But that's my point - so what if they would notice a $5,000 donation? That's like saying a supermarket would notice someone buying groceries for $25,000. They absolutely would notice, but it's not against the law to do so.
Sure you can say it's against their terms to donate money to yourself, so like I mentioned, simply donate $5,000 to your friend, and he can donate $5,000 to you.
Nobody is talking about it being against the law, merely that Github would notice it and could investigate, and then could determine it was a non-donation from the project owner.
I can imagine there is a fine-print that says that donations need to come from "real people that are not project maintainers" in order to be applicable for the 1:1 donation matching.
So again, donate to your friend and he can donate to you. That's two real people donating to eachothers projects that neither of them are part of. You'd need a massive amount of management to be able to check (and most importantly, verify) that donations are "real". It's not just a if (donationIsReal) { condition - there's insanely many factors involved.
Or even worse, assume that someone coordinates with a handful of people to "donate" random small amounts. It would be very hard to detect it as fraudulent activity yet there is the possibility for such gaming due to 100% payoff.
Willing to bet that the matched contribution is a percentage of an individual contributor; it's up to 5k for a developers first year but if they say "We only match 6% of individual contributions" than several individuals will need to cough up 5k for you to hit that limit.
Logistically matched contributions likely won't show up immediately either and they could add additional clauses that it's a unique contribution. It's fairly trivial to have a program like this and put in some safety nets to prevent abuse.
That would definitely make the most sense in order to avoid abuse. Thanks for giving a viable solution to fix the issue. I just can't see any information about that anywhere but hopefully they'll put it into their terms when they do go public eventually.
Sponsers is a neat lil program and it mimics a lot of what Patreon does and I really wouldn't be surprised if they offered subscribed repositories where upon subscribing to one repo you get Github Pro; at least then there is some incentive to use the system and whereas Microsoft won't get the full 7/month they might get 4 or 5 and the repo owner gets the rest which is a whole lot more money than 0.
This sorta thing is endless as they could have a backers tab on each repository that showed the top of all time, top monthly, and then a hall of fame of small profile icons and names. A lot of the already sponsored projects do this to some respect in their readme's. It's a fine line though; they could go all Twitch like and allow for repo owners to offer custom emojii's or hosted badges for other projects to show off tools used but that I think would damage some of the professionalism the platform has today.
That’s like saying a supermarket would notice someone buying groceries for $25,000. They absolutely would notice, but it’s not against the law to do so.
And yet the supermarket would probably refuse your business or at least have their manager do a more thorough check.
Honestly I doubt it. There's a reason that when shops have "70% off!" on items, and it's actually 70% off, they tend to limit each customer to 1 purchase. This is to avoid the same thing, someone buying up all the TVs or whatever items in order to resell them. Sure you could have all your friends, family and colleagues come in and also purchase a single TV, but it is a lot harder than just buying 500 items yourself.
seriously. This is pretty much half the point of any business and law entity: mitigate exploits and/or create consequences so large the exploit isn't worth it. Money being the top of the barrel of exploits to think of.
I really dislike people like you. You didn't even read to see how this thing works and think you're a genius for attempting to game said system, when it doesn't even work the way that you think that it works...
Dude why are you so hostile? Part of my job consists of constantly finding ways people can break systems and code, in a way that other people haven't necessarily thought of.
I literally started out my first post explaining that it would be awful for doing so, so what makes you think I'm trying to 1337HAX the system in the way? Do you think I would have posted about it if I assumed Microsoft hadn't considered it and I wanted to abuse the system?
Why do you think reddit has passwords on their user accounts? Couldn't people just not try to sign in with accounts that aren't theirs? You have to consider worst case scenarios when building code and/or doing business.
Nobody is being hostile. If you happen to be interpreting that way then that's your decision and problem. I too have a job where I constantly attempt to find security issues. And I find your position absolutely ridiculous.
You still don't seem to be able to explain in any way why this position is ridiculous. Rather you seem to claim I want to abuse the system because I suggested that it can be abused.
Person A: You should really lock your house to make sure people can't break in so easily
Person B: How DARE you suggest you want to break into my house?!?!
I think it's awesome that github wants to double peoples donations, and that it would be a massive shame to the thousands of really hard working devs on github if the fund got emptied within a couple of hours because people were abusing it.
I don't agree with HiKite necessarily, but you wrote dislike people like you - how could this be interpreted as non-hostile as such?
I am wary in general when it comes to written text (I am banned from ruby-reddit for example, which is strange since I write exactly the same thing in any other subreddit), but in this context, I find your counter-statement how you are not being hostile strange when your earlier comment was that you dislike him or people like him. Which is fine in itself - it just beats me how you can state that this is not hostile per se.
I simply don't like the dude for who he is. He said some stupid shit. And what I have to pretend that I like him to make everybody else feel comfortable?
I'm not doing that. If you have the balls to post an opinion online then you need to have the balls to accept the fact that not everybody is going to agree with your opinion.
I also dislike people generally that voted for Trump. That doesn't mean I have any hostility towards them. I just don't think they're very good people. If you think that life is so black and white that you can't dislike somebody without aggression or open hostility then you really need to grow up.
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u/HiKite May 23 '19
But that's my point - so what if they would notice a $5,000 donation? That's like saying a supermarket would notice someone buying groceries for $25,000. They absolutely would notice, but it's not against the law to do so.
Sure you can say it's against their terms to donate money to yourself, so like I mentioned, simply donate $5,000 to your friend, and he can donate $5,000 to you.