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So, one of the things people bring up to us sometimes is that our country list -- used, for example, for setting your Location on the Edit Profile page -- is out of date. Which is absolutely true, and we admit it freely: the list is, more-or-less, the initial list of countries from 1998 when 老王最新版 was creating LiveJournal, tweaked only slightly. There have been times in the intervening 15 years (oh God, it has been 15 years) whenever people reported countries having been created, renamed, or merged with others, but the updates were haphazard. Adding to the problem is the fact that national and geopolitical identity is often contentious, and is extremely personal. We don't want to step on anyone's toes.

It's well past time we figure something out, though, and right now, the best solution (though still far from being perfect) we can come up with is to use the list of United Nations member states plus 老王vn官网 as the most definitive source. We thought we'd kick that out to y'all and see if anybody would be negatively effected by doing it that way, though.

(Not that I think I need to say this since y'all are generally awesome, but: when weighing in on this discussion, please be respectful of other commenters; national and geopolitical identity is, as I said, an often-contentious and extremely personal topic.)

So, one of the things that has come up repeatedly recently is the question of username hoarding and account trading/selling. We've been trying very hard to work out a policy to manage the problem (and how to handle it when it happens) that will be fair to everyone and will only affect people who are honestly abusing open account registration, not people who are using the site legitimately.

People have reported some of the most egregious squatting/hoarding and trading, and we've been holding off on taking any definite actions because we've been having trouble formulating a policy that's fair to everyone and working out what consequences there should be.

We have an idea of what we think we should do, but we also know that this has the potential to negatively affect people who are using the site in a performative/creative style (roleplay, fiction projects, collaborative performance art) instead of a personal journaling style. We don't want to interfere with that legitimate use, so we'd like to hear feedback. To keep the discussion away from "pick holes in a specific proposal", I'm not going to share the full range of what I'm thinking yet; instead I'm going to lay out the problem and let everybody brainstorm.

The goal here is:

* To formulate a policy regarding username squatting that prevents squatting, without placing undue restraint on the many and varied ways people use Dreamwidth for performative/creative work;

* To prevent rewarding people for bad behavior and encourage fair play and community responsibility;

* To prevent username trading and selling (which is not only a violation of the Terms of Service but is a very bad idea because a traded account will never and can never be secured);

* To take away the advantages of username squatting/hoarding with minimal administrative overhead and in a way that returns desireable squatted usernames to the pool of available usernames.

( 1. The Problem )

( 老王v2.2.8 )

( 3. Some Examples )

( 4. The problems of putting that into policy )

( 5. Disincentives )

There are a ton of other things I can think of, but this is long enough already and I don't want to make it too overwhelming. I'll turn the discussion over to the floor and see what everybody comes up with.

Parameters for discussion: you don't need to give more examples of legitimate use or reasons why people might want to have multiple accounts. Likewise, please don't offer up specific situations (either hypothetical or actual) and ask "is this squatting?" We know there's tons of reasons why people would want to have lots of accounts (and we want to encourage the creative use of DW and avoid having any kind of "chilling effect" as much as possible), and we're not ready to talk specifics yet.

As always in discussions such as these, please remember there are many different ways to use Dreamwidth, and a) any solution we put into place has to work for the benefit of the service as a whole; b) we're looking for solutions that will, at best, only slightly inconvenience legitimate good-faith usage, while stopping things that are negatively affecting the entire community; c) however, it may not be possible to completely avoid affecting legitimate good-faith usage completely and this is a trade we may have to make.

With that, I'll turn it over to the floor for discussion!

We've seen a bunch of people questioning why we don't accept payment via PayPal. We used to, but PayPal closed our account with them, after demanding that we censor our users' content to remove material that did not violate our Terms of Service but that made them uncomfortable. We refused to place restrictions on our users over and above the restrictions placed by US law, and so PayPal refused to process payments for us. (The same thing then happened with Google Checkout, before we found a payment processor that was willing to accept our business without placing further restrictions on user-generated content other than "is it legal".)

