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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of Gittip, and I have definitely thought about the problem of how society can encourage things that benefit it (i.e. open source software).

I had a bad experience with Gittip though. I tried to tip you. It said sign in with github, so I did. Then I go back. I tried to tip you again, and it said there was an error. Then I clicked "back with a credit card". And it says I need to sign in with github to add a credit card. But it already says I'm signed in as my user name in the upper right corner. So something is wrong.

Also I think it would be better to allow one-time payments too. I just wanted to try your system but I wasn't committed to making a recurring payment. I was going to cancel it after I tried it. I would have been fine with a one-time payment.

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On the one-time payments issue, see:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/113

The short story is that Gittip is targeted at funders, and the current wisdom is that one-off payments would erode confidence in the stability of one's funding stream. Yes, you can do what you were planning to do, pay for a week and then cancel, but Gittip doesn't want to optimize for that, I don't think.

Is there a way for people to tip without being members of Github? I imagine that a lot of the beneficiaries of say, jQuery's goodness, aren't necessarily on Github at all.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: You're right, and I want to expand beyond GitHub. Here's the ticket:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/80

Why are you targeting for "funders" (I think you mean the people getting paid)?

In general, getting the money into systems is the hard part. If money is there, people will come - easy! Getting people to give money - whether to a company or for donations - that's hard!

Also, frankly, this is a nice proposition from the POV of the "funders". You seem to have built it for yourself. But, the value for the donors? Sounds like a tough sell.

So making donors happy is most important. Without them you're toast. With them you can AT LEAST support yourself, if nothing else :)

The value for donors is "the feeling of participation in someone else's story" (quote from Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley[0]). It's up to recipients to tell a compelling story with their life. That's what's going to get money into the system. Tell me a story!

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-po...

Ouch, thanks for reporting. :-(

Digging a bit ...

Started a ticket:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/143

Okay, I'm sorry for this. I don't have good logging set up yet (see https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/115), so I'm not easily able to recover the traceback. :^(

Obviously this is a big problem. Has anyone else seen this?

I've started tailing and storing logs locally to try to capture this.

I've got to turn my laptop off for a while. :-(

I've ticketed setting up a log tail somewhere else:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/144

I did catch one other (less significant) error by watching the logs.

I'm sorry for the bad experience. :-(

If it helps, when I click 0.25 cents, there is a modal popup that says "sorry something went wrong :(" I guess that is your unhandled traceback message?

If so there are a bunch of error logging services you can sign up for... or some you can download and run yourself.

After I click get that message, it appears that I'm signed out, and I have to sign back in.

I wish you luck with Gittip! It is a model I hope will become viable soon.

Can I ask your username?

Also, I'm back online and logging. Any chance you'd be willing to trigger the error again?

I wired up Loggly's Heroku app. It was really easy. I'm seeing a few "out of memory" errors connecting to the db. My current theory is that one of these at just the wrong moment got your account in an inconsistent state.

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