November News

For completion, here's the link to our donations page once more:
https://www.wikiloops.com/donate.php

Well, on the occasion of releasing above video today, I'll dedicate todays blog post to fundraising for wikiloops.
You may have already noticed some of the new features that have been added lately to make sure we can keep paying our server rent,
but let me try to make sure you are up-to-date with things & options:

First, yes, we have kicked off the "let's think of 2018 and try to round up some funds" time of the year a bit early this year,
and help is indeed needed.
I do hope some of the "this is getting way too big to keep around if nobody helps"-feeling expressed in my video message may strike a chord with those who get to see it - and I will try to raise as much awareness and as much support as possible.
If you are willing to help, then I would like to introduce you to two notable things outside of donating yourself which I have been working on lately:

We have a new option to donate to wikiloops and let some (other) member benefit by sponsoring his or her membership.
This is a nice way of giving thanks to some of the incredible wikiloops contributers,
but it also [b]allows your grandma[/b] to sponsor your wikiloops membership if she likes to.
You may now create a direct link to the wikiloops support page, which you can then pass on to grandma (or post on facebook) to benefit from any fundraising you do for wikiloops.

To do that, just replace "Baer" by your username in below link:
https://www.wikiloops.com/donate.php?support_for=Baer
and any payments made by your friends and family are turned into membership upgrade credit for you (or whoever else you'd like to rally for).

Another nice-to-know change on the donations page:
We are again able to offer [b]monthly recurring payments[/b] (in all countries but germany and china), so if you would like to keep your membership from timing out every X months, you may set up a monthly payment there as well.
Payments via the donations page and via the membership upgrade page will have the same effect on your supporting membership (if you do not dedicate your donation to someone else, of course).

Second, we have been setting up so called [b]"affiliate partnerships"[/b] with several online merchants and offerers of musical goods, among them amazon and thomann.de.
The best way to understand how that works is to think of those shops giving back a bit of their revenue to the one who recommended them.
Since we are talking about online shops, using the links offered on wikiloops is enough to identify you as a customer who has been recommended by wikiloops.
The probably most international and best known partner is amazon, and if you visit them via the wikiloops "gateway", they will return a small percentage of your shopping spendings to wikiloops - no matter if you shop music related stuff or christmas presents, you can help us run wikiloops every time you spend money on amazon.
To give these special links a fixed place which you may bookmark if you are planning to use them, I have set up this first draft of the wikiloops affiliate shops page, have a look, and thank you for checking this out, too:
https://www.wikiloops.com/shopping.php
It still is a work in progress, but with your help, it may eventually return something to wikiloops - in the end I am trying to pull all available strings that will not spoil the fun right out. The idea of getting such an affiliate area goes back to Nuno1959s suggestion as far as I remember, and he might have had a good hunch there.

Once I'm at it mentioning some helpers:
I really need to make another mention of our member [b]swordfish[/b] from italy, whom I could talk into having a look at the wikiloops translation needs in mid-september, and who (with a little starting-off-help from my end) translated the whole interface to italian within roundabout four weeks.
We've exchanged quite a load of emails in the process and had a really good time doing that.
I do believe in online collaboration - "mille grazie" to swordfish who made it happen for wikiloops italy, and to the unseen others who are still spending their evenings and days off translating to other languages... Let's just imagine for 20 seconds where we would be jamming today if translating wikiloops would not have been a core concept of the project from day one on - if wikiloops would have been launched in german only (which is my native tongue after all), you probably wouldn't be reading this blog today, right?

In the video, I ended up speaking about potentials.
We have so much of that, let's put it to work for wikiloops.
All the best for tonight

Richard
circus director of the 'loops