Links to Patreon pages and donations

[Antrad 37]

On my Watchlist I just saw someone changing the links from Patreon pages to buymeacoffee.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/w/index.php?title=I_Am_Alive&diff=1020741&oldid=1013318

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/w/index.php?title=Nocturne&diff=1020708&oldid=1013309

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/w/index.php?title=American_McGee's_Alice&diff=1020702&oldid=1018837

It is for Peixoto, who I know makes video game fixes and I used his program before. I'm not sure what was Patreon link doing there in the first place. When I link to his fixes I link to a thread on Vogons forums.

As much as I think these people deserve any support they can get, I don't think PCGW articles should link directly to donation pages and those URLS should be blocked if not given official permission of PCGW. How do we know it is not a fake ?

What is the policy about this ?

[Aemony 141]

Currently there is none, but we did bring the discussion up on the Discord a few hours ago though without any conclusion as of now.

My own preferred way of doing it is to direct link to the content as much as possible. One example that was linked on the Discord was a link to a Patreon blog post that had the content as the "primary focus" of the linked page, with the donation being a secondary focus of the page (it was only present in the sidebar). This is fine by me, but the latest Coffee-links however is the other way around -- the primary focus is to drive donations with the secondary focus being the patch itself (currently with a broken link). A donation "gateway", if you will, that the user must pass before they're able to get to the content proper.

We'll have to wait and see what the discussion brings us to, and after that write a proper policy about these sorts of things.