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December points bonus time!
Hello, Dreamwidth! It's been a hell of a year on our end, but amidst issues ranging from family to health to family health, all y'all and this place of ours have been a bright spot. As our way of saying thank you for continuing to help us prove it's possible to run a social site without selling your users (or your soul), it's once again time for the December points bonus!
For the month of December, all orders of points and paid time in the shop (https://www.dreamwidth.org/shop), for you or sent as a gift, will get a 10% bonus of points once you complete the order. For instance, if you buy a 12-month paid account (350 points), you'll get another 35 points once the order is complete for you to use on a future order. This bonus only applies to orders of paid time or points -- bonus icons and rename tokens don't receive points bonuses. If you buy paid time or points for a friend, the bonus points will go to you, not to them.
IMPORTANT TO KNOW: When we say "the month of December", that goes by server time, which is in UTC. It's not midnight your local time zone! (For people in Pacific time, for instance, the promotion ends at 4PM on 31 December.) Every year a few people get bitten by this, so if you're planning on buying paid time during December, it's best to do it on 30 December or before.
This is our annual way of saying thank you, because we owe you a lot. Every day it seems like there's another story in the news about a site selling data on its users, manipulating what their users see, or prioritizing page loads and "active users" metrics for their investors over people's actual lives, safety, and security. We built Dreamwidth because we believed there could be a better way, and we are grateful for all of you who believe in that better way enough to come along for the ride.
Here's to a wonderful December holiday season and to a 2018 that does not suck.
(Comment notifications may be delayed for up to an hour or two, due to the high volume of notifications generated after an update is posted to dw-news. This was posted at 12:45 AM EST (Sorry, no link to time zone converter). Please don't worry about delayed notifications until at least two hours after that.)
For the month of December, all orders of points and paid time in the shop (https://www.dreamwidth.org/shop), for you or sent as a gift, will get a 10% bonus of points once you complete the order. For instance, if you buy a 12-month paid account (350 points), you'll get another 35 points once the order is complete for you to use on a future order. This bonus only applies to orders of paid time or points -- bonus icons and rename tokens don't receive points bonuses. If you buy paid time or points for a friend, the bonus points will go to you, not to them.
IMPORTANT TO KNOW: When we say "the month of December", that goes by server time, which is in UTC. It's not midnight your local time zone! (For people in Pacific time, for instance, the promotion ends at 4PM on 31 December.) Every year a few people get bitten by this, so if you're planning on buying paid time during December, it's best to do it on 30 December or before.
This is our annual way of saying thank you, because we owe you a lot. Every day it seems like there's another story in the news about a site selling data on its users, manipulating what their users see, or prioritizing page loads and "active users" metrics for their investors over people's actual lives, safety, and security. We built Dreamwidth because we believed there could be a better way, and we are grateful for all of you who believe in that better way enough to come along for the ride.
Here's to a wonderful December holiday season and to a 2018 that does not suck.
(Comment notifications may be delayed for up to an hour or two, due to the high volume of notifications generated after an update is posted to dw-news. This was posted at 12:45 AM EST (Sorry, no link to time zone converter). Please don't worry about delayed notifications until at least two hours after that.)
Re: End-of-the-year giving
Re: End-of-the-year giving
So, this year, I want to bring people's attention to two underappreciated charities. One is the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award, which encourages the exploration & expansion of gender -- you may have seen me entertain scifi/fantasy fans at conventions as the charity auctioneer raising money for the Tiptree Award. (I'm also on its board, or "Motherboard," as of this year.) I recently wrote about what an award does, and the reflections I've seen from winners of the Tiptree Awards and Fellowships tell me those honors are doing the job -- encouraging creators and fans to expand how we imagine gender. I'm one of the people matching donations to the Tiptree Award right now; all donations made from now through the end of the year will be matched, up to USD $2400 -- if people match that whole amount, that'll cover more than half the Tiptree Award's annual budget, which would be great.
And second, the Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit that helps free and open source software projects. They help programmers give away their work for free. The Conservancy is a nonprofit umbrella (a fiscal sponsor), helping projects like Git, homebrew, Wine, Selenium, and others by taking care of legal and financial paperwork on their behalf. They're also the institutional home of Outreachy, which gives underindexed people in tech paid apprenticeship-style internships to help them start their open source software careers. And they make sure big companies actually follow the rules, legally, so everyone can benefit the same from the openness of open source. I go into what they do in this essay (video version). Right now, they have a challenge match going: "All donations up to $75,000 will be matched dollar for dollar until January 15." Conservancy's part of the unsung infrastructure of inclusivity and fairness in open source, and I hope Dreamwidth supporters who can will chip in a bit.
Re: End-of-the-year giving