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Quarterly Fundraiser

Baden February 20, 2017 at 15:50 16300 views 28 comments
Hi all,

As you know, since we started TPF a little over a year ago, we've made impressive progress up the search engine rankings to become the top philosophy forum on the net (disregarding the defunct old PF). What's helped Google and others to love us so much is our focus on quality content in a non-commercial - i.e. ad-free - environment. We want to keep it that way, but we have bills to pay, so, to make a long story short, give us some money, please, so that we may live long and prosper.

You can subscribe or just send a Paypal donation to [email protected]. We need $150 / quarter to keep the place afloat. We'll keep you posted and guilt-ridden with updates on how we're doing.

Cheers!

Comments (28)

Hanover February 20, 2017 at 19:11 #56325
Quoting Baden
You can subscribe or just send a Paypal donation to [email protected]


How do you make a paypal donation when you click on [email protected]? That link just lets you leave an email.
jute February 20, 2017 at 21:51 #56379
Just log into paypal, navigate to send money, then enter that email as a recipient.

I just signed up for a quarterly donation. I'm a lurker carried over from the old forum (posted a little there as "bemoosed" but doubt I'll post here besides this one). I enjoy reading the discussions here, thanks to the admins and to all of you that post to make it work.
Mongrel February 20, 2017 at 22:56 #56411
Reply to jute What would you like to see more of on this forum, Jute?
Baden February 21, 2017 at 01:40 #56459
Thanks @jute and @Hanover 8-)
Hanover February 21, 2017 at 14:01 #56562
Reply to Baden Buy yourself a little something special with the money.
Baden February 21, 2017 at 14:03 #56563
Reply to Hanover

Can we discuss our corrupt arrangements by PM in future? Cheers :-*
jute February 21, 2017 at 17:42 #56603
Reply to Mongrel Thanks for asking, Mongrel. Just don't ban TGW and I'll be happy. :)

Besides that, I first discovered the old forum by chance when Chalmers was a guest there, and I joined in order to ask him a few questions. At the time I thought that was a great feature of the forum. It fell by the wayside; I don't know why, but in retrospect it didn't seem that successful anyway. Maybe because no one posting had a deep familiarity with the guests' work, maybe the format wasn't conducive to a larger discussion. I'd like to see something like that, but only if it could be done well, and I for sure don't know how to do that.

Personally, my primary (completely lay) interest is in relatively current analytical philosophy of mind, then metaphysics more generally. Some of the threads I enjoy the most are those started to examine a paper or some aspect of a paper of someone well known in the field. Examples would be the thread on Sellars that csalisbury started here, or the wonderful thread Aaron R started and maintained on Sellars in the old forum.

Until joining TPF yesterday, I also would have said that the forum's format is a little hard to make sense of, particularly in that there were no times associated with posts; but I see now that the times are visible upon logging in.
Mongrel February 21, 2017 at 20:06 #56625
Reply to jute Cool! If you had an opportunity to ask a living philosopher something... what do you think it would be and to whom?
Agustino February 22, 2017 at 12:50 #56775
I sent the money from a Swiss bank account. When do I get my moderator status now?! >:)
jute February 22, 2017 at 20:39 #56834
Reply to Mongrel Nothing earthshaking. My inclination, given advance notice, would be to try to familiarize myself with the guest philosopher's work and ask about something I found interesting. For example, I asked Chalmers about a couple of variations of his neural-silicon-replacement thought experiments. I'd still ask him about one; he proposes replacing a person's neurons with functionally equivalent chips one-by-one, and if by the end of the process the person still reports no change, this would make a strong case for organizational invariance. I'm not convinced that this would establish what he thinks it would.

Dennett would be a thrill for me too. If I had the opportunity to ask him something right now off the top of my head, I'd ask him why he equivocates on the word "seems" in his "Quining Qualia" paper, or so it seems to me at least. :) Given time, though, I'd try to familiarize myself with more recent work of his.

