up receiving limit for individuals

[chadwhitacre]

@jdorfman from @MaxCDN wants to start giving > $100/wk to individuals. We upped the receiving limit for groups in #1378. What would it look like to up the limit for individuals?

It sounds like @jdorfman's use case is starting to get into more of a payroll situation, where he's giving to someone who's doing a fair bit of work on @MaxCDN's open-source projects. In the past we've said that employment-type relationships are out of scope for Gittip, but now we actually have a payroll-like feature: Teams (cf. #2569). One possibility could be to use the existing Teams/Payroll feature with the MaxCDN Gittip account.

If we did want to up the receiving limit for individuals, I think we should do something like:

• Payments > $100/wk are non-anonymous. The receiver sees who the giver is.
• The receiver has to explicitly opt in.

Want to back this issue? Post a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[seanlinsley]

Payments > $100/wk are non-anonymous. The receiver sees who the giver is.

Doesn't that work against the idea of not giving someone undue influence over someone else on Gittip? What benefit is there to removing anonymity?

[chadwhitacre]

@seanlinsley Yeah, my thinking is that Gittip is evolving. I think we want to increase our emphasis on the Teams/Payroll feature. I should probably do a Medium post about this.

[jdorfman]

@seanlinsley I see what you are saying, but this is a requirement I need to satisfy my boss. I love Gittip and want to continue to use the platform to distribute funds to those who deserve to get paid what they are worth. $400 a month, is too low for some of the folks I work with.

@whit537 I am happy to jump on a live hangout and/or contribute to the Medium post.

[chadwhitacre]

@jdorfman I know you've advocated for non-anonymous giving in the past (#236), so I guess that's not going to be an issue for you here.

Would you rather see this or #2571? What do your receivers want? Do they want you to set the amount they're each receiving, or do they want to each set it themselves from an overall budget that you'd set?

[chadwhitacre]

I'm upping this to ★★★. If you'd rather see #2571 instead, let us know!

[seanlinsley]

Myself in IRC:

My only concern over upping the limit is fraud, and having to refund more money than Gittip itself has

@jdorfman with that in mind (assuming we make the change globally), do you have an idea how much you'd want to give to any one person?

[jdorfman]

@whit537 @seanlinsley Ideally I just want to be able to give anyone upto $1,000 a week. In terms of fraud, I think one way to mitigate this is to have an opt-in process to start.

[seanlinsley]

Currently we use HTML5 numeric input's max attribute to prevent people from entering more than $100 for individuals, and $1000 for teams. First, I propose we remove the max so the server can respond back with an appropriate error message. Currently you would see:

Second, we should change the error message to hint at the ability to increase the limit.

Emulated locally with:

Gittip.notification('Giving is limited to $100 per week. Want to give more? Contact us!', 'error');

[chadwhitacre]

@seanlinsley Since we already allow gifts up to $1,000 w/o whitelisting, do we really need to enforce whitelisting here? A fraudster could already potentially move up to $1,000 at a time through our system if they cared to try.

I think we shouldn't worry about whitelisting on the giver side. I think we should focus on the opt-in experience on the receiver side. Maybe we need a "Receiving" page that's parallel to the "Giving" page we have now? We could move the charts there to represent a receiver's anonymous tips, and we could also show potential and actual non-anonymous payments there as well. Eh?

[chadwhitacre]

@jdorfman I'm heading out on vacation for a week so I won't be able to drive this ticket. Per your private email I've manually set up a $500 payment from @MaxCDN to @jmervine:

Hopefully that's good enough for this week? :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Data point re: fraud. We received this sketchy email on support a while ago:

I want to cash from credit cards, about $20000 per month.
I will pay you 10% of cash amount.

all you have to do is raise donation amount to $500.

If there is any doubt, please contact me.

I look forward to cooperating with you

[chadwhitacre]

Dropping to ★★☆ since we can handle manually as a workaround.

[mattbk]

Closing, since with teams the limit is $1000 per week (yes, I just checked).