Anthere wrote:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_partners_and_hosts
This page is very badly outdated. Could it be possible
that it be cleaned up and straightened before the
beginning of the fundrive (roughly a good week) ?
Thanks
Ant
If there's going to be another fundraiser soon, does anyone know if any
progress has been made towards accepting credit card donations?
I believe that this could significantly improve the amount of money
donated, by removing a barrier to donation for people would like to
donate but do not have PayPal-style accounts, and do not want the hassle
of money orders, inter-bank-transfers and so on.
This has been promised for the last two fundraisers, and has never
happened; it might be even worth delaying the forthcoming fundraiser for
a week or so if this made accepting credit cards possible.
Googling for "credit card processing" unearths large numbers of
companies offering to do nearly all the work for you on this, for a
fixed fee per transaction (a few tens of cents) and a small percentage
of the value of the transaction.
I seem to recall that the setup is generally on the lines of:
* set up a CC processing account with the vendor, which generally
requires a small amount of checking of your credentials
* registering an SSL certificate for your domain [
wikimedia.org,
presumably] (takes a few hours, and a fax or two if you're in the phone
book), and serving your payment page via HTTPS
* creating/installing a CGI / web form script for that page with a bit
of prevalidation logic (all needed fields filled in, right number of CC#
digits, Luhn checksum and other sanity checks) that then proxies the
finished CC payment requests to the processor's actual online CC
acceptance server, also via HTTPS, for a final go/no go decision.
Once it's set up once, you can then accept CC payments from anywhere in
the world, and you can of course change CC processors at a later date
with much less hassle.
Presumably Bomis and/or Jimbo know everything there is to know about
this; perhaps they might be willing to lend some technical / financial
know-how?
-- Neil