After the 3800 dark and stormy years of 2020, I took a few weeks off from active Slipmat development to load my batteries a bit. Gotta say, 2021 is starting to look a bit better already
Community Fundraiser
Our community fundraiser is still ongoing, in the hopes of getting 80% of our necessary funding from the community for keeping the site running January-March of 2021.
Slipmat has never had any ads, nor do we sell or use your data in any way to make money. Starting today, we’re displaying a prominent banner for encouraging donations for all of those members who have not yet participated in supporting the community. The banner will be visible at least 15 seconds every 45 minutes. Slipmat supporters and VIP users will never see this banner.
We’ll keep the fundraiser banners and ads on the site for the time being until the 80% funding target is met.
New DJs
We’ve had quite a lot new members joining lately, I hope they get a warm welcome at our events
Do remember that all DJs can invite new members in, so don’t leave your friends behind!.
Upcoming changes
Due to my recent vacation and the fact that I spent quite a lot of time preparing stuff for new developers who decided not to help after all, the next big updates are delayed by few weeks. The focus is on event recordings, better listener experience and moving things to the new platform as fast as possible.
As always, at the end of the day you are in charge, so please keep those bug reports and feature requests coming
Users who aren’t subscribers report that they’re getting a popup that cannot be dismissed until 30 seconds have elapsed. Additionally the popup appears to be tripping this BitDefender alert…
Wow, lots of issues with this popup! Users report that even after they have donated, they’re still getting the popup. It’s going to impact the live shows’ audiences pretty heavily tonight. I would donate the remainder of the goal tonight if I could afford to - but users are reporting this is really interfering with their experience.
I’m on mobile so will try to answer the best I can.
The ”popup” is a modal, not a popup, displays on the page like I mentioned here for those users who have not supported the community:
Like said, we don’t have ads like most big platforms do, so when there is a first it might upset some who expect getting everything for free.
The technical implementation marks user as a supporter after a donation so unless you close the page before the transaction is over, it will mark you as a supporter. If there are any problems at all, users can dm me here or email us at slipmat@slipmat.io and we’ll refund any donations or payments they want to cancel.
The bitdefender issue is most likely a totally separate thing, at least the URL in the screenshot is different. There’s nothing new on the site that should trigger it.
Oh, one more thing; if the support banner appears after donating for some reason (it definitely shouldnt), just refresh the page. That will
most likely fix it if you habe a mobile browser or some old version or a random hiccup
Thanks again @Phoole for good and detailed feedback
Can’t get to my computer now but I did manage to tweak a couple of number settings that will probably make the shock factor of the support banner a bit less dreadful: it now appears every 45 mins and stays up for 15 seconds. This should be a bit of a less hassle for everyone.
The changes are online now and update to the live page as soon as you refresh the page. (The DJ can do this for everyone from the DJ admin console via the refresh page button, but all new users joining to an event will automatically get the new page.)
Ok. I understand the necessity for fundraising. This site needs money to keep it going. BUT: This way isn’t the best way. This looks bad for new users. Think about it. A DJ sends message to his/her friend:
“Hey I’m playing a DJ set on this cool site, come and watch!”
“Sounds cool! But wait: Isn’t this service supposed to be free?”
“Well yeah, but thing is that this site needs money to run.”
“I understand that but it should be my decision! I hate this, I’m out.”
New users don’t see why the fundraising is necessary. First thing they think is “I’m supposed to pay for this?! No way!”
We indeed passed the target goal last night, yay! The logic for passing the goal had a small bug, which I’ve fixed now. The small banners now show a thank you message with a link to the support page.
I also disabled the big banner from the live page altogether. The ad for non-supporters is still active, it’s not behind a simple toggle so it needs a proper release to be disabled. Will do this either tomorrow or on Monday, when I find the time.
There were also 3 early supporters whose profile was not correctly labelled as a supporter. I refunded all payments made yesterday, I apologise for the inconvenience.
I’m happy to hear any better solutions that don’t involve shutting down the site. Every actionable idea and suggestion is very welcome!
I don’t see the logic here at all. Does YouTube ads look bad for users? How about the paywalls on newspaper sites? Can you tell me an example of a moderate traffic site that runs without ads or any corporate funding?
But good you mentioned new users; this one ad we currently display, does not show for any user who have visited less than 5 events. I figured that the amount of new users vs old ones who have visited tens or hundreds shows for free is negligible so I filtered all fresh users out.
(This is a sidenote but the “isn’t this free” notion is really, really, really bad. Big sites that are “free” are either making millions or billions of dollars from their users --by selling data and ads–, or they are backed by big corporate startup investments that is designed to carry the project for the development phase. Nothing is free.)
Here’s the details from the 2020 Community Fundraiser for everyone who is interested: https://slipmat.io/support/
I’m glad that fundraising achieved the goal. But I’m wondering: was this one time only or is same kind of fundraising happening again after three months?
I expect the current funding structure with the raised funds to carry us to about May this year, which will give us plenty of time to figure out alternative ways to fund the site. We managed to run over 5 years without any ads or community fundraising, I’m hoping that we’ll find ways to stay ad-free after this campaign for a long time as well
But, if the site gets in position of either shutting down or doing another fundraiser, I’d like to ask the hundreds of users who enjoy the site every week to chip in again.
In the meantime, all discussion and especially constructive solutions is welcome! If anyone has better ideas, please share them.
