I have a serious amount of work to do on my thesis, and thus all progress on everything else has slowed to a crawl. Expect this state of affairs to continue until the end of June unless notified otherwise. Here's a quick item to keep you satisfied in the meantime.

In early April, I wrote (anonymously) a small rant in a Mandrake Linux forum on the subject of voluntary payments. [The page in question may require you to create an account in order to view comments.] This was in relation to their articles entitled The Future of Mandrake Linux and Mandrake Linux Users Club Answers. In short, they are trying to raise revenue by getting people to buy paid memberships in their Users' Club.

I've pontificated on the subject of making money through voluntary payments before: I told the author of ShareSniffer how he ought to run his business, and suggested to Robert Cringely that voluntary payments are the way to go as regards earning money from content on the web. I've also made some observations about micropayments which tie in with the comments to Cringely. What follows is a copy of my Mandrake Club Rant, pontificating about how the owners of Mandrake Linux ought to run their business. Consider it an addition to this ecclectic collection.

First up, I think that a fundamental philosophy of a voluntary payment system like this should be "give the payer options". You're not strictly offering any benefits that I want here, but I'm happy to become a member anyhow because I want to support the Mandrake distribution. That being so, you should make it possible for the payer to pay in as many ways as possible.

I don't just mean the distinction between Credit Card and other payment forms here. I have already tried to purchase a silver membership using the online payment form and abandoned the effort because it was too hard to get past the "shipping details" screen. Shipping details? What shipping details? What are you going to ship? Just give me a membership number for goodness sakes. My shipping address is a PO Box in Australia, and your form doesn't accept that. I would have to fill it out with totally bogus bits of information just so that I can send you money! This is ludicrous.

Another axis of change here is that you should be more flexible in offering "group" memberships. I actually want to purchase memberships for two people, but we'd rather purchase a collective silver membership than two ordinary ones. If we start a de facto users' group, we'd like to be able to buy a membership for the group rather than individual memberships, because of the reduced hassle in performing one transaction versus many. You can complain that we shouldn't do this because we are cheating for one reason or another, but that's the point: I don't want to milk any privileges from this system other than to say that I am a club member.

My suggestions are therefore twofold. First, and most important, improve your membership ordering system so that I can type in a credit card number and get billed. If the information isn't absolutely essential to the credit card transaction, make it optional. Get that horrible enormous form full of useless mandatory fields out of my face and just take my money.

Second, membership should convey no immediate privileges other than the ability to identify yourself as a member. You should be able to buy a basic no-privileges membership at *many* price levels: "student/pensioner", "standard individual", "silver member", "gold member", "standard corporate", and so on. The *only* thing that's better about one relative to the other is the perception of prestige: there are *no* tangible benefits. If you want to sell specific benefits as well, sell them *separately*. I want to have a silver-class membership because I want to represent a very small user group that has a joint membership, and so I want to pay more than just a one-person fee. I do not want the silver membership to convey special privileges such as licenses for proprietary software because I don't *want* that kind of thing. If you want to sell StarOffice OEM licenses, sell them to club members as a separate item. If you want to have a premium download service, sell it to club members as a separate item. And so on.

You can offer discounts to higher-level members, but always sell these extras on a "per unit" basis without making any assumptions as to how many people are sharing the membership. Sell things like software licenses on a "per license" basis, for example. Say I'm a silver member, and I don't actually want a StarOffice license, but I look after the computers at a small non-profit organisation, and the powers-that-be there have decided they want StarOffice not OpenOffice. I protest, but eventually let them have their way. As a silver member, I want to be able to purchase N StarOffice licenses for this organisation. If you can't do this, you MUST realise that you are cutting your own throats: my obvious alternative is to tell them that it can't be done, and why not just stick with OpenOffice since it's free and there are none of these silly arbitrary licensing rules?

Make it easy for me to give you money, or I won't.