Pledgie discontinuation email

pledgie.md

Hello GitHub User!

If you're receiving this email, it's because we think you're going to be affected by a change we're making soon and we want to let you know about it in advance. Effective early next week, we're going to remove the Pledgie Donations feature from the GitHub user interface. This means that your Pledgie campaigns will no longer be displayed at the top of your repository pages and you will not be able to administer your Pledgie campaigns from GitHub.

Why are you doing this?

Pledgie never really took off on Github the way that we had hoped — as of now, less than 0.4% of GitHub repositories have Pledgie enabled (and even fewer have made money from them.) As GitHub grows, the feature is becoming impractical for us to continue to maintain. Also, we feel that Pledgie may be limiting for projects that could choose other ways to monetize; we don't want to give preference to one system over another. The way you want to make money from your project should be yours to choose.

What happens to my campaigns?

Your Pledgie campaigns will remain active under GitHub's Pledgie account, so if you have your Pledgie badges posted in other places, you aren't going to lose any money. All of your badges will continue to function (and monetize) properly in other places - they just won't be displayed on GitHub anymore unless you add them to your README (see below.)

How do I add Pledgie functionality to my GitHub repository page?

For now, the best course of action is to find your existing Pledgie campaign ID and add the badge to your repository README. This should have been sent to you in an email by Pledgie originally; if you don't have it, go to http://pledgie.com/ and type in your project name. When you find your project, the embed code for your Pledgie badge will be displayed on your Pledgie campaign page. (Even though we don't support HTML as a README option, the badge parses correctly in many of the markup formats we tested.)

Who do I talk to if I have questions?

Of course, GitHub support is always around. You can simply reply to this email, it will find its way back to us.

Thanks,

The GitHub Team

In my README.md I have this code

[![Click here to lend your support to: mediatags - meta-data tags as JSON and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !][2]][1]

[1]: http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/14039
[2]: http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/14039.png?skin_name=chrome

which produces

<a href="http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/14039">
  <img src="https://assets2.github.com/img/bf4f13136d4af16be809e61141a073c683014d0e?repo=&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pledgie.com%2Fcampaigns%2F14039.png%3Fskin_name%3Dchrome&amp;path=" alt="Click here to lend your support to: mediatags - meta-data tags as JSON and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !">
</a>

Which looks like

Instead of

<a href='http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/14039'>
  <img alt='Click here to lend your support to: mediatags - meta-data tags as JSON and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !' 
    src='http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/14039.png?skin_name=chrome'
    border='0' />
</a>

Which should render as

Or

(Neither of which appear to work)

This is a poor show that I had to search for this information, and as far as I can see, was never a blog post. Transparency boys and girls, transparency.

This was emailed to every user that was using pledgie at the time.

Ummm, I don't remember receiving that email... In any case, I think it would be interesting to see what happens when you make it enabled as standard for every project (every project could use funding couldn't it?). You could even be more proactive by pre-populating the README with "Every Open Source project could use your support. Donate by clicking the Pledgie button above!".

I suspect this will give a greater feeling for its usefulness and foster a more supported developer community. If it's a pain to administer, take a %-age cut for each donation (based on the amount) in support of continued development of the open source community.

In any case, putting the embed code in the README file didn't work. Other options?

average,
Social-Garden