Lifting the veil of anonymity

Liberapay is no longer limited to secret donations

The “anonymity” of donations has been a cornerstone of Liberapