Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
...I can't have people sending money for something like this through the forum or to me personally. No matter how good the cause...
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I don't think the people who pledged large amounts of money thought I was anything but serious, and I was. Yet I am someone people have only known for a few months, and never in a commercial relationship.
In contrast, as I noted in a post now long ago, Ben and Scruffy had established a modest track record for collecting money (including through PayPal) and delivering the goods promised (CDs). That's why I thought people would trust a fundraiser under the aegis of AAm. Without this precedent, I would not have thought the effort was worth my time.
Checks and postal money orders work just as well as Paypal to transfer money reliably. Scruffy believes in the Scholarship effort and I hope he will consent to be its treasurer, because he is someone everyone here trusts. Upon his affirmative reply, we will move the discussion off-site. I have no desire to abuse Ben's always-kind hospitality here.
After the dot-com bust, lots of free hosting opportunities dried up. But in recent years, a wealth of such resources have flowered again. Even before YouTube, which now supports ever-better quality media, for years I often exploited the generosity of Google Video (which no longer accepts new content, yet maintains the old stuff.) Likewise there are plenty of offers to host for free generic Web pages, threaded discussions, and so on.
Perhaps one reason people are reluctant to donate to support AAm costs in the face of these opportunities, is that they don't understand the burden of migrating the existing Website and the skillset of AAm users. My 2 cents is that you should cover costs by hosting third-party ads, which people can turn off by paying an annual subscription fee, a model which works well for wikispaces.com.
I never imagined that acting alone, I could do anything to help Alizée and her artistic partners remain and thrive in the entertainment business. For a while, I held the idle hope AAm might help promote new methods of financially supporting recording artists like her. Now all that is left are the hopes I raised among those who pledged to the Scholarship fund. I will do everything I can to see their trust is not betrayed and then quietly attend to many non-AAm matters.