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Speaking of Liberapay...
Reflecting on Liberapay and:
- Txp’s efforts to decouple from Goog shite (i.e. doing the right thing)
- yet still keep a thread of financial support coming in
- the fact more writers are wanted for Txp blog
- that TXP mag sits like a sodden log, and probably will forever more
And this is just a notion to throw out there to the ‘team’ for thought…
What if you:
- Set up a walled loyal member section of the textpattern site that worked in relation to Liberapay — a reputable tool that’s open code, favors non-profits, and has more reasonable cuts than Patraeon — and they’re a French company, not out of SillyCon Valley
- Seeded the loyal member section with select past TXP mag articles (then removing TXP mag from the grid and taking care of that thorn once and for all)
- Then figure out a loyal member arrangement that works in three directions…
For example:
- Members can be readers only or contributing authors too.
- If a reader, you setup a monthly donation account with Liberapay (asking $1 or 1€ per month from loyal members is beans for the member and immensely beneficial to Txp) and get full access to the ‘premium’ juice.
- If a contributing author, you still pledge a lousy dollar, plus get a flat value back for each quality contribution, directed to a PayPal account. (The incentive is needed to get the writing.)
The public blog becomes (or remains a dev blog) for more easily managed news and short-form stuff related to milestones, new tags, etc and whatever — niblets — making it easier for devs to keep that channel regularly active and independently so.
The loyal member side is more operational like an editorial team, but less complicated as the magazine was. It would still need tech/design support (team Txp), at least one “chief” editor working with contributing authors, and/or a couple of copy editors helping/leveraging with copy review/polish, just to clean things up a bit for the premium material it’s supposed to be. Anybody involved outside Txp Dev team status should get something for their efforts too, or it will fall apart.
Articles can be long or short, but they better be damn insightful or outrageously entertaining. Whatever.
This is where I would expect community writing contributions to go, making it worthwhile for everybody more than just begging and pleading for freely given time/effort, as TXP mag was trying (and failed). Especially as it’s more attractive for those people in that case to just write at their own sites. And this way the fuel of the engine comes from community readership (via pledges) versus having to have Txp source everything up front.
It could work, and with themes coming, possibly more eyes/interest.
Worst thing that happens is nobody pledges a lousy $1 per month and the experiment is ended. No harm done. Articles that were written, including past TXP articles are given back to their authors for posting elsewhere, if they want.
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Re: Speaking of Liberapay...
Intriguing. A membership area funded by readers, proceeds distributed to writers. And doable almost natively, with Txp 4.7.0 gaining an official if_logged_in tag.
Hosting content directly on .com is risky due to account management concerns. Each new account is an increased attack surface to our primary web presence (including downloads), even with limited privs granted to member account holders. I’m not saying that Txp is insecure, but someone choosing a crappy password is a burden I’d rather not shoulder on our main web presence.
If account management could be farmed out, or the members area separated into a different database and made to appear seamlessly integrated… sure. And it’s also a great advert for people that pop up and ask from time-to-time on the forum “Can Textpattern be a community-driven platform?”
Mmmmm, Txpaper.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Speaking of Liberapay...
I edited list 3, item 3 to indicate authors still must get in the game with a baseline member pledge. I think that should be par for the course for everyone but core. Author incentive, however, offsets their pledge. Everyone wins.
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