Is the Syncthing project infrastructure being funded sufficiently by donations lately? Is there a pressing need for more money to cover hosting and related costs, or are the thousands of people using Syncthing supporting the project steadily?
(By the way, I tried to donate using the form at the bottom of https://syncthing.net and it failed twice).
It’s fairly adequate, the donations that come in cover the current running costs. I don’t know what error you ran into, but Stripe is fairly strict and we will also “soft” blacklist an email address after two failed donation attempts. This is because we’re getting a significant amount of fraudulent payment attempts.
(Why would someone fraudulently donate to an open source project? I asked myself this when the charge backs and fraud notifications started dropping in… Apparently the thing is that donation forms like ours are very convenient for testing bulk lists of stolen credit cards to see which are still live, by doing small $5-$10 transactions without having to screw around with creating an account and buying some product… These are indistinguishable from real donations from our point of view as we don’t ship any product, so the other anti-fraud defenses are unfortunately at max.)
I’m glad to hear that funding is adequate. Syncthing is an important part of my family’s “cloud” and I want it to continue to grow and succeed.
The fraudulent donations problem is a shame. I wish the people that spend so much energy doing harm with such schemes would just get legitimate jobs or start legitimate businesses. They would make at least as much money given equal effort.
I wouldn’t be so sure of this…