Same. No interest in getting anyone into trouble on any aspect with Bethesda etc. I guess I was also looking at the donation aspect like the Nexus does or the bounties that were already listed.
Thanks Roy for pointing that out. I guess that could be (or potentially) a problem.
Agreed Chuck. Therm, this site, this mod, and team are too important to risk.
Just to be 100% clear, with my bounties, I am donating money to individuals in recognition of their hard work and labor hours. I am not paying for people to deliver mod files to me only, nor am I charging anyone to download anything.
Roy has put out tons of other good modding work for free, and volunteered to convert WMX on his own. No one made him do it, and he knew very well that if I got hit by a bus and croaked out before he got paid, he probably wouldn't see any money.
Nothing about this breaks any rules. What *would* be an issue is if anyone tried to *charge* people to download a mod. This is why Nexus can't force you to pay for an account, and will always have free accounts (even if those accounts have certain limitations). This is why Nexus authors can accept donations, but can't make donations mandatory to download file or aggressively recruit donations or advertise for them.
For example, if I said, "I paid Roy to $200 make a WMX conversion. Now you have to pay me $20 if you want to download it so I can make the money back." Well, the first part is fine. But the second part is not.
Another example: if I said, "You must donate to support TTW's hosting expenses in order to view or download files from this site." That is not OK obviously.
What we do for donors - which is nothing besides a little badge on your forum posts - is fine, because donating is 100% optional and in no way impinges anyone's ability to use the site or download any files. That's the key issue. If people want to spend any money, it has to be 100% optional, and in no way changes their access to mods or the site. Just like Nexus or any other community site.
Regarding donations for the site in general: there have been tons of sites that have asked for donations for years, and/or financed their web hosting costs with advertising, since 2002 when Morrowind came out. No one has sued them, even if they are using tons of BethSoft intellectual property to generate ad revenue, like UESP or the Fallout Wiki pages. The reality is that web hosting for a site that gets any decent amount of traffic is going to cost upwards of $1,000/yr - or more like $100,000+ a year if you're running Nexus.
Speaking of which, if anyone's going to get sued it's Nexus. They literally have a full-time business solely based on making money off of mods for BethSoft games (and other games these days). BethSoft could sue them out of existence, but they obviously aren't going to do that because having a big modding community adds a lot of value to the games.
tl;dr: You guys need to relax.
Also, I have very little desire to manage an escrow account for modding bounties. But if you really want to do that I can. I already took $30 extra for the Vurt's conversion so I guess I already am sort of doing that.
I don't really have anything against the idea, in principal. I do, however, feel like it will end badly. Human nature being what it is, something will inevitably happen. This is a lovely community that develops a fantastic project, and I feel like this would just inviting problems into the house.
I gotta agree with Therm here, though not without saying he's the only one here who should be trusted to handle the business of donations if you will, and if he doesn't want to do so it shouldn't happen.
My project Dash is on Kickstarter!
Well in light of what therm has said, maybe it's possible but I still think it's a delicate situation and should be handled as such.
I think keeping the bounties atmosphere is the way to go if someone that everyone can trust is willing to keep escrow if Therm does not want to.
If Therm doesn't, I don't think there's anybody else. It's entirely up to him.
My project Dash is on Kickstarter!
i, for one, would make mods for cigarette money.
@Puppet, Any good with armors? 
um, i've got the art skills of a drunken 5 year old without crayons. but i can make your armors do some pretty nifty shit.
