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...