Membership

I would like to be positive but that pains me to see less and less players taking membership even among the few most active players.As an ecologist I am always worried when a common good is used by people without them thinking about sustainability and exchanges in the big wheel of life.

Think about how many years LG have been in existence and how much work it has been for the few involved. Not always exciting work as offering new games, but servers backs up, database troubleshooting, hackers handling... for us to enjoy this free and add-free site.

Think also about the motivation for creating new games if there was a crowd of new members, all the ideas we could express and hope to see achieved!

In the past we were mostly young students without income, preferring to be here than working on tomorrows exams, but I guess that most of us have now decent jobs. In the past it was a bit of a burden to pay for membership through Moneybookers, now it is quite easy to use your Paypal account or send a few fractions of your bitcoin...

I will not gain anything if you do, except the pleasure to be part of a better LG community and still play here in a few years.

Please use your social networks to send this message to all your friends...

sadly there is no way to pay without paypal or bitcoins, two ways that i do not believe in and therefore can not go. saying that since years. (and no, using your iban account as a proxy does not change anything)

@Mirko Rahn, I'm curious -- what's your preferred method of payment?

I agree, and I will buy membership soon. I hope others do the same.

Thanks for reminding me.  I hadn't noticed that my membership had lapsed.

One point of view:

Players who are playing here without being member do contribute to the site (they do not use up a common good, they increase the value of being a player on the site for both members and non-members).

Do you thin the site would be better if everyone who played for free would stop playing here?

transfer to an iban account

I agree with Mirko. If iban was possible i would have been a member for at least 2 years.

Wuall gee whiz. Seems Richard can't win for losing. First it was Moneybookers, which hit me with a huge additional charge, and now (formerly) Elon Musk's PayPal is reviled. If it's not too much trouble, please what are the objections to it?

for paypal: just there is no point in having a (big) proxy in between. the natural solution is to transfer money from my account to some lg account. every bank has push-only accounts, there is no danger in publishing the account number.

for bitcoins: just it is the wrong direction to _add_ traceability to money. also, to overcome space and time and become an digital entity is nothing my body likes.

All right Mirko, you don't believe in PayPal because there's no point in it because it's not the natural solution. Do you have to pay any additional fee when you use it? Richard is the one who pays a fee when he gets a donation, no one else, am I right? And yet, he is willing to endure this injustice. You say it is safe to make your account number public. Doubtless you know much more than I about it. But I still would not be willing to do so. To me it sounds like saying it would be fine to post half of my password to my online bank account.

Maybe you could establish an encryption method between yourself and Richard, then email him your account and routing numbers, or your credit card or whatever.

@David, what Mirko said is that every company/individual (like Richard) that wants to accept payments can make a push-only account, where others, everyone can send money but no-one can get money from. All the incoming money are forwarded to another, normal account of the company/individual.

mirko, paypal is secure and you do not need to have a paypal account to buy the membership.  click on the paypal button, then you can opt to pay by any of the following methods;

1) paypal balance

2) credit or debit card

3) electronic check

If you still don't like this, I am sure Richard will accept cash or check if you ask him

There seems to be a little confusion here because David is American and (I presume) Mirko is not.  The banking systems are very different.  Mirko mentioned IBAN accounts; I had never heard of them, and the U.S. does not seem to use them.  I've never encountered push-only accounts over here.  If you're trying to receive payments from America and from Europe, PayPal is probably the easiest way to do it.

as i side effect of what Ray describes you end up with an account, been there and that is another reason to not go there again.

there are services to collect money that allow people to use there paypal account but also offer ways that does not require to open an account or to store personal information, e.g. betterplace.org.

ridiculous: we are in 2015 and there are hurdles between US and Europe wrt. to electronic money transfers!?

sad: we are in 2015 and there is no feel of sense for the dangers that are involved when feeding the big KI's, like google, facebook or paypal.

sending cash or check would be fine, just requires Richard to publish some postal address.

And to physically collect the checks and consistently do something with them in a timely manner. And to deal with people who say they sent payment that he hasn't received. And bounced check fees.

Sounds like you're imagining some version of perfection that wouldn't be perfect in real life and using it as an excuse to not participate in real world systems whose faults are quite tolerable.

Not that I'm a member anymore, either. I no longer get nearly as much ose of the site as I used to and am not fond of how Richard allocates what development time he chooses to put in. If the site is ever really in trouble and needs money to pay bills, someone can message me. (I no longer read the forms much, either.)