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Did you all get an email from Mike about financial support? It seems like a strange email to me. Are we raising money here? Yes. We accept donations. I have a PayPal donations button on the website main page. I have only mentioned it once or twice on the site because people have been sending in about enough to pay for everything so far without advertising or asking. It costs about $200 – $250 a year for hosting, domain names and stuff like that. Included in that is also hosting for FacesEast.org which I agreed to take care of for them when “Solistics” died earlier this year. Solistics had been providing the hosting and tech support for New Order Mormon, FacesEast, and FLAK (could be more, but those are the boards I know).
My only financial goal for StayLDS has been to not have to pay much if anything out of pocket to keep the sites running. That’s about where the donations have funded things. I paid a little bit out of pocket earlier this year. Since all this was running, it’s been about a wash.
FWIW, I was planning on bringing the StayLDS.com site soon under the umbrella of the Open Stories Foundation. John Dehlin has always owned the domain name, and didn’t want to let go of control (not that I am concerned about that, but it’s the situation). I took control of the servers and hosting early on. So in effect, I guess I “own” that half of the equation. Blending into the Open Stories Foundation would give us tax exempt status for donations, which is a small perk. I’m on the Board of Directors and am the acting Controller for OSF already.
When we move under OSF, I might advertise more for donations to help the overall organization. OSF would also be responsible for paying the costs at that point, and it wouldn’t be my direct responsibility.
Thanks, Brian. You’re a stud. Probably most appropriate for you to respond to Mike?
I think aligning with OSF is a good move. I also liked Mike’s suggestion to disclose our finances to create more transparency, although maybe things will get a little lost in the OSF pie? Just a thought. I don’t want people to think we are selling the word of God here or that we’ve become paid careerists or anything.
One of my current projects for OSF right now actually is putting together financial statements for internal management purposes (higher detail) and also for public presentation to potential donors (lower detail, summary style). I am designing the overall accounting system, and it will have a project accounting element so we can track revenue and costs for different programs that OSF runs. Maybe while I am at it, i’ll put together something for StayLDS. I like the idea of transparency, and want to make sure people know we are running this site to help people.
One of my pet dreams would be to possibly get $2,000 together somehow and file a domain infringement action against the jerk who runs StayLDS.
ORG. I looked it up once a while ago, and I think that’s around how much the filing fees are to start this with the arbitration gods of the internet. I try not to let it bother me most of the time, but he does do damage to our work, and it’s only for malicious purposes. It was actually a topic that came up when my Stake President called me in recently to investigate me. One of his first questions was to clarify that I was not running StayLDS.org. Thanks Brian. This is good info to know. I agree with you on the cyber-squatting, and I’d like to see that domain become part of ours. I’ve typed in staylds.org countless times by accident.
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