dw_news | Check/money order payments

Check/money order payments

We have an important update for those who choose to pay us by check or money order: starting today, we've had to place a minimum dollar value order amount of $20USD on carts that are being paid by check or money order. This is because our mail forwarding service has raised both their annual subscription rates and their charge for forwarding mail significantly since we signed up with them, and for any check/money order payment under $20, too much of the payment would be taken up with those costs and we would wind up losing money overall. The number of people using check/money order payment is very small, but we're pretty determined to keep the option for those of you who don't have credit cards easily available; nearly everyone who does pay by check/money order pays for a year of services at a time, so we don't think this change will affect many people overall, but it is necessary in order for us to be able to keep offering the payment method as an option. I'm really sorry for the inconvenience to anyone this affects, though.

While I have you here and since I'm about to flood our notification system anyway[1]: as usual, we will be offering our annual December points bonus of 10% the completed cart value sent to you as points to use on a future order. I'll announce that one formally when we get there, but thought it was worth letting you know in advance since I was here already!

[1] Posting a

dw_news post can delay notifications sitewide for an hour or two, due to the extremely high volume of emails generated whenever we post one. Your comment emails may be delayed for a little while after I post this. It was posted at 3:45PM EST/2045 UTC (view in your timezone). Please don't worry about missing notifications until at least two hours from now. You may receive multiple copies of this email notification due to a bug we're still trying to squash [2]: we apologize, and we're still holding out hope we'll be able figure that out and fix it.

[2] (The duplicate notification problem that affects news posts is unrelated to the problem where a few people were getting duplicate notifications for everything this week: that one should be fixed. Duplicate emails for a news post is a different issue! Our notification system is very old and very cranky.)

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Very, very old. Very, very cranky.

Sooo excited for that December points bonus ♥
Thanks for all that you do to remain accessible.

For a user who doesn't live in the US or have a credit card it would be great to have some other way of paying for an account. As it is I have to rely on friends buying me a yearly paid account for my birthday which tbh is pretty embarrassing at my age!

We're limited in the payment options we can offer because a lot of the services that make it possible for us to accept other methods of payment that are more common outside the US have restrictions on the sort of content they allow services to accept, and we're not willing to impose the kind of content restrictions they're looking for. That's part of why we keep the check/money order option open -- if you can get a check or money order in USD, you can send that to us. Alternately, if your country offers prepaid Visa cards that's always an option! (We find prepaid Visa works better than prepaid MasterCard because of how each of them handles prepaid cards; the way MasterCard does theirs, they're more likely to fail due to incorrect address data.)

I use prepaid credit cards myself in this same situation!

Oh thank you. I never thought of using a prepaid Visa card. Will do that going forward as I do like having lots of icons. Also prefer you guys to get money to help with maintaining this site than me giving it to the Russians on LJ

Will you ever add the option to pay via PayPal?

It's not Dreamwidth's idea not to have Paypal, it's Paypal's idea not to have Dreamwidth!

Oh I see! I didn’t know that, grr…

I went and grabbed the receipts for you!

from from the 1/15/2010 news post:

First, PayPal, our merchant processor, has requested that we remove entries on our service that contain nothing but constitutionally and legally protected speech that is not against our Terms of Service. We will not be complying with PayPal's demand that we remove these legal entries posted by our users: our Guiding Principles say that we won't, and we're sticking by them.

Because we refuse to do so, we will need to switch our merchant processors.

from the 2/22/10 news post:

In a repeat of last month's situation, we have once again come under attack by the same group of people attempting to extort us out of business. We've been back and forth in discussion with Google Checkout, our current payment processor, but they've decided to terminate our business relationship unless we alter our Terms of Service to prohibit all adult content.

This means that we are once again temporarily unable to accept credit cards to buy paid time for your Dreamwidth account, since prohibiting all adult content on the site goes against our Guiding Principles of free expression. We're really sorry about the problem, believe me, but we think it's important to stick to our promises to you. More than important, really: it's a requirement. We're not going to go back on our promises simply because Google and PayPal are unwilling to work with us.

from the 9/8/10 news post

We've seen a few people asking whether or not we accept PayPal for account payments. Unfortunately, we don't; PayPal closed our account with them at the beginning of the year after we refused to censor our users' perfectly legal content at their demand. We thought that your free expression was important enough to us to stick to our guns. Alas, but this means we can't take PayPal. We do accept credit cards (VISA, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express), and checks and money orders in US funds. We know this can be difficult for our users without credit cards and users from outside the US -- if you're having trouble making a payment, you can a) buy a VISA gift card, which will work the same as a VISA card; b) get a friend with a credit card to make a payment for you in exchange for you sending money to them via PayPal; c) send us American Express traveler's checks (or cash in US funds) in the mail. (If you choose C, do be aware that it is a risk -- the money may get lost in the mail, and while traveler's checks can be replaced, cash can't.)

