Unfortunately, I haven't been able to persuade any of my favorite websites, ie Medium, to facilitate micropayments. Just how hard could it be to allow one-click-giving? I decided to find out.
After shelling out $60 bucks for hosting, I spent a few days modifying the code for phpbb forum software and voila! I created a very basic, no frills, micropayments forum...
$9.35 = the amount of money in my wallet
$0.57 = the amount of money allocated to the post
The way it works is pretty simple. You paypal me money and I update your wallet. If you value a post at a nickle, then you click the nickle coin button...
1. A nickle is transferred from your wallet to the poster's wallet
2. The value of the post is increased by a nickle
There's no page refresh. There's no transaction fees/costs of any kind. And whatever ends up in your wallet is 100% yours keep. When you want to cash out, you PM me the amount you'd like and I paypal it to you.
It's as easy to value a post on RudeBagel as it is to like a post on Facebook.
In order to create this very basic ajax valuing system, these are the pages that I modified...
overall_header.html (1 line of code)
navbar_header.html (~2 lines of code)
viewtopic.php (~ 5 lines of code)
overall_footer.html (~ 1/4 page of code)
viewtopic_body.html (~ 1/2 page of code)
... and here's a new page...
ajax_value.php (~ 1 page of code)
To give credit where credit is due... this "ajax like" code was quite helpful.
The code that I myself wrote is a trainwreck. I'm sure it's all types of wrong, and in the wrong places... so there's plenty of room for improvement.
I could have spent many more days, weeks, months and years improving and developing the functionality and features of this micropayments forum... but that would have defeated the very point of facilitating monetary feedback/guidance from the crowd! :D
If there are any features/functionality that you'd like added...then you could post your suggestion in the feedback forum. It's probably a good idea to only have one suggestion per post. That way, if/when people allocate money to your post... then there won't be any ambiguity.
Yes, you can allocate money to your own posts. When you do so though, the money won't go back into your wallet. Basically you're "boosting" your own post. Kinda like on facebook. But with this forum... everybody and anybody can also help boost your post. It's crowd boosting/amplifying. Every post can be crowd sponsored.
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