Supporting Blender Artists on Patreon

Running a major platform like Blender Artists is not easy or cheap. We invest a LOT of time in keeping things running here, both at a technical level as well as in moderating the conversations and ensuring a more positive ‘vibe’ here (we think it’s starting to work!).

While we currently break even financially, having extra financial resources will greatly help us improve the platform with things like:

  • Upgrade our storage (we’re burning through 3GB a week now and don’t want to clamp down user uploads - you need to be able to share your art!).
  • Invest more in moderation and community activities.
  • Invest more time in platform maintenance and optimization.
  • Fund additional plugin or theme development to futher customise the forum.

You can help us by becoming a supporter on Patreon! We offer the following options:

  • Casual Supporter - $2.50 or more per month
  • Serious Supporter - $5 or more per month
  • Commercial Supporter - $25 or more per month

Becoming a supporter at any level will remove the AdSense banners from the site. Perhaps you were already using an ad blocker, but now you won’t have to feel bad about it anymore :wink:

The Commercial Supporter tier gives access to the Promotions category and allows for 1 commercial post/bump per month + 2 days of global pinning. Each additional $10 will get you one extra day of pinning. See also the update on our commercial policy.

We also offer other options for commercial promotion, please send @bartv a private message to learn more about these.

Finally, all Patreons will also receive a supporters badge.

Can we count on your support?

Visit our Patreon now

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I don’t want to wear a badge with the word casual on it. Casual supporters support your site with clicks, comments, debate, and answering support questions.

I now have other gripes too. I’ll keep those to myself here. Others have posted many of these complaints elsewhere.

Thanks. :slight_smile:

-Larry

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@bartv I think you missed a spot:

YOU’RE NOW FOLLOWING {FULLNAME}! WANT TO BECOME A PATRON?

Is what I get after following.

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Perhaps I didn’t use the best word for it, but I’m disappointed to see that you choose to interpret that as ‘intimidation’ and decide to therefore not support us. I was hoping the team built up a little more credit than that.

We’re doing an honest thing here and would love to have your support!

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At the least, one can just turn off any ad blocker for this site. The ad policy has been carefully done to prevent the intrusion of any that suck data, suck CPU cycles, or try to deliver malware.

I also don’t see how the tier names are any different from the Development Fund tiers, everyone knows that bronze isn’t worth as much as gold so someone could contort that into saying people on that tier aren’t as valuable. The higher tiers have to sound more valuable simply because they will cost you more.

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I’m not a massive forum user, but every time I need info about Blender for some reason I end up here, so I officialy started supporting the forum :slight_smile:

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I decided against donating at this time. Don’t take it personally. I’m honest too. It’s a business decision. Value for value.

-LP

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the new link policy? What’s that?

This one, I guess:

turned off add blocker :slight_smile:

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is there any way to hide the badge?

Not right now, I suppose I would have to create separate tiers on Patreon that would not add a badge, but I’m a bit worried this would make things harder to understand. Is this a big issue for you?

Not as much as for the dev fund badges. This one is less visible.

Francesco mentioned you will be able to control that from your Blender Cloud, but I’m not sure this is available yet.

If you’re talking about the dev fund badges, it’s already available and I already set mine as private. However it’s not on the Blender Cloud but on Blender ID.

So after becoming a patreon, how do you link my account to get no banners?
[edit] oh, I think I just found out! [/edit]

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Using the same email address will automatically link you. Thanks for your support! :+1:

17 posts were split to a new topic: Paid support website

@bartv Since ads don’t seem to be so welcome by some users, what do you think of doing a Wikipedia-like annual donation campaign to be able to drop them?

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