Wow, so it’s a censorship issue? That’s interesting, and thanks for compiling the info for me. I’ve been on DW on and off since the start and now I vaguely remember reading this stuff as it happened. It’s a shame :/

You're most welcome!

Yep, they wanted and still want all adult content banned if they're going to be this site's payment processor, and one of the reasons I hang out here is that I know Denise and Mark aren't going to bend to that.

It is a shame on Paypal situation, definitely!

Interesting… Thanks for the explanation! I send my AO3 payment through PayPal so I may need to watch that in the future. Although I guess it shouldn’t be so surprising given literally everything fandom when external money makers and censorship because they want things to be squeaky clean gets involved. Although that may or may work in people’s favour with Twitter right now given the backlash to how things have been panning out so far with Elon’s take over, pending on that one.

(Although I doubt it’ll go far enough to make the Queer community feel safe on there again but I won’t know because I’m not on there but I did go through a FanFiction.Net crackdown and mass migration to AO3 so yeah, and even some mainstream media from my country I listen to doesn’t seem thrilled about the Twitter takeover or at least the reporters themselves seem a bit nervous about the meaning of it all and trying to explain to the average non-American and non-Twitter user listener just what the significant impact to democracy etc. it could all have but anyway!)

I don’t know about other people using PayPal but I do know my main reason for using PayPal with things is because I can cancel or adjust my payments easily without needing to go through organising it with other people or without needing to cancel my payment then having to start a new one if I need to change my bank details, payment amounts etc. so I started to use PayPal for pretty much everything instead. I’m not sure how Dreamwidth handles that stuff though, I’m almost entirely AO3 based so I haven’t really checked, so that may or may not be part of other people’s considerations.

Might have to reconsider direct payments for AO3 though from the sounds of it. On reflect I think originally I couldn’t use PayPal for AO3 then later I needed to update my details or something and PayPal was available so I switched for future convenience of detail changing and auto payment management. Hopefully Patreon doesn’t also become an issue… but anyway, more reasons to support Nebula (YouTube Alternative) and other sites like you guys.

Edited (Expanded on the Twitter bit for clarity.) 2022-11-12 01:30 (UTC)

I see someone else has covered why Dreamwidth and PayPal don't go together, but I do want to mention that there are people here* willing to play PayPal Proxy! As in, you PayPal them the amount of money you want to spend on Dreamwidth services, then they buy those points via credit card (or whatever) and gift them to you. It's a clunky work-around, but it gets the job done.

* I am one of those people! Hello!

That’sso nice of you!

Others have found the old news posts for you, but just confirming for you -- it's not us that won't take PayPal, it's that PayPal won't let us use their services unless we impose a lot of content restrictions we don't want to impose. Unfortunately our commitment to allowing as much legal content as possible means that a lot of payment processors won't work for us, but PayPal in particular is notorious for dropping sites for allowing any amount of "adult" content (they mean sex, they always mean sex, unless they mean LGBTQ) on the site.

Ironic - wasn't Paypal Elon Musk's baby at one point? That noted free-speech advocate? /eyeroll emoji

It was actually apart of Ebay first, then got spun-off into it's own entity.

*am old*

It was two separate companies (X and Confinity) first, which merged to become PayPal, which then got bought by eBay later on!

He did a takeover of X, which was one of the two companies that merged to make PayPal, yes

Ah, understood! Thanks for the explanation:) I applaud you for not letting them intimidate you!

Adding to the voices who say they really appreciate you offering this option, as well as appreciation of your priorities, re: paypal. Thank you!

We'll absolutely keep it open as an option for as long as we can! Even though it costs us a lot more than credit card payments, we want to make sure as many people as possible have a way they can pay us if they want, even if it costs us more to offer the option. We held off doing this as long as we could, but it's gotten to the point where it costs us more than $3 to get a check/MO payment into my hands even without factoring in the annual membership fee for keeping the address valid -- and this service has some of the lowest rates out there, sigh. (We used to use a PO box at our post office to at least avoid the remailing fee, but service cutbacks meant they were only open from 10-2 and we get checks so irregularly that it was impossible to know when we needed to make the heroic effort to actually get there and check it, especially since people actually mean it and send us a check/MO only about 5% of the time they check out with check/MO as an option. And also our post office sucks and their "text me when I get mail" service has never worked there. Our mail carrier: great! Our post office: terrible!)

We've been looking into the other payment methods our payment processor offers other than just Visa/MC/Amex, and at some point we probably will be able to at least offer a trial period for them, but yeah; it's important enough to us to offer a way to pay that can protect anonymity if people need it to. (We don't exactly encourage people sending us cash, because cash can get lost in the mail really easily if someone along the line can identify that there's cash in the envelope and because there's no recourse if the envelope does get lost, but people have taken that option before because it's the only way they can pay us or if they need to stay anonymous, and we're willing to take the slight hit in "how much it costs us to accept this payment" as long as we're not actively losing money on the transaction!)

