Watercooler - Q4 2016

[Changaco]

This is Liberapay's monthly "what's up?" thread. Previous: #72.

[Changaco]

The conference in Toulouse is approaching fast. As part of the preparations here is a small report on the technical status of Liberapay.

We have one critical issue, liberapay/liberapay.com#177, i.e. unreliable hosting. As I will probably be away from the Internet for many hours during the conference it would be best to address the problem in one way or another. Obviously it would be bad if the site went down during that weekend.

On the other hand, the number of issues tagged "Bug" is quite small. Most of our issues are about new features or improvements to what we already have. Many others are about increasing developer productivity and preventing bugs.

We currently have 22 issues tagged "Easy", so there's plenty of room for new contributors.

Overall liberapay.com is in pretty good shape technically. You can't see it but our Sentry queue currently has 3 items only, all of which are about transient or upstream (Facebook, etc) errors.

[Changaco]

Someone with more than 180k followers tweeted a link to a donate page yesterday, so we got a traffic spike, but few new users.

[Changaco]

Those are the times when you're really happy to be using a service like CloudFlare, because it absorbed 80% of the traffic spike:

[Changaco]

While I'm at it, our traffic has been slowly increasing in the past month:

[Changaco]

Brett Cannon - Why I took October off from OSS volunteering

[Changaco]

MangoPay has received an anonymous email complaining about one of our users (usually people contact us instead of MangoPay, related issue: liberapay/liberapay.com#353). MangoPay is not asking us to take action against the reported user.

[Changaco]

Following a brief disturbance on MangoPay notifications yesterday I've just run check-balances.py to see if we were still in sync. We are.

[Changaco]

The service we're using for IRC notifications is malfunctioning, I've reached out on GitHub: https://github.com/notifico/notifico/issues/158

[Changaco]

How Gratipay helps solve the 'free rider' problem

[Changaco]

Found yet another donation app: Donorbox.

[Changaco]

https://twitter.com/ploum/status/807960347189637121

Anecdote : je reçois désormais plus par mois sur @.liberapaye que sur @.Flattr. Merci à tous :-)

Translation:

Anecdote: I now receive more per month on @.liberapaye than on @.Flattr. Thanks everyone :-)

[Changaco]

We had a question on IRC about the privacy implications of using CloudFlare. My answer was this quote from https://www.cloudflare.com/security-policy/:

We do not sell, rent, or share personal information with third parties for their direct marketing purposes,

[Changaco]

https://twitter.com/Gratipay/status/808702383282880516

We've updated our Terms of Service, to make it easier to join @.Gratipay: https://gratipay.news/from-teams-to-projects-45c46718507b

[Changaco]

For the record I've been working mostly on https://github.com/Legilibre/legi.py for the past week, that's why not much is happening here.

[Changaco]

I have suspended one account because of suspicious activity. I'm going to ask MangoPay if they think it's fraud.

[Changaco]

MangoPay believes it is fraud and recommends refunding the payments.

Note: I've also suspended two other accounts linked to the first suspicious one.

[Changaco]

Apparently we had a weird traffic spike a week ago that was absorbed by CloudFlare:

I wonder what it was.

[Changaco]

A long comment in French explaining why a project which already uses Patreon and Tipeee doesn't want to create a Liberapay account: https://linuxfr.org/news/zemarmot-compte-rendu-de-fin-2016-et-appels-aux-dons#comment-1687104

[Changaco]

Interestingly it gives a new argument for implementing multiple currencies (liberapay/liberapay.com#182): the reason ZeMarmot originally chose to use both Patreon and Tipeee was to support donations in both dollars and euros, but now they're tired of posting every news twice, so if Liberapay supported both currencies it would be more attractive (multiple currencies wouldn't be enough though, we need to catch up on other features too, e.g. liberapay/liberapay.com#41).