Anyone interested in a Pinboard account elving exchange?

[epershand]

ETA: Gift exchange is here at pinboard. Thanks to the people who put it together!


Executive summary:
I am thinking about hosting a pinboard account gift exchange and am trying to judge whether people would be interested in getting involved. They don't have an official feature but I emailed them and they said if I sent them a list of recipient emails, gifter emails, and whether the gifter would like to be anon, they'd make it work.

If you want to be involved (PARTICULARLY if you are interested in gifting accounts) please fill out the poll below.

Also here's a list of the features that Pinboard is missing that Delicious has had, to give you a general idea.

More rambly post.

I seriously hope that Delicious is able to get their act together over the next couple of days, particularly with respect to the mangling of tags with commas, slashes, etc. The rest of the problems people are having sound like the sort of thing that seem fixable technically, but that kind of data mangling? Eeep!

I'm not a delicious user, really--ironically I only became bookmarking-obsessed after getting a Pinboard account. So while I really hope that Delicious gets there act together and fixes things for their current users (and I'm sure they were), I also think it's probably wise to back up delicious accounts to other services.

Of course, I have a vested interest in getting lots of people moved over to Pinboard-- more results for my tag searches, more cool fannish extensions getting built (note to self: FINISH YOUR FREAKING AO3-pinboard sync feature), etc. Plus I just *love* the pinboard guys. They're enthusiastic, they're totally transparent about everything, even when all the servers at their webhost are getting seized by the FBI without a warrant. (>_<). And while they aren't fannish, they are genuinely excited about fandom using their system. (For instance: today they tweeted "Just a gentle reminder to fanfic people - / tag works just fine on Pinboard :-)". I *like* them.) (ETA: by "them" I mean "him", because Maciej is just one guy, as he reminded me on Twitter just now.)

Obviously, though, Pinboard accounts cost money--it's currently at $9.42 and will go up over time, since the price is based on the number of users at time of sign-up. A lot of people don't have this money or, if they do, have much more pressing things they could be spending it on. (ETA for clarity: this is a one-time fee that will get you a pinboard account for all time. The more people join Pinboard before you, the more you have to pay to join.)

So my thought was to do an exchange where people who have money they could spend on accounts do so for other people.

Diigo has a "buy an account for a friend" option, but it only works for premium accounts, at the $40/year level, so I'm hesitant to suggest that, although if anyone *really* wants the exchange to include that, I can make that happen?

Pinboard has no feature at all but says over email that they'd be happy to give out accounts and send emails with payment info to the people who offer to give the gift. This means that I'd have to collect email addresses for both senders and recipients, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do so while letting them keep their addresses private (to everyone except me and Pinboard). Most likely this will involve a google spreadsheets form or something.

So, a poll. This one is completely anonymous and I'll use it only for the purpose of deciding whether people would be interested in this exchange at all. I especially don't want to promise everyone on the internet gifts of pinboard accounts if I am the only one willing to buy them, because that's a good way to fall through on a promise if everyone on the internet decides to collect. In my ideal world, the ratio of gifters to recipients is on the scale of 1:1 or 1:2...

Poll #8169 Collecting interest in Pinboard elfing

This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 24

Would you be interested in participating in this exchange

View Answers

Yes, as a recipient
8 (33.3%)

Yes, as a donator
16 (66.7%)

Only if I can donate anonymously
2 (8.3%)

This exchange should include paid accounts for

View Answers

Pinboard
24 (100.0%)

Diigo
2 (8.3%)

Other (will mention in comments)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[jumpuphigh]

I like this idea but this line strikes terror in my soul:
Most likely this will involve a google spreadsheets form or something.

Using google means that this will not be true:
This means that I'd have to collect email addresses for both senders and recipients, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do so while letting them keep their addresses private (to everyone except me and Pinboard).

[epershand]

In my experience, Google's incredibly good about protecting user data of this kind, including from themselves, but I understand your concerns. My thought was that a spreadsheet would be faster and more secure than me implementing something similar from scratch.