Off-topic, but, as a European, it's really so odd to see checks as an apparently viable option for standard payments, in 2022. I mean, I think we still have a checkbook somewhere in the house, but I've not written one in... maybe a decade? 15 years?

I worked for a little bit at a check-printing company and while checks seem to mostly still be a hit over in the US with businesses, it was surprising to know just how many local banks still have personal check book sets printed for each new account member.

Heck, we had a regular client who would mail/fax over order forms because they were in an Amish area and did not have a computer. Frankly I'm surprised they even had a fax machine.

I don’t personally write checks, but my bank has a bill payment service. If it’s a large company, they do an ACH payment, but they’ll also send checks to individuals or small institutions that can’t receive ACH. (US person)

As an American, every time I have to haul out the checkbook I feel like I have deeply failed, but there are times when it's the only option. Like, DW's online bill pay/money transfer has really low limits because we're using a tiny credit union whose risk tolerance is dialed up to "paranoid", so I still have to write about 5-6 checks a year. It's very annoying!

Recently, a contractor asked to be paid with a check and my spouse was afraid he wouldn’t be able to pay the guy. Fortunately, I had an ancient box of checks hiding in the bottom of the “miscellaneous crap” drawer. So it still comes up now and again! I can’t remember the last time I wrote a check before that.

Edited 2022-11-12 06:28 (UTC)

Adding on to this, somewhat belatedly - I've never written a check in my life (I didn't even have a bank account or debit card of my own until I was ~35 because I'm disabled and my benefits [both financial and medical] are sent to and distributed by my mother, who serves as my representative [which has been a Thing in itself because I'm in a weird grey area where a lot of people and agencies alike don't understand, "Legally an adult/not under a guardianship, but not in charge of own money," and either question whether I'm allowed to make use of their services without her permission, OR refuse to interact with her despite me requesting they do so AS a disability accomodation - but I'm getting off-topic), and it's a joint account with her that only came about because I was moving out of state to be with my boyfriend and needed a means of accessing the funds for rent, etc, without having to have her serve as the middlewoman from half a continent away. Before that, if I needed money for ANYTHING, online or off, I had to ask her, which meant she would decide whether or not she thought I needed it, and I had no privacy whatsoever regarding my personal business (both of those things are still somewhat the case, honestly). But the attempt failed spectacularly enough that I had to move back in with her, only for her to reach a point where she's having difficulty caring for herself, let alone both of us. So now we're in the process of trying to get her to family back home and me moved in with a better friend, but haven't worked out how the leafy green spendy money will be managed at that point - I can continue to have my mother serve as my payee and pass my share of the roommate bills on from that account, or we could look into having that friend assigned as my payee instead. The easiest option, at least at first, would certainly be to leave things as they are, but under those circumstances, the method I use to pay that share becomes an issue - we'll be renting from her parents, not a "career" landlord (there has to be an actual term for that, but damned if I know what it is @.@) who's set up to automatically withdraw payments from the bank or whatever. Supposedly services like Paypal and Google Pay aren't supposed to count things like "Hey, here's my half of the rent/bills/repaying you for going out to eat last night" as income, but I'm betting we all know how many times they screw just about everything up, and if they screw up, it will affect her negatively come tax time. In the US, disabled persons receiving finacial assistance (or their payees) are also required to keep records of how that money is spent, so it's occurred to me that the "best" solution may well be to get a checkbook and write checks that specifically include "This is for rent/utilities/whatever" in the memo section, so that there'll be a paper trail both of the cancelled checks and the receipts, and not just "Transfer of $$$ via Paypal" on our bank statements.

If she was to take over as my payee, that part would be a non-issue because it would appear on her bank statement as "$$$ Benefits paid to [Her] for [Me] (and therefore not personal income)" and she'd distribute them directly herself the way my mother does now, but she'd have to keep even more detailed records because the rules for "Disabled adults whose payees are parents/etc" and "Disabled adults with unrelated payees" are different. So it seems like either way, even as archaic and inconvenient as paper checks are, they might still be "superior" to electronic transfers.

(And then my bank will charge me for them. -.- But at least they don't have minimums or monthly fees, because when I was looking at alternatives for personal reasons, I wouldn't have been able to open accounts at any of the local banks because of how high the initial deposits and minimum balances were, and if that's all I wrote them for, one box would probably last forever.)

tl;dr version (sorry about that >.<): A lot of the time 'murrica sucks for exchanging money, especially if you have any kind of "special" needs. -.-

Is it too late to ask you to point out that earlier this year, Dreamwidth got old enough to have a Dreamwidth account of its own?

That's kind of terrifying, tbh. I fixed a bug in something I refactored ... that I broke a decade ago ... and I just can't fathom it.

And it was at this point that I realised in the chaos of this year, I had not actually spotted the reminder that I hadn't renewed my account. Fix fix fix.

Odd. I never got a notification for this post in my inbox.

Yeah, the failure mode of the bug is either multiple emails or no emails :/

(reply from suspended user)

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