Simply to much nagging here

[ruhmkorff]

Just stopped by to tell my opinion about the distribution strategy on this site. I was interested in ProcessTamer "freeware" as it was recommeded by ShellCity and thaught this could be a helpful little prog, but actually the amount of nagging around what you call "freeware" makes it totally unuseable. I prefer honest and simple shareware to any form of "nagware" and I will never donate when get the impression that somebody lures for user data.

[mouser]

ruhmkorff,
what i can tell you is your not the only one who feels this way.. and i do thank you for taking the time to post about your impression. if you read some more on the forum youll find we've struggled very hard to figure out a way to make this site work while keeping the software free for those who can't afford to pay, and make sure everyone can donate exactly how much they think its worth, including 0.  i hope you have time to browse around the forum and the site and read some of the much longer discussions we've had about this and related issues.

the bottom line is that there doesn't seem to be a perfect solution but we are trying to find a reasonable balance that let's us stick with our principals.

regarding collecting personal information, what i can say is this:
we have never and will never share any personal information, email addresses, etc. with anyone.  we won't sell it, trade it, or use it to send advertisements.  period. ever.  we do send out a newsletter about the site once or twice a month which you can remove yourself from easily by checking a box in the profile options - after that you'll never hear from us again.

it was a real debate whether to require registration on the forum and i know some people object to it, but it has made a real difference in terms of helping encourage people to participate here, and it does help us keep in touch with those who dont mind an update from us every once and a while.  we operate entirely on donations and i hope it's not too much to remind people that we survive on their voluntary donations once a month or so, given that it's so easy to opt out of the newsletter.

having said that, we are still very much debating whether or not to scrap all of this and just make the software usable without any signup or license key, etc.  i think we may do another trial period of it and see the result.  please keep in mind that we pay a fairly hefty server fee now, and we absolutely MUST face reality that 99% of people are never ever going to donate.  that leaves us trying to reach the remaining 1% which would consider donating.  that's fine.  our aim is to find a reasonable way to reach that last 1%.

one real dilemna is that some people from that 1% are probably like you, they might donate out of good will and don't require any incentive at all.  then there is (what we believe is) a much larger group that just need a little bit of motivation to donate - thus the license key approach we have followed.  i hope you see our dilemna - how to stick with our priniciples but not end up having to stop this whole project because we can't raise enough money to pay server fees each month.

it's really that simple - there are no hidden agendas on this site, and no plans on collecting user data.  as it says all over this site, we're trying to find a way to build a community where programmers can get a little bit of money for their work and keep their software available for everyone.  not get rich, but be part of something fun and satisfying.

anyway, i've said all this in different ways in the past, can't tell if i'm getting better at explaining it or not.

one last thing that we've tried to make clear.  anyone who objects to the policies of the site need only email me and explain their thoughts and we're happy to send them a non-expiring license, etc.  our goal is not to punish those who won't donate, only to nudge those who might be willing to, to go through the little bit of work required to do so. 

i do want to repeat though, that it does help hearing from people who won't donate because of the approach we've taken, because it's useful information to have when it comes time to think about how to best balance things.  this site is an experiment and we will keep trying things until we find the best balance.

-mouser

[mouser]

ps. shellcity is a fantastic site that i visit every day.  they were one of the very very very first sites to tell people about donationcoder.com. we don't do any paid advertisements and it's only through other sites like shellcity that people hear about us.  one of the main problems with requiring people to sign up and download a free license key is that many other sites are tempted to classify us as shareware, etc.

i know that a lot of the happy members heard about us from shellcity and i hope they feel like we've done well by them and lived up to our promises.

[ruhmkorff]

Thanks for your reply.

