Donations via Liberapay -- how can I know that my donation reaches the intended recipient?

#1

My issue is about donating via Liberapay.

As of now, there is no way for me to know if my donation did reach the intended recipient, i.e. I am donating to K9 as well, and all I can see is on


when I click on “Einkommensverlauf anzeigen” (show income history)
how much money K9 did receive in donations.

A possible solution to this would be that on the Liberapay website, in addition to the chart showing the income per week, to add a button that can be clicked on for viewing a list containing the user names of all the donators together with the sum of the weekly donation, e.g. as a list in alphabetic order.

There is a discussion on GitHub
# Suggestion: option to transfer the donor’s username to the recipient #852

or rather


(at the end of the thread) trebmuh Mar 8, 2020

Nice!
(…)
To reformulate, as a donnee I’d like to be forbid my donators to make a private/public donation, because of taxes purpose.

So, to make my point:

  1. Is it true that i.e. K9, as a donnee of Liberapay, is averse to know the user names of the donors because of taxation reasons? And how could that make any sense, if the total amount of donations is publicly known anyway??

  2. And, to come back to my initial point:
    Wouldn’t you be in favor of my proposal (the added button on the Liberapay Website, see above), because it would certainly encourage more people to donate via Liberapay?

#2

Hi! Welcome to the K-9 Mail forum :wave:

Is it that you don’t trust Liberapay to actually forward the payment or do you want the world to know that you gave money to the K-9 Mail project?

It wasn’t someone from the K-9 Mail project who made the statement you’re referring to. Please ask them to clarify what they meant.

I’m not sure what you’re looking for exactly. An endorsement for a feature request to Liberapay? I don’t think that would carry much weight.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind donors having the option to display their name publicly. However, there should still be the option to make anonymous donations.

#3

Thank you for your reply.

Yes, if you like to endorse my feature request, this couldn’t hurt, actually. In the first place, though, my intent was to know if the k9 folks have an opinion on this.

And yes, I’d like a little more transparency from the side of liberapay. It is not distrust per se, considering I have already been donating to severall FOSS projects via Liberapay in the last 2 years. Concerning “do you want the world to know that you gave money to the K-9 Mail project”, my answer would be I don’t mind/care if they know my username.

I have posted this feature request on
https://github.com/liberapay/liberapay.com/issues/1952

#4

You can see the payments you made under https://liberapay.com/<yourusername>/ledger.

The money isn’t distributed on a weekly basis. It’s sent in full to the project the moment you make the payment. It’s only divided into weekly chunks for display/statistics purposes.

#5

Yes, I know I have a ledger on Liberapay. And I know the weekly basis is only statistis.

I explained where I see the benefit of the list feature that I advocate (see my last post on the link given above)

Now, the list I am proposing is an effective tool for transparancy that only gives more transparency to the respective donor. Since only he/she (and Liberapay, of course) can know the connection between the username and the real name, and the donor can look up in his/her ledger under https://liberapay.com/[username]/giving/ how much he donated, and can compare with the username in the list that I’d like to see as a feature, there is perfect transparency to the donor, and nobody else (again except Liberapay, of course). And since the creator /the donee knows how much they receive, the numbers in the list definitely will add up correctly since the donee would complain otherwise.

#6

As it happened on the thread on Github that I linked above:
I find it troubling that a module owner can obviously close a thread at his will. I’d say that the reasons he gave are only a pretext because he didn’t like what could result from this discussion, and much less that anybody might join the discussion.

I found this upsetting enough to delete my account at the donations provider. So this feature request will not be of any personal concern for me anymore. I’d still recommend the users of the donation service ask for a little more transparency. I don’t want to go into unfair speculations because it could very well be that the donation service handles everything in a correct manner. My opinion is that a little control helps to keep everybody honest, and no control whatsoever might be a temptation. I guess my proposal explained above could be a viable solution for more transparency.