Donations

Donations allow a forum user to make a payment of any amount they choose. Donations are great for charities or non-profit organizations, but can still be valuable in other cases as well.

If you are considering charging your members for forum usage, then one factor to consider is the value of the content on your forum. If you are confident that the members will pay, charge a fixed price. If the value is questionable or you are not confident that the members will pay, you might consider asking for a donation.

You should also consider if your community feels like charging a fee for the content or the membership is consistent with the premise of the community. On the other hand, would they find it objectionable? If the latter is the case, you might consider asking for a donation rather than a fixed price.

Please follow the directions mentioned below to enable Donations on your forum:

1. Log in to your Website Toolbox account.
2. Click the Settings link.
3. Click the Paid Access link.
4. Provide your PayPal Email Address.
   

   Note: Make sure that it is a Verified PayPal Business Account. This is the PayPal account email address where funds should be sent when a user makes a payment. If you do not have a Verified PayPal account, you will need to create a new PayPal account and connect it to a bank account. Because PayPal verifies that you have connected an active bank account, it may take up to 48 hours to become verified.

5. Enable the Donation option.
6. Set the Permission option according to your requirement or skip this step if you don't wish to grant special access to paid users.
7. Save the changes.

Once you enable Paid Access Donations, a Donate link is automatically added to the navigation menu of your forum. You can also post an announcement with the donation link. The link address is https://FORUM_ADDRESS/?action=paid_access (Replace text “FORUM_ADDRESS” with the URL of your forum.)

If you have set any Permission restrictions in the Settings -> Paid Access section, when a user tries to view a category that requires paid access, they will be shown a page with the Paid Access Message you specified in your settings along with a PayPal payment button. Once the user makes the payment, they will automatically have the Paid user group added to their Additional User Groups and will be given access to all paid access areas. If a user cancels their subscription through PayPal or one of their subsription payments fails, they will automatically be removed from the Paid user group and access to paid access areas will be restricted until the payment is successfully processed.

To give additional permissions to paid users only, restrict permissions for the General user group and give permissions to the Paid user group.

Related Articles:

• Paid Access Overview
• Paid Access Best Practices
• Requiring users to pay to access the forum
• Requiring users to pay to access a category

If you still need help, please contact us.