I know this is inconvenient for people without credit cards and people outside the US, and I'm sorry! We thought that sticking up for our users and maintaining our integrity was important enough to stick to our guns on the issue, though.

If you don't have a credit card, or are outside the US, there are a few payment methods you can use:

* We accept checks and money orders in US funds as well as credit cards. The address to send payments to is available in the shop. (We'll also accept US cash if it gets to us; however, we don't recommend it, since there's no way to track or recall a payment if it goes astray in the mail.)

* We accept prepaid Visa gift credit cards (prepaid Mastercards have some issues, so we don't recommend them), which are in many cases available in convenience stores and other similar locations, and if all else fails, can be bought online.

* If your debit card has a Visa logo on it, it's very likely it will also function as a Visa credit card.

* We accept American Express travelers' checks (sent to the same address as check/money order). They only come in limited denominations, but you can buy 老王vn下载 for the amount you're going to send us, and then use those points over time for paid services.

* If you can't find any other method to pay, you can arrange a swap with a friend who has PayPal and a credit card: you PayPal them the money, and they put it on their credit card to buy you Dreamwidth Points, which you can use over time. We unfortunately can't offer anything official there, because we can't be responsible for any problems with transactions and if we offered anything official PayPal could freeze the accounts being used, but there's much less risk to doing it unofficially with a friend, except of course having to pick someone you trust enough to function as a proxy for you.

I know this is annoying for some people, and I'm really sorry about the inconvenience! We've investigated a number of different payment processors, both ones that people have suggested and ones that I've found on my own (seriously, sometimes I think I've probably read the Terms of Use of every single payment processor on the internet) and all of them either prohibit content that we allow, place unreasonable restrictions on sites that accept user-generated content, refuse service to sites that accept user-generated content, or have fee structures that are prohibitively expensive. The solution we've found really is the best and only solution that won't lead to future posting restrictions.

In the meantime, if anybody knows of a good place to get prepaid Visa credit cards in countries that don't usually use them, leave links and information in the comments!

I've been pondering this question for a bit (foregrounded in my mind again by the latest wave of newly-minted dwenizens brought to us by LJ's unavailability this week and as a reaction to the real-names fiasco of Google+) and, failing to come up with any real answers -- or rather, coming up with too many conflicting answers, and none of them good ones -- I realized that the best thing to do would be to take it to you all, lay out my reasoning, and see what kind of solutions we can come up with when we all brainstorm together. :)

The task: Make it easy for people to find their existing friends on Dreamwidth, either while they're registering or after they've signed up.
( The new-social-network problem: finding your existing social network. )
So, the questions I have for y'all:

* What other ways can you think of to help a new user find their existing friends who have accounts on DW easily, quickly, and with minimal hassle?

* How can we best balance your privacy with your desire to find people you know?

* How can we help preserve the right not to be found by people you don't want to find you?

* What else am I forgetting to think of?

So, the year-end accounting is finally finalized, and we can look back at 2010 and analyze the business end of things!

In summary: 2010 was slower than we'd hoped due to three months of being unable to accept online payments and due to higher fees from the merchant processor we switched to in April of '10, but we came very near to breaking even for the year, and would probably have broken even if it weren't for the entire quarter of downtime. In the end, we only spent about $6,000 more than we took in (not counting taxes, which are paid by Dreamwidth).

On the whole, I'm pretty pleased with our performance for the year, and I hope that 2011 will be just as good if not better!

( Some notes on the 2010 year )

On the whole, I'm relatively happy with our 2010! Obviously I wish that we hadn't had such a long period without being able to accept online payments, and the combination of that period of no income, taxes, fees, and the reserve-against-chargebacks our merchant bank is holding means that our operating fund reserve is a lot lower than I'd like it to be right now. We are, however, heading into "payment season" -- our biggest spike in payments happen at the end of April/beginning of May, which is the anniversary of when we first opened for business. (And, therefore, the time when people who pay by the year renew their accounts.)

