The Hearts Fund Drive is going great, BUT........
...I would be remiss in my duties as a fundraiser if I didn't ask you to kick it up a notch!
As global ad rates continue to lag, voluntary member payments have become an increasingly important source of revenue for independent sites like DU. This means that the three fundraisers in February, May, and August really are our best revenue-raising weeks of the year, and they pretty much see us through from year to year.
If you have it within your means to kick in a few extra bucks before Valentine's Day on Saturday, or by the end of the fund drive on Sunday, we sure would appreciate it -- and even though it gets harder to find folks who don't have any hearts as the week goes on, I think you'd agree that getting and giving hearts during Hearts Week never really gets old, no matter how many times you do it.
And so, speaking of kicking in extra bucks, I have some news..................
DU IS NOW TESTING STAR MEMBERSHIP PAYMENTS VIA STRIPE
It seems that PayPal is making it increasingly annoying to purchase or renew a Star Membership without creating an account, and every year I get more requests to add a new payment system. You should be aware that the work involved in this is complicated, which is why we've been putting it off.
But this week I started to investigate other ways to take payments, and I decided to try out Stripe. Their service allows you to make payments directly to DU without having to go anywhere near PayPal. You can use credit, debit, and other forms of payment such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc.
I set up a payment page, which you can try out right here by clicking this link:
https://buy.stripe.com/bJe14he2q1B81qj3e9bwk01
Making a payment on that page will appear as a charge to DEMU STAR on your card statement. You'll receive hearts, and your Star Membership expiration date will be extended to one year from the date you make the payment.
Here's the catch though -- with DU's current payment system, it knows your username, and can automatically update your Star Membership. Getting all that automatic stuff working is the hard part of integrating a new payment system into DU, which means that none of it is working with Stripe payments yet.
So right now, there are a few things to note:
- Using this payment system will not automatically update your account. I'll have to do it manually, which means there will be a delay before your Star Membership is updated. (Note that updates will be quicker during US east coast business hours.) On the payment form, there is a field for your DU username. Please enter your username ACCURATELY, so that I can find your account quickly.
- If you use this payment system before the end of the fund drive, you will get hearts to give out (one heart per dollar). Hearts will be assigned at the same time that Star Memberships are manually updated, so again, please note that there might be a delay.
- This can only be used to make one-time payments. We're not testing it for recurring subscriptions yet. Please note that if you already have a monthly or yearly recurring payment to DU set up, making a payment via Stripe will not affect that payment in any way -- it will continue to recur as normal.
- Bear in mind that this is a test. You should have no issues making payments, but I may have to shut the link down at some point in order to make sure I'm collecting bookkeeping data correctly, or for other test purposes. If this is a success, we'll work on integrating it so that your Star Memberships are updated automatically. But if there are bookkeeping or integration issues, we'll have to consider a different solution.
Thank you so much to everyone who has helped to make this a successful fund drive so far -- with a few days left, I hope we can keep going all the way to the end!
= new reply since forum marked as read
I'm for whatever keeps this place open! Can't imagine life without DU. 
That answer is that it doesn't quite work like that. Basically, any Star Membership payment simply pushes your Star Membership expiration date back by one year from your most recent payment. So if you make a purchase today, your new Star Membership expiration date will be February 13, 2027.
The recurring subscription memberships work like that too -- when people set up a recurring monthly payment, essentially they get a one year Star Membership each time, but they just push their expiration date back each month. If they stop making monthly payments, they still get a year of Star Membership from the time of their last payment.
Before we had ads on DU (more than 20 years ago), payments were simply donations, but after we started running ads and we introduced the Star Membership concept, where you get to hide ads, and receive various other things for your payment (like hearts to give out), they're now considered a purchase. But when we switched over from the original system, there were a few issues to overcome. People were used to making donations multiple times a year -- and we appreciate that, because it helps fund the site -- so we had to come up with a way that would let them do that, while also technically making a purchase, and that, combined with the "pay what you want" approach, combined with the limitations of PayPal's automatic payment system, meant that we ended up with the "push your expiration date back" system that we have now.
I was going to say I hope that makes sense, but to be honest, it probably doesn't. It's just the way we've done things for the last 20+ years 
I've already purchased a Star membership, but I want to try out the new Stripe system.
I hate Paypal so much and I've never agreed to a Paypal account for that reason. (They are insidious, but up to now they have allowed DUers to use them without opening a PP account.)
I'm happy to kick in a few extra bucks, just to make this a successful fund drive. Thanks!
