Allow sending of short, personal messages with tips

[pjf]

I'm delighted that I have two whole people sending me tips. However I don't know why. It could be my efforts in maintaining Dwarf Fortress mods, or my writing about science, or my public speaking, or my software development, or photography, or just because they like me. If people are giving me tips then I'd like to continue working on things they like.

It'd be great to have a "why are you tipping this person" field, that gets copied over as a transaction note (ie, you both can see it). It doesn't mean you know who the tip came from (although I guess someone could stick their name there), but it means they can write "Love your photos", or "Great work on exobrain", or whatever it is they wish to share (which could be nothing).

One could potentially allow this to be pre-filled (eg, with a URL from the referring page). Flattr does this, so recipients know what people are flattring them for. One could even include GET parameters to provide a suggested message. (eg: https://gittip.com/pjf?for=photography)

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[chadwhitacre]

We had this as #7, but closed that with Tooting the Horn, which feature we've since killed (#1466). We may have another ticket still open that this duplicates, but until it surfaces let's use this one to further track this idea.

We had a long go-round at the retreat (cf. #1777) on whether to build communication channels into Gittip vs. outsourcing that to existing platforms (Twitter, blogs, etc.). The general sense was that we have tons to do and on-site communication is an engineering black hole (cf. #1466 #1776), but we couldn't quite bring ourselves to say that we could fully get away without taking this on some day. Hmm ...

[pjf]

Ah, the horn is before my time. I did make sure this was a very narrowly-scoped comment (just an optional transaction field), because I know that implementing communication channels is a right pain.

[ribasushi]

Fwiw this would indeed be very useful. Anonymous donations feel too much like robo-calls otherwise ;)

[zbynekwinkler]

I was thinking about allowing tag(s) with tips. This would allow let's say someone to tip jressing and add tag "javascript". The tag would be public. We might have to allow multiple outstanding tips between participants differing only in tags. You could do cool things with it like asking "who is getting most money because of her javascript work?" or drupal or readthedocs or ... you get the idea. It might even supplement (replace?) communities.

[chadwhitacre]

It might even supplement (replace?) communities.

@zwn Why not rather use communities as the tags? So if I tip jressing I can additionally specify that my tip is for jressing's work related to this or that community. Only communities that jressing has joined would be options for my tagging. I can probably tag one tip with multiple communities (javascript + jquery).

This would help us scope aggregates on community pages (#963).

[pjf]

I view tags (if implemented) as a separate suggestion, especially if those tags are communities.

The reason being that a lot of my most popular work (such as public speaking, or some rants about learning) don't fit into a 'community' at all. And my work that does fit into a community tends to be very broad. If see a tag that just says 'perl' then I still don't know why I'm being tipped. Plus tags still feel really impersonal.

A short message, on the other hand, does feel more personal, and it lets me know why I'm being tipped.

So by all means, allow tips to be tagged, but please don't let that be a replacement for the transaction comment.

[zbynekwinkler]

@whit537 You have to join a community first (action on the tippee side). Tags give you the freedom to let other people (the tipper side) assign you to a like-minded group which I think is cool. And if we had tags and not communities nobody would expect any kind of communing and we'd be fine the way we are right now.

But anyway, @pjf feels the need for personal message so lets not hijack this issue 😃. @pjf Would you care to update the name and/or description of the issue to reflect the personal aspect? You even suggest an url in place of a message right now.

[pjf]

D'oh. I wish github would provide a way that would let anyone edit the tickets I create. :)

@zwn : How does that title/description look? I imagine some people will put URLs in the message field, but I see these as being useful in general. (Personal messages, project names, cities where one would like speaking tours/training to be held next, etc)

[zbynekwinkler]

Thanks. Github actually allows me to edit it, I just don't consider it very polite (editing issues others have/create).

[singpolyma]

I think this is a great balance. A full communications / social networking feature set is just not what we're here for. rstat.us et al exist as community projects for that kind of thing. But some small information tied directly to the giving, like this, would be useful.

[pjf]

+1 from me again on this. Having just received my flattr report, it's awesome to see what people are flattring me for (which is not what I expected). ;)

[chadwhitacre]

Closing in light of our decision to shut down Gratipay.

Thank you all for a great run, and I'm sorry it didn't work out! 😞 💃