I'm also expecting a less pronounced, but still present, bump in income in the next few days; the anniversary of our payment system coming back online is in a few days, and we definitely saw the spike in yesterday's payments. (The announcement of payments being back online was April 7 -- so yesterday was the day that the 3-day expiration reminder email went out for people who'd bought a year of paid time as soon as it came back up!)

Our initial plan for DW had us breaking even or having a slight profit in 2010. The fact that external circumstances meant we didn't isn't a dealbreaker, though we are looking at ways to replenish that operating fund for peace of mind. So far in 2011, we are looking to be on track to, again, break even or have a small profit. (I'm rooting for the extra income. It would be very nice to be able to upgrade my pay from 'peanut shells' to at least 'peanuts'!)

If you have any questions about anything, feel free to ask! I may not answer in depth, but I will do my best to get you an answer.

Please indulge my research and factfinding for a few moments! This is a poll to determine which instant messager/realtime communication services our users use, and which single one you use most often, in order to figure out which services it might make sense to concentrate on integration with. (This is not to say that it's something we're definitely going to be doing! Just that, for instance, it wouldn't make any sense to work on sending notifications to/accepting entries from a service that few of our users are using.)

I'm sure I've forgotten some common IM services in the poll, so I left in an 'other'. (I deliberately left out irc, since that's not so much a one-to-one realtime communication service.)

So, we've closed the books on April, and I'm really pleased to report that we had a fabulous month of sales. We're about 60% of the way to our goal of raising $50,000 to replenish the funds we spent during the months when we were unable to accept credit card/online payments (which is very, very reassuring!) Even more reassuring is that April was the first month we've been (well!) in the black since open beta launch: our income was greater than our regular expenses. This is fabulous news, especially since our predictions didn't expect this to happen until about six months from now. (It's more exciting because so far, May sales are on track for May to be another month in the black.)

I've seen a few people mentioning that the fact we're concentrating so much on raising money, especially so close to our initial launch, troubles them or makes them feel like the site's financial future is less secure, or people saying that the fact we're not reliably in the black yet month-to-month is an indicator of either a) overspending or b) underperforming, sales-wise. (Often heard as: "it costs them what per month? What the hell are they doing over there?")

Please don't worry.

First of all, the reason that we're concentrating so hard on raising money is to replace what we spent to cover the three months where we could only accept online payments intermittently. It isn't a sign of a major shortfall or an immediate urgent cash need: it comes from a desire to restock that "emergency fund" so that if (God forbid) we need to use it again, we'll have it on hand to draw from. The idea is that by restocking now, when times are good, we'll have it on hand in case of disaster.

Meanwhile, the fact that we aren't in the black month-to-month yet is something we'd totally planned: our schedule and business plan gave us plenty of time to get there. We could, at pretty much any point, cut back our monthly expenditure sharply to just "server costs" and have enough income to run the site comfortably for quite a long time. The extra cash is going into investing in our development: paying contractors to help maintain and improve the site, paying our fulltime employee fu to do awesome things for us, paying for other professional services, doing marketing research and usability studies of Dreamwidth (did any of you notice our forays into Google AdWords tests? Results say: I need to work on writing my ad copy like whoa), education like books and courses, travel (to conferences and other things where we both make important industry connections and learn about useful technologies -- site search came out of Mark attending a talk at OSCON '09) ... the list is endless.

So, it might look like we're making stupid decisions, or doing things wrong, or what-have-you, which we knew at the very start would be a major risk with the level of openness we wanted to offer -- Dreamwidth is, among many other things, an experiment in radical business transparency. And we do hold back certain details, because putting them into context would take time away from developing and running DW. But I can tell you, there's totally nothing to be worried about for DW's future. (The fact that we were willing to hire on fu as a full-time employee -- hire her away from her existing job, even! -- should tell you something!)

