Watercooler - Q4 2017

[Changaco]

This is Liberapay's quarterly "what's up?" thread. Previous: #146.

[Changaco]

Last Thursday a user contacted us because their card payment was rejected with the error message "Unauthorized Card issuer country". It turns out Mangopay has recently revised its payin rules and Russia is now in their blacklist of countries. However it seems that only card payments are blocked, so Russians may still be able to fund their donations by bank wire.

On the payout side Russia is only grey-listed, see the list of payout rules per country.

[Changaco]

The Flattr relaunch: What to expect!

The release is finally happening! On October 24th, we will launch the new version of Flattr for the public. Here is a guide to the new Flattr, for creators, publishers, and contributors.

[Changaco]

Mozilla's new system for people to fund the add-ons they use supports "Patreon, PayPal, and Micropayment as payment providers". Adding Liberapay has been suggested in https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/upcoming-changes-to-contributions-on-amo/17734/40 and https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/10/12/new-contributions-launched-amo/#comment-224449.

[Changaco]

(I found out about it via https://framasphere.org/posts/3984657.)

[Changaco]

Shaking the tin for LVFS: Asking for donations!

[Changaco]

I've renamed the hacktoberfest label to good first issue now that October is over. I believe @EdOverflow is the one who had previously changed the name from Easy to hacktoberfest.

[EdOverflow]

@Changaco: I can confirm that was me.

[Changaco]

There is a big outage at OVH this morning, the Liberapay website isn't affected since it's hosted on AWS, but Liberapay's email accounts are on my personal OVH server, so I can't access them.

[Changaco]

The problem is fixed. The server never actually shut down, it just wasn't reachable.

[Changaco]

New release: Cockatoo | MANGOPAY API Docs

New functionality included in this release

• We've added new endpoints to help you list every transaction linked to your clients mandates (all direct debits made with a mandate), bankaccouts (all payouts made towards a bankaccount) and cards (all preauthorized and direct payins made with a card)
• We also added new endpoint to help you list every refund for a payin, a transfer, a payout (in case the initial payout has been refused by the bank) or a repudiation (in case the dispute type was contestable and that the client won its contestation)
• Every preauthorization processed for one of your client can now be listed too
• You can now use much more filters (eg. ResultCode) for every existing and new list endpoints, and using multiples values for a single criterion. For instance, you can now filter transaction lists by multiple statuses (eg. SUCCEEDED and FAILED) or dispute list by multiple dispute types (eg. CONTESTABLE and RETRIEVAL)

Improvements included in this release

• We've fixed an issue allowing simultaneous refunds related to the same transaction, even if their cumulative amount was higher than initial transaction amount
• You do not have to send a URL value anymore when updating a hook status or tag

[jorgesumle]

Liberapay: an article about Liberapay written in Spanish.

[Changaco]

Cloudflare supports Privacy Pass

[Changaco]

Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor | Hacker News

[Changaco]

I received a billing alert from AWS because the Gratipay shutdown announcement and the attack from last week (liberapay/liberapay.com#789) have raised our bandwidth usage. It's nothing to worry about, our alert threshold is set very low ($0.50), so far the total bill for November is only $0.24.

[Changaco]

Screenshot from Cloudflare that shows the peaks in bandwidth:

[Changaco]

I've suspended 12 individual accounts on suspicion of card fraud / money laundering.

[Changaco]

We ended up getting a $2.16 AWS bill for November, and the forecast is similar for December.

The gross cost is almost entirely bandwidth, more precisely "regional data transfer - in/out/between EC2 AZs or using elastic IPs or ELB":

I believe the cause is that our DB and web server are currently in two different AZs, so we're getting billed for all internal traffic between the webapp and the database.

[Changaco]

The amount of traffic between the app and postgres is crazy, there must be a problem somewhere.

[Changaco]

I temporarily switched log_statement from ddl to all and looked at the logs. Apparently the newsletter cron is broken, it's sending queries to the DB continuously.

[Changaco]

send_newsletters_every was set to 0 in production, and that led to a crazy loop because I removed the period <= 0 check in liberapay/liberapay.com@f851948. I've changed the period to 3600 and restarted the app, we seem to be back to normal now.

[Changaco]

I've configured a CloudWatch dashboard with some useful metrics:

Notice the giant drop in CPU utilization when I fixed the "crazy loop" issue about 10.5 hours ago, and the subsequent improvement in response times.