But I'd love the opportunity to ask questions of many others too, if I had time to prepare -- Strawson, Searle, Nagel, Bostrom, McGinn, Max Tegmark (not really a philosopher per se) come to mind, others escape me at the moment.
Mongrel February 22, 2017 at 21:52 #56854
Reply to jute Wow. All great ideas. I asked because I was listening to an NPR article about Facebook's efforts to increase interest. I thought.. "How would the philosophy forum do that?" Really all the stuff you mentioned would be interesting to me. I'd definitely read Dennett's thoughts on his tendency to equivocate. I agree with you though... on the old forum we just ended up abusing people who were good enough to take the time.

Would you be interested in talking a little more about it? Maybe formulate a plan?
jute February 22, 2017 at 23:56 #56884
Reply to Mongrel Sure, I'd be happy to! Though I'm not equipped to head it up. What are you thinking of? Would you like to start a thread on it?
Mongrel February 23, 2017 at 02:40 #56922
Reply to jute Yes, I'll start a thread.
Baden February 23, 2017 at 07:08 #56943
Quoting Agustino
I sent the money from a Swiss bank account. When do I get my moderator status now?! >:)


If this is just half a joke and you really sent a donation (from wherever), thanks (I don't know as I don't have direct access to the TPF kitty, i.e. the paypal account set up to pay the bills).
Agustino February 23, 2017 at 08:53 #56951
Reply to Baden I did send the dough, but it is in pounds. So do your indirect checking please, and then I expect my mod status to be delivered ASAP >:O :P
Michael February 23, 2017 at 09:00 #56952
Quoting Agustino
I did send the dough, but it is in pounds. So do your indirect checking please, and then I expect my mod status to be delivered ASAP


It was sent but we were told it was lost in transit. Unfortunately we don't have a spare.

Such is life.
Agustino February 23, 2017 at 09:01 #56953
Reply to Michael Yes, no wonder, in your Great country of Britain, my mail was always delivered to other people... >:O
Michael February 23, 2017 at 09:03 #56954
Quoting Agustino
Yes, no wonder, in your Great country of Britain, my mail was always delivered to other people...


That's what we get for letting those damn immigrants work for Royal Mail. Someone should kick the lot of them out and let Great Britain be great and British again.
Agustino February 23, 2017 at 09:06 #56956
Quoting Michael
Someone should kick the lot of them out and let Great Britain be great and British again.

Who, Farage?! >:O
ernestm March 07, 2017 at 23:26 #59678
Thank you for making a nice forum, and I will save some money for you.
jkop March 21, 2017 at 14:03 #61677
I assume that the site is managed in the USA, so I sent some US $ (via PayPal).

Another thing which can help keep the site going is a secure connection for the login page, as explained here:
https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Protect-your-privacy/Insecure-password-warning-in-Firefox/ta-p/27861
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Insecure_passwords
Baden March 21, 2017 at 14:14 #61688
Reply to jkop

Many thanks for the donation and the suggestion, jkop.
Michael March 21, 2017 at 14:37 #61713
Quoting jkop
I assume that the site is managed in the USA


England, actually (if you're referring to the hosting company).
jkop March 21, 2017 at 15:12 #61732
Quoting Michael
England, actually (if you're referring to the hosting company).


No, in PayPal one is asked to choose the currency, and at the forum's subscription page it says $, hence I assumed that this is managed in the USA, or at least that donations should be made in $.



Baden March 21, 2017 at 15:33 #61745
Reply to jkop

Don't worry about the currency. It's all good.
ArguingWAristotleTiff March 21, 2017 at 18:58 #61814
Wait can you nominate someone to be moderator and pay for that to happen?
~wicked grins
Baden March 22, 2017 at 04:18 #61910
Reply to ArguingWAristotleTiff

Yes, but then it won't happen and we'll keep the money anyway. ;) Anyone can of course nominate someone to be moderator at any time by sending a PM to one of the staff with reasons for their choice. We don't have a vacancy at the moment, but we'll take that into consideration the next time we do.
Jamal March 22, 2017 at 09:28 #61924
Reply to jkop Thanks for the heads-up. Chrome only just recently started showing the warnings. It's all secure now.

And thanks for the donation. :)