*

Now, while I've got you all here: As a part of our ongoing process of constantly re-examining our offerings, our processes, our goals, and our structures, it is time for a poll! This poll will ask you certain questions about both your existing and your hypothetical future behavior. I'm calling it the "completely non-judgemental paid account poll", because a lot of times when we make polls like this, people feel like they have to justify why they haven't upgraded their accounts, or why they've had to let a paid account lapse. Please don't! We absolutely do not think less of our free users, and everyone's reasons for paying or not paying are 100% valid for them. We completely respect your choices! This poll is just a way of trying to tease out meaning from some of our business stats, trying to figure out which of our planned or possible enhancements might be popular, and seeing whether there are any barriers to payment that we don't know about. (There are ones we know about, and some of them are things we're working on, and some of them are things we can't quite figure out the best way to handle, etc.)

As always, the results of this poll will be used as another factor in our decision-making; it isn't a guarantee.

( The very long and completely non-judgemental paid account poll )

Meanwhile, some news and updates on features that people have been waiting on: rename tokens are very close to being completed (the first round of code review is in process), vgifts are close to being completed (the first draft of the patch is done, but will likely require a few more drafts, because of the complexity), mark is working on cross-site friends page reading as his primary development priority right now and estimates sometime in June, foxfirefey is working on importing community posts from other LJ-based services and doesn't have a specific time estimate yet but is giving it the majority of her development attention, and fu is concentrating on the mockups of the update page redesign that will be a preface to draft/scheduled posts, which we hope to have done sometime during the summer ... are there any other projects you guys would like a specific status update on?

I mentioned back in the 23 March dw_news (item 4) that, with our new payment processor, we were taking the opportunity to implement the gift certificate/credit system that we've been meaning to do for a while. Many people had questions! At the time, several of the details were still fuzzy, and some of the ideas we described there turned out to be too confusing in practice. So, we changed some of the details, and we wanted to make sure you understand how the points system works and what benefits it will give you.

First off, let me say that the process of buying paid time for your account won't fundamentally change! You'll still be able to do everything you could do before; you just can do more now. (Or, rather, you will be able to as soon as we do a code push with the new payment system, which will be as soon as we clear up one last detail with our merchant provider.)

Our end goal is to have a lot of flexibility in how you choose to spend, save, and send your points, so everyone can work out something that works best for their own use of the site.

We'll start with the official FAQs:

What are Dreamwidth Points?
How do I buy paid time for my account?
What are paid accounts? (has the cost of shop items, in points)

Then, some Q&A:
( Q&A )
Next, I'll walk you through some scenarios that will be common and the questions they'll bring up:

( Payment scenarios )

Future improvements on the points system, and by future I mean as soon as possible:

* You'll be able to transfer points, in any amount, to another account, including to communities.

* Once you've used points to activate paid time, you'll be able to convert that paid time back into points at any time. There will be some limitations to avoid gaming the system: you'll only be able to convert whole months. (For instance, if you have 11 months and 23 days left of paid services, and you want to 'cash in' back to points, you'd get 30 points times 11 months, or 330 points, and have 23 days remaining of paid time. And yes, the math doesn't work out exact, but we're not going to sweat it -- we'll always round in your favor.)

* Something else to redeem credits for other than paid services: rename tokens are coming soon!

And yes, we're also looking into the idea of applying credits for small paid feature add-ons like choose-your-own-number-of-icon-slots. We will have to be very careful with that, but we think this system eliminates many of the problems with micropayments and pro-rating that we'd identified as problems with offering those paid account add-ons. We still aren't 100% sure we can do it, from a business standpoint, but we're seriously looking at it.

I hope this helps clear up some of the questions about the points system. It will be going "live" sometime tomorrow, hopefully. Once it does, if there's anything unclear, you can either ask here or open a support request in the Account Payments department and we will be happy to answer them for you.

As discussed in this week's 老王2.2.3 announcement, the last three months of lowered income has done a lot to deplete our "war chest" -- the amount of money we keep in reserve to cover our future operating expenses. We'd already been running in the red from month to month, and the past few months have seen some additional expenses over and above the usual.