I can see about finding another option for people who aren't comfortable putting their email address in a Google doc, but I'd also be sending the list as an attachment via Gmail, which has an equivalent level of privacy as GDocs does...

[jumpuphigh]

Thanks for letting me know. :)

[epershand]

In case you haven't seen it, this wound up getting up and running over at the pinboard lj community here

[jesse_the_k]

Donor is a healthy English word, volunteering to be used. ;)

Warrantless searches? O.o

[epershand]

The full story of that search, which took involved the data of a bunch of different web companies. There was a warrant for data from one person at the webhost and the FBI took *all* the servers from the hosting company.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks so much for keeping my up-to-date. Another GeekService™ brought to you by the sunny skies of California!

[epershand]

(And thank you for the word donor, which eluded me for the whole post-writing process even though I knew there was SOMETHING out there...)

[lurksnomore]

I sent them an email before being pointed to you. Thanks for getting the ball rolling.

[epershand]

In case you haven't seen it, this wound up getting set up on the pinboard LJ community here

[stbacchus]

I switched over to Diigo last night and I love it - but it appears to be fan-unfriendly. :( I keep my porny links private so I don't care, but this is obviously a dealbreaker for kink memes, etc. Pinboard is probably the better option, despite the price.

It's unfortunate, but something like Delicious is entirely necessary for dealing with LiveJournal/DW, which have very little structure or search capability. AO3 is apparently looking to be the premier fanfic library with lots of these kinds of features, but they're not close to that yet. In the meantime, I'd be willing to sponsor one or more of the comms I use a lot - having a well-curated library is just indispensable.

[epershand]

Awesome! Given all the diigo stuff, this is looking to be pinboard only for now.

My current plan is to make it semi-anon--people will sign up to donate or receive accounts and I'll match them up randomly. But I can add an option for people who want to gift to a specific user.

You can also just send an email to support@pinboard.in with the email address you want to donate an account to, but since I'm already consolidating them I might as well include others....

[stbacchus]

I like the idea that people/comms could sign up, and potential donors could have a smorgasbord of choices (like the gift trees you see in the mall around Christmas). In the case of comms, there may or may not be an associated email address, and it may or may not be the one used for signup.

This needs moar banner for pimping! :)

[epershand]

ALWAYS NEEDS MOAR BANNERS. In case you haven't seen it, this wound up getting up and running over here at the pinboard lj community.

[unjapanologist]

This is a great initiative, please keep us posted!

(Speaking as a paying customer of Diigo who just discovered that a bunch of her bookmarks have been turned private: everyone is free to use whatever service they like, but let's not mention Diigo as an option without putting up a few really big warning signs :( Seems like the censorship story is pretty much everywhere by now, but I'd really hate for someone to shell out for a premium Diigo account and then discover that you can't mention sex.)

[epershand]

Yeah, the draft post I had written yesterday had a link to your post on that very subject; as it turns out, I got distracted by life and in the meantime this got up and running on the pinboard LJ community here

dYXQMOcVIzUBZXlXoiU

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, nano is public, but maybe you can't foollw the link because it's through my login. If you go to nanowrimo.org and then click forums and then scroll all the way down to the forum for Marketing, Self-Promotion and Stuff for Sale, you should be able to find it.As to the FB not displaying, I'm not sure, I made it a public post. Gimme a min to check the settings and try again. It should be public now.

[silviakundera]

Something to think about: perhaps set up an exchange for people who can't afford/can't purchase with PayPal or credit card. Everyone can probably think of something in exchange for an account. Maybe they're not a fanfic writer or vidder, but they could also auction fanfic recs or detailed episode reviews or meta or picspam or something like that. Set up a DW community and people post offering something and someone posts offering to buy them an account in exchange?

[epershand]

As it turns out, exactly this is going on over on the LJ pinboard community here! Yay!