A few words on Donations

I really don't monitor donations, but I've noticed in the last few months that donations have been falling slowly but surely. For example, if the last 30 days was typical of the next year, the site will barely pay for itself. Obviously that would be ideal but if I personally have to add $100 for hosting at some point, that's a significant amount of cash to me (I currently earn about $10.50 per hour before taxes, I'm married, and my wife is a student). So please forgive me if I think about these things.

There are exceptional donations. For example, one person, who shall remain anonymous, donated a not insignificant 3 digit sum during the summer (she knows who she is) but I find it disconcerting to depend on random significant donations. These are very rare anyhow, particularly since I prohibited several individuals over the last few years from donating, since they were basically being too generous.

OK, so I've said all I want to say about the current situation. When I have talked about donations in the past I have occasionally received a hard time from someone, usually with the misguided opinion that I'm either a) sitting on a pile o' cash, or b) doing something else that's dodgy. If you're one of these people then please search the site for discussions on this topic, and if that's not enough for you there's a nice detailed thread on the topic of Caudata.org donations/costs over at caudata.nl with a detailed contribution from myself. Thank you.

For those who have a hard time browsing our mainly Dutch forum, the topic can be found here: http://www.caudata.nl/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=98&topic=1407.msg9873#msg9873

Thank you Coen.

I'm making this post to further the goal of transparency on the site. Our donations drive for Amphibian Ark ended on January 2nd 2009. We raised a total of US $1120 from December 2nd 2008 to January 2nd 2009.

To inform anyone who might believe that such a large number is typical of what Caudata.org receives, here's the donations total to Caudata.org since the AArk donations drive ended. This number is for January 3rd to February 6th 2009: US $50. That does not factor in Paypal fees. In the middle of January I paid our 3 monthly hosting costs and there were 2 domain renewals (these are yearly): total just over $300.

This does not include commission from sales through cafepress. I can give more information on these but frankly Cafepress has a customer complaint from me regarding the absence of the cheque for the last couple of months' commission.