[eesmith]

Why does it matter if this blogspot is authentic? The "Donation page" link is to http://pypy.org/py3donate.html which is hosted under pypy.org.

The blog could be written by Trafalmadorian trolls, and it wouldn't matter - so long as you trusted that "pypy.org" was part of the PyPy project and that its connection to PayPal was valid.

I don't think your last comment is relevant. What I think you are saying is that the blog should be hosted under pypy.org and not blogspot. It could be WordPress or any other system.

It couldn't easily be Pelican because the blog supports comments, which means integrating with some other commenting system - plus authentication and spam detection. Why not get rid of the hassle of manually adding files and rebuilding the server and just use blogspot?

Lastly, are you really saying that people aren't donating to PyPy because some supportive blog site somewhere else, run by who knows who, isn't hosted on pypy.org?

[sandGorgon]

yeah - because people dont go to the homepage. what gets tweeted out is this blogspot page (including here on HN). So people check out the nice blog post and see a donate link on the left of https://morepypy.blogspot.com/ and then go ...hmm, looks shady.

Not many read the blog post, then go to Google, search for pypy and then click the link and then donate.

Fundraising is not an easy process - there is an aspect of sales here. Blogspot may be easy.. but its not good branding. And that was my point - cos I want them to succeed.

[eesmith]

Please explain how it looks shady, because I don't understand it.

If I start a blog - completely independent of PyPy - which promotes PyPy and describes the development efforts, and I want to encourage people to support the PyPy project, then I might link to the PyPy donation page, yes?

Yet, because I'm not affiliated with the project, I can't put the blog under pypy.org.

Would my blog also be shady? If so, doesn't that mean that no one should promote donating to a project unless that promotion is done under the project's domain?

You write "Not many read the blog post, then go to Google, search for pypy and then click the link and then donate."

That would be true even if the blog post were hosted under pypy.org. That is, why would anyone donate after reading one blog post?

I would think that more people would donate after they download PyPy, try it out, and see that it's worthwhile enough to fund.

In that case, they've already found out how to get PyPy, so there's no need to "Google, search for pypy" because they've already done that.

Nor is PyPy unusual in this respect. It's hard to find projects which have both a blog and a donate page. Of the 50 so projects I looked at, the following are "shady" according to your definition:

- the PSF blog (hosted on blogspot) links to the python.org page for donations, eg, https://pyfound.blogspot.com/search?q=donate .

- The Thunderbird blog has a posting like https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2018/08/whats-new-in-th... linking to https://donate.mozilla.org/thunderbird/ while the main Thunderbird page is at https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/

while:

- Orange, with a blog at https://blog.biolab.si/ is a sibling subdomain to the main project site at https://orange.biolab.si/ , making it ... semi-shady? I mean, how are we to know that "biolab.si" is not some sort of large ISP where any of their customers can make a subdomain?

I did find a two places where the "donate" and "blog" pages were hosted on the same domain: http://rssbandit.org/ (which links to a SourceForce page which redirects to PayPal) and http://sagerss.com/ .

To summarize, I don't see why it's shady, your view seems to mean that no one should promote donating to a project except for the project itself, static site generation tools don't seem to be a good fit for blog support, and it doesn't seem like the effort to change to a single domain would have a worthwhile effect on improving the donation rate.

[sandGorgon]

your examples are weird - and ill try to explain if i wasnt able to. I'm not saying that the blog is bad and you are explaining why the blog is good.

I'm saying it is hosted on blogspot and there is another main site which is a pypy.org . People dont think the way you do. Try it out - ask 10 people if they would open this blogspot page and ever click on the donate link. Pypy's blog is not shady - blogspot as a free hosting service is shady.

your examples of mozilla, etc blogs are super orthogonal - they are hosted on an authoritative domain. Again, I'm repeating - it has nothing to do with pypy. Its about blogspot.

You are again attacking my suggestion of static site - the reason i suggested that was because it was a python based site generator with a CMS. you can try to do a wix site or whatever. As long as its an authoritative domain.

Its not about me - its how people thing. You should go and check.

[eesmith]

Now you, "ask 10 people if they would open [the pypy.org] page and ever click on the donate link".

I think the answer is "very unlikely", which is why I don't think your example is a useful diagnostic.

I also don't think "authoritative domain" is meaningful. What does it mean to be "authoritative" and how do people tell if a domain is authoritative?

I gave the examples of blog.biolab.si and orange.biolab.si - is "biolab.si" authoritative enough to know that both subdomains are part of the same project, if pointed to blog.biolab.si ?

Let's stay in the same top-level domain. Is github.com authoritative? What about gitlab.com? If so, what does that mean? That we can trust paths under that domain to be part of the project?

I note that https://github.com/donate and https://gitlab.com/donate both exist, but neither are ways to donate to the respective projects. So the answer is clearly "no".

Indeed, it looks like someone could set up https://gitlab.com/gitlab_blog as a place to describe GitLab development, and set up https://gitlab.com/donate as a way to donate, and yet have nothing to do with GitLab.

So if someone read a blog post under gitlab.com/gitlab_blog/, then they still can't trust the donate link but must instead, as you wrote earlier "go to Google, search for [gitlab] and then click the link and then donate" .. though neither takes donations on their home page.

How is the PyPy situation any worse by not hosting the blog on a non-authoritative URL?