So, we're looking to run a DW fundraiser, once the credit card payment system is up and running again, to 'repay' the reserves that we've had to tap into over these past few months. It costs us around $10,000 a month for operating costs + what we pay ourselves (and we really don't pay ourselves much -- thank God for spouses with day jobs and the willingness to let us follow our dreams), and we've had some pretty big one-time expenses since the beginning of the year, including the tax bill being due. (We had money set aside for it, but let me just say, ouch.) With credit card payments, we were taking in about $6,000 a month, and we obviously hope that we can get out of the red, month-to-month, sometime soon!

In order to repay what we've had to raid the piggy bank for since the beginning of the year, our target goal is to raise $50,000 in the month of April. In order to repay the piggy bank and be able to support the kind of expansion, marketing, and improvements we'd like to do for the rest of the year, our pie-in-the-sky fundraising goal is $100,000 -- it's a bit of a stretch, but since we know a lot of paid accounts are set to expire on the one-year anniversary of open beta (5/1), we think it's totally doable if we hustle.

We haven't decided exactly what form that fundraiser might take, though, so we thought we'd put it up for discussion. Each of the plans we've been able to think of so far have pros and cons, and we'd like to make sure we hear everyone's thoughts before we make a decision.

One possibility is to sell another batch of seed (permanent) accounts. We said that we weren't going to do it again, since permanent account revenue is good in the short term but not so good (for you or for us) in the long term, but many people have asked us if seed accounts will ever be available for sale again, since they missed the first sale or weren't yet Dreamwidth members, and we think there'd be enough interest to support another sale. (Like the last time, seed accounts would sell for $200, and we would only place a limited number, probably 200-300, on sale.) We're really hesitant about doing that, though, because we told you guys that we weren't going to do it again except in dire emergency, and this isn't dire emergency -- we don't want to go back on what we said.

Another possibility is to do a paid account special sale -- along the lines of the December holiday promotion, where buying 6 months of time for someone else would give you 2 months for your own account, but not necessarily exactly that. (Details of what exactly the sale would consist of could be totally up for discussion.) The advantage of that would be that we wouldn't have to do something we said we wouldn't do (offering seed accounts for sale again), and we'd be able to design the sale to be as attractive as possible, to give people a chance to support Dreamwidth at any financial commitment level and get a bargain in the process. (We know that $200 is a lot to ask from people!) The disadvantage is that whatever promotion we come up with might be hard to distinguish from the changes to the paid account/credit system, which might make adopting the credit system more confusing, plus it might be hard to find an incentive that would encourage people to buy paid time credits.

A third possibility is to run some sort of unofficial Dreamwidth fundraiser, where individual people would offer up goods/services/what-have-you in exchange for DW credits, once we have the credit system going. The advantage of this would be that it might get people used to using the credit system, while the disadvantage would be the amount of overhead it would require -- it would have to be something unofficial, since we don't have the resources necessary to handle disputes or conflicts, and it might wind up with things going really wrong when people can't or don't deliver on what they promised. Also, this is the kind of model that's usually used on Dreamwidth and LiveJournal for charity fundraising, and Dreamwidth isn't a charity -- it might be weird, and we don't want to devalue the important charity fundraising work that people do.

So, there are advantages and disadvantages to each option (and there's nothing saying we can't do a mix of any/all of the above, as well as things we might not have thought of yet). We want to throw the question open to the floor, though, and see if people have perspectives and ideas that we haven't thought of:

* Which of the options do you prefer?
* Do you have any other ideas that might help us reach our sales goals?
* What kind of sale would inspire you to buy DW credit?

(One thing we're not looking for, for this post at least, is feedback on what kind of features and benefits would make paid accounts more appealing to you. We know there are a lot of things we can do there -- we've got a list of them scheduled for the rest of the year -- but they take more senior-developer time and effort than we have to schedule right now. Later on in the year, we'll revisit the question of paid account features and how we can improve them!)