Please be assured that I fully understand the situation of quality software coders who invest a lot of their time in making life of others easier. And of course you are free to choose your strategy for distribution. Did you try an alternative, maybe more "free" approach in the past? I have the impression that the current way may be counterproductive if you want to have a wide base of users.
I trust you when you state that you will not use the user data, but please understand that there are plenty of sites that obviously try to get large databases for advertisment purposes and you never know at the first look whom to trust or not. To be honest, I very often do not donate although I would like to in principle, just because I am not convinced in PayPal security or passing the credit card number via any site.
As for the software, it is my personal view that a timebomb has to be treated like a severe bug. There are other "freeware" examples out there. I remember RegCool, which is a nice regestry editing tool but expires soon and requires frequent re-downloads. I may consider using such software if I really cant´t live without it, but in the freeware sector there are, in most cases, alternatives available (like ProcessLasso and ProcessManager in the case of ProcessTamer).
However, I found very nice reviews about ProcessTamer at FileForum and it is reported to be the best of its kind.

Regards,

R.

[mouser]

ruhmkorff,

yes we added the license key stuff in august after about 5 months, and it has resulted in a large increase in forum members - there has been a lot more discussion on the forum as well, but it's hard to know if that's a coincidence since the site has only been around for 10 months or so.

i understand 100% your reluctance to donating for fear of a scam - i have the same worries - that's part of the problem in this day and age with surviving on donations - it's just one more reason people don't donate. 

one of the ways we've tried to address this is to use a range of ways people can pay.  at the bottom of the donate page youll find a link that will let you donate with 4 other services, some well known shareware services and also amazon.

By the way, regarding paypal and these other services - they don't send us credit card information, so the risk of donating to us, in my view is probably much much less than of buying something from some small online store where they will actually be staring down at your credit card information.  here we just recveive the payment.  plus paypal will also offer you a refundable garantee for your donations if for some reason you don't believe us that we will refund any donation at any time for any reason

we are also happy to accept donations in the form of mailed cash, gold, diamonds, paintings, cookies, chocolate, rare gemstones, etc.

---

let me just add another explanation for why we try to encourage people to sign up at the forum here and make a donation:

my own personal experience and the experience of almost every other donationware project i know about has been that people just do not donate.  i've said this before, but if you simply put up a button saying "donate if you want", no one will.

the theory of this site was that the reason people don't donate is NOT that they aren't willing to contribute some money for a project they like, but just that they were not motivated to go through the effort.  so our approach has been to try to equalize the work effort in making a donation or not making a donation, such that this becomes a non issue.

some people feel great about the site and are so thrilled with it that they donate $60 minutes after they land on the site.  other people are much less taken by the site and make a donation of 10 cents (all which goes to paypal by the way).  one real goal of this site is that after a couple of months, that $60 donator looks back and says wow i really helped a site that is just getting better and better, in part to my donation supporting it, and that the 10 cent donator looks back and says, wow that site really surprised me - i may have been a bit irritated at first having to donate, but now i get it, maybe i'll donate a few more bucks since the site is continuing to be useful to me.

so again, to those 0.001% of you who already donate to support donationware coders and don't need these "inconveniences" to motivate you, we apologize - and we hope you at least understand what we are trying to do and why.

[mouser]

ah one other thing:

we decided recently that none of our applications should ever "expire" and only resume "nagging" after some time in order that you return to the site to get a new freeware license key (as described on the page), and recently added 2 additional new features to make things easier:
1) people who really dont want to sign up at the forum can still download a shorter-period license key as many times as they want without signing up for anything.
2) after 1 year (two 6month freeware license key renewals) a non-donating user gets a full non-expiring license key for all apps.

i know it sounds complicated, but i'm just pointing out that we're trying to address the concerns people have raised.

the biggest concern from all this is that the complication is getting out of hand, and that is the issue we are struggling with the most now.. i'm confident that we will find a good balance if we keep at it.

[brotherS]

I was interested in ProcessTamer "freeware" as it was recommeded by ShellCity and thaught this could be a helpful little prog, but actually the amount of nagging around what you call "freeware" makes it totally unuseable.

-ruhmkorff (January 26, 2006, 02:23 AM)

"totally unuseable"? That's an exaggeration if I ever heard one!

[Edvard]

  Ya think Joey Parrish's warmongering penguin will get donates? -  http://armory.nicewarrior.org/projects/cygmp/

[mouser]

HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHA
that picture is hillarious!

 

[Carol Haynes]

Perhaps needs Cody needs a makeover after his Christmas jollity

[mouser]

hahaha