FAQ: License Key Help - DonationCoder.com

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Become a Supporting Member

There are many benefits to becoming a donating member, including a permanent non-expiring license key for all of our programs, early access to beta releases and new reviews, discounts on popular shareware, and much more.

Still Have Questions?

You know the drill -- the first order of business is to search our site or forum for answers to your questions.

But don't hesitate to contact us directly with questions. We don't have secretaries - you'll get a reply right away from the same people who designed the website and coded the software here. Or post your questions on our public forum for a community response.

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If you prefer, you can join our text chat channel on irc and speak to other DC members and administrators 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

May we recommend..

Gizmo's Freeware / Tech Support Alert

No site does as good a job of helping you choose a freeware tool for a specific task than Gizmo's Freeware (otherwise known by us old-timers as Tech Support Alert). The site is simply unrivaled in terms of recommendations for freeware, and if you ever find yourself asking what the best free windows utility is for a given task, it's *the* site to visit. In each well-organized category, top alternatives are reviewed, rated, and ranked, and then discussed by all -- and reviews are frequently revisited and updated, which is a rarity. In addition, Gizmo Richards himself has also long been a friend to freeware authors, helping to shine the light on new freeware tools, and a friend to us from the early days, helping to tell people about DonationCoder and our software -- and I am extremely honored to have had some of my tools recommended on the site. I can't think of a better site to receive the first entry in our list of our Favorite Websites.

FAQ - License Key Stuff

The page has common questions and answers regarding our license keys.

How do I get a license key?

With so much information on our web site we know it can be hard to find what you are looking for.

At the end of 2017 we tried to make it a little easier to get a license key for our software. Just go to this page and it will walk you through the brief process.

Do I need to sign up at your forum just to get a license key?

In the past, we strongly urged folks to sign up at our forum in order to retrieve a free license key. It was our attempt to encourage people to participate in our discussion forum and spend a little more time with us, in hopes that they would decide to donate.

We've tried to streamline the process recently. It is now painless to retrieve (and renew) free temporary license keys for our software without signing up at our forum. Should you decide not to donate you can request a full non-expiring free license key via an online form, again without ever signing up at the forum. Should you choose to sign up at the forum and join our discussions, we would love to have you.

Where do I put my license key?

This is a very common question!

Some of the larger programs available for download from DonationCoder.com use a License Keys system to remove expiration dates and donation-reminder "nag" screens.

Remember that the License Keys are used only in some of our software, and only after you have already installed the program on your computer. Although each program is slightly different, they all accept license keys in approximately the same way.

Watch a video showing how to enter your license key:

Manual instructions:

Select the license key text from your email or the web page where you generated it. It will be multiple lines long and start with *r. Select the entire multi-line block of text.
Then hit Ctrl+C to copy the license key text to your clipboard.
If you haven't yet downloaded and installed the program of ours that you are interested in activating, do that now!
Start the program on your computer that you are trying to activate and go to the Help menu.
Choose the menu item labeled "About" or "About/Enter License Key".
An About Box dialog window will pop up showing some information about the program.
Click the button on that dialog window labeled "Enter New License Key" (or something to that effect), to show the edit box where your license key will be pasted.
If there is an older existing license key already shown in the edit box, select it and hit the Delete key.
Now put your cursor in the edit box and hit Ctrl+V to paste in your new license key text (if you forgot to copy your new license key to the clipboard that's ok, go copy it now from your email or web page and then paste it).
Click the OK button to accept the new license key.
To make sure your new license key was accepted, open the Help menu and select the About box again and you should now see your name and info in the about box.

Still need help? Just use our Contact Us form on this page or, even better, post a question about your problem on our forum.

To get a free key without donating, visit this page.

I donated to the site, but I didn't receive my license key!

We're here to help.

If you donated using Paypal, you should receive an email from DonationCoder.com with your lifetime non-expiring license key within minutes. If you donated via one of the other methods, it could take us up to 24 hours to send it out to you.

If you haven't received anything by then - chances are that either your official paypal address is wrong, or that the email from us to you has gotten marked as spam somewhere along the way.

Check in the spam/junk mail folder of your email account - sometimes mail from our server gets filed there by mistake.

What you should do:

If you didn't get your license key email from our server when you donated, or you did but you've lost the email -- visit this page to have your license key resent to you.

I made a donation but I still can't log into the forum!

I've lost my license key. What do I do now?