[Changaco]

(FTR, https://serverfault.com/questions/753053/aws-regional-traffic-track-down-where-it-comes-from was useful in figuring out the problem.)

[mattbk]

Nice.

[Changaco]

Better screenshot of the dashboard, which now has more widgets:

[Changaco]

Apparently Patreon is going to change how they handle payment processing fees.

• https://cybre.space/@cassolotl/99129247105948955
• https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99129313100447847
• https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005631963
• https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=patreon&src=typd

[mattbk]

Liberapay is getting a bit of play on Twitter as a result: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=liberapay&src=typd

[Changaco]

A couple of threads in which Liberapay is mentioned:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7i885y/new_patreon_rules_at_35c_fee_to_a_1_pledge/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15872128

[mattbk]

https://www.patreon.com/search?q=Liberapay

[Changaco]

The amount of tweets about Patreon has been crazy, and now I'm not sure I can keep up with all the messages mentioning Liberapay on various sites.

[Changaco]

[fr] Vent de révolte sur Patreon qui profite à Liberapay - LinuxFr.org

[Changaco]

With so much more activity than usual on Liberapay we're already at more than 2200 emails sent this month, and we only have 10000 free.

[Changaco]

The Mastodon instance we use is down, again.

[Changaco]

Created an alternate account: https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay

[Changaco]

Screenshot of our CloudWatch dashboard showing the significant traffic increase these past few days:

[Changaco]

(FOSS WIN?) New Patreon rules cause creators I was supporting to open Liberapay accounts

[Changaco]

Our primary Mastodon account is back online. https://mastodon.rocks/@HackJack/99150331365459352

[Changaco]

@mattbk BTW the full search I use to keep an eye on Twitter mentions is https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=liberapay%20OR%20liberapaye%20OR%20liberapay.com%20OR%20librepay&src=typd

And for HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=liberapay&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=all

[Changaco]

https://twitter.com/Crowdagger/status/940574676727881730

Bon je sais pas si ça a vraiment un intérêt pour l'instant (j'ai déjà une page Tipeee) mais vu que ça a l'air d'être la hype du moment je me suis créé un compte liberapay

We're trendy! 😆

[Changaco]

We messed up. We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change. - The Patreon Blog

[Changaco]

I am now receiving more money on Liberapay than I was receiving on Gratipay 3 years ago.

(Related posts: https://mastodon.cloud/@Changaco/37831022 and https://twitter.com/Changaco/status/940989479569051649.)

[Changaco]

[fr] https://standblog.org/blog/post/2017/12/14/En-vrac-du-jeudi

J’ai un ouvert un compte Liberapay (une plateforme de dons récurrents), et je vous encourage à faire de même pour soutenir vos projets libres préférés. Pour l’instant, je l’utilise pour donner à Liberapay lui-même et à Exodus. Bien sûr, je vous encourage aussi à soutenir la Quadrature du Net ;

[Changaco]

(Tristan Nitot is the former president of Mozilla Europe.)

[Changaco]

New release: Ocelot | MANGOPAY API Docs

New functionality included in this release

• We’ve added a new endpoint to help you list all the bank accounts for a given user.
• We’re excited to present you the progress made with the Fingerprint features (unique card identifier). We’ve generated a Fingerprint for every card used to do a Payin Web. And it is now possible to list all the transactions for a Fingerprint.
• We’ve added a soft descriptor for Paypal transactions.

Improvements included in this release

• We fixed the desynchronization error we had on the reports. Now all our reporting tools is fully working.
• We fixed the issues we had on the GET /events/ endpoint by limiting the historical data search to 45 days.

[Changaco]

BountySource has been acquired by a company running an ICO, and OpenCollective is adding support for Bitcoin payments.

[EdOverflow]

@Changaco, is there a ticket somewhere to discuss adding support for Bitcoin donations? I would love to see that implemented somewhere on Liberapay.

[Changaco]

@EdOverflow liberapay/liberapay.com#364

[trebmuh]

pippin, one of the lead dev of GIMP, wrote a post where liberapay is cited (and supported in the comments)

[Changaco]

I've suspended two accounts doing shady stuff including a possible direct debit fraud.

[Changaco]

https://gnusocial.de/notice/12852693

Hey, @.liberapay, I created a small ad for your platform and it is now shown at #34c3!

https://github.com/rugk/liberapay-ad-34c3/blob/master/liberapay-banner_minified.png

[Changaco]

Mailgun stats for the past 30 days:

[Changaco]

GIMP and GEGL in 2017