New donation system

It's been a turbulent few weeks! We started off June with our Patreon and Ko-Fi getting mass reported and taken down which was disappointing. We then voluntarily took down our BuyMeACoffee and cancelled all subscriptions. This was a bit of a wake-up call as we didn't want to end up in the same position as nopy.

We were planning on rebuilding rpdl.net for the last few weeks as it was showing its age so figured we'd take this chance to rebuild and correct some of our mistakes from the first time.

We settled on using Ghost which gives us a lot of flexibility. It allows us to handle subscriptions via Stripe plus it's open source! For now, this will be the only way we handle subscriptions.

How does it work?

Because we're using subscriptions, we need to give our donators a way to modify or cancel their subscription. This means that if you choose to donate, we ask for your email address. Whenever you want to login, you enter your email address and we email you a login link. Easy, right?
After donating, be sure to DM @rpdl so we can assign you the @donator role on Discord. It goes without saying too, we're very grateful to those that choose to donate their hard earned money towards this project 😘

Important things to remember:

1. You do not need to donate to use our torrents.
2. Accounts on rpdl.net are completely separate from dl.rpdl.net
3. There are donator perks on Discord*
4. rpdl.net accounts are not tied to Discord accounts, but we might look into adding this functionality to make assigning roles easier?

* @Cake has added a bunch of features to the Discord bot to search games and serve files directly. We tend to consult our Donor channel regarding changes, or touch base with them for ideas and suggestions. We're also more open when it comes to news/usage/analytics so if that's your thing, you might find it interesting.

Affiliates

We have a few affiliate services linked on our affiliates page. We added a new one, NordVPN. These are all services we actually use so we figured, why not.
VPN's help with connectivity issues, especially if you're behind a NAT or on a restrictive university/work network so if it's something you find useful, it's win/win.
The link to the affiliate page only shows in the footer.

So yeah, nice and short I guess. This took up a bunch of our time the last few weeks so we're happy to be finished. We can get back to working on our  backlog!

Thanks again to everyone already donating. We're already 33% to where we were with Patreon and it's only been a few days!