Watercooler - 2024

[Changaco]

This is Liberapay's "what's up?" thread. Previous: #541.

[Changaco]

Liberapay had a bit more than 10 minutes of cumulated downtime earlier today as the web server became unresponsive. The problem seemed to be caused by my attempt to run a Python shell in order to manually delete a duplicate account at the request of its owner. AWS' botocore module may have been the culprit, as its initialization appeared to get stuck at DEBUG:botocore.client:Registering retry handlers for service: ses. Edit: After reexamining the evidence, it looks like the parsing of the translation files by the babel module was the trigger.

The webapp came back up after I terminated the EC2 instance, which automatically triggered the creation of another instance to replace it. I previously tried to reboot the instance, but got an error message along the lines of “this instance is not in a state where it can be rebooted”.

As a precaution I will update the botocore module to its latest version in the next pull request. The long term plan is still to migrate away from AWS, but unless that becomes urgent I will wait until the code is ready to migrate to a new database technology at the same time.

[Changaco]

The webapp was down again earlier today. I wasn't doing anything on the server this time. I didn't do anything to fix the outage either.

[Changaco]

Open Collective Inc - Investor Update 2023

The financial contributions Collectives receive has moved from individual contributions via crowd-funding toward institutional support directly via the fiscal hosts’ bank accounts. I’ll explain briefly: from 2015 to 2020, Open Collective was primarily a crowdfunding platform, where OC INC received a percentage fee taken from each donation. A few years ago, we introduced a feature called Added Funds to help hosts use Open Collective to track direct bank transactions and in this way maintain a centralized budget for their collectives. We saw the value in this approach and intentionally started driving larger donations to the hosts (i.e., Funds for Open Source). We did not have a separate business model to capture the value created with this and other related features so we simply copied the % on the transaction we had for crowdfunding.

Open Collective is no longer primarily a crowdfunding platform.

[Changaco]

Email from Stripe:

Hello,

We’re writing about upcoming Stripe pricing changes for your connected accounts starting April 1, 2024. Most of your connected accounts will only be affected by one of these changes, but we wanted to let you know before we start notifying them on February 28, 2024.

• Domestic card processing fees for Australian businesses on standard pricing will decrease from 1.75% + A$0.30 to 1.70% + A$0.30 starting April 1, 2024. Learn more.

• Fees for Instant Payouts in the US will increase from 1% to 1.5% per payout effective June 1, 2024 for your Standard connected accounts. Your connected accounts can continue to pay out funds using our normal schedule (2 business days) for free. Learn more.

• SEPA Direct Debit disputes and failed payments will be priced separately for businesses on standard pricing starting June 1, 2024. The dispute fee will increase to €15.00, and the failed payment fee will decrease to €3.50, from €7.50. Most of your connected accounts will see cost savings as a result of this change. Learn more.

• An international fee of 1.5% will be charged to UK businesses on standard pricing when their customers pay with European bank-based payment methods (SEPA Direct Debit, Bancontact, EPS, Giropay, iDEAL, Multibanco, Przelewy24, and Sofort) beginning June 1, 2024. Learn more.

• The fee cap for Bacs Direct Debit transactions will increase from £2.00 to £4.00 per transaction and Bacs Direct Debit disputes will now cost £5.00 starting June 1, 2024 to reflect Stripe’s underlying costs. Learn more.

These changes will also apply to any direct processing with Stripe. We’re here to help you navigate these changes with your users. You can contact us and find more details about the changes, including how to manage or close your account, through our support center.

— The Stripe team

Stripe emails you about important updates for Liberapay, like compliance requirements and pricing updates. Learn more.

Stripe Technology Europe, Limited is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

[Changaco]

Stripe Organizations: A new way to power the world’s most complex businesses

The upcoming feature mentioned at the end should simplify the technical implementation of liberapay/liberapay.org#45.

[Changaco]

Passkeys, a faster more secure way to log in to the Stripe Dashboard

[Changaco]

Google Translate adds 110 languages in its biggest expansion yet

[Changaco]

New open source funding platform: https://polar.sh/ (https://github.com/polarsource)

New initiative to push companies to fund open source: https://osspledge.com/ (https://x.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1831386292460122381), similar to https://copiepublique.fr/en/

[Changaco]

I've transferred the liberapay.net domain from Gandi to Cloudflare because renewing was four times cheaper at the latter.