, 85% of our
traffic is non-USA/UK based and therefore
generates little or no ad revenue. Advertising
income itself is variable and unfortunately
isn't rising in proportion to our traffic -
since 2005 my ad income has gone up by about
40%, however during the same time our traffic
and our hosting costs have doubled. I do also have the additional cost to bear of 25 other
free Sims sites which we host free of charge.
Parsimonious can exist without community
donations, but if you find this site beneficial
then your support does make keeping it online
less stressful and expensive as our traffic
continues to rise.
What happens if
I donate and then Parsimonious closes?
If the site closes permanently
then I'll refund any donations received within the 30 days prior
to the site going offline. There will be no topping up of lost Pay
Pal fees.
Can
I send money a different way other than Pay Pal?
I
will not give out my address for cheques or postal orders, I'm not
paying out for a PO.Box just for the once in a blue moon cheque I
might get (in 4+ years no one has ever sent me a
cheque even when an address has been
provided!). I will
accept bank transfers but only if you have previously donated more
than £50.
I
won't accept Western Union or similar for the practical reason
that I live in Germany but my bank is in the UK - I only go back
to the UK 2 or 3 times a year, so it would take several months to
pay any such contributions into my bank account. Frankly its not
very practical!
Payments
via other online payment sites, i.e. World Pay, iBill etc,
probably can be arranged - ask
me & I'll see about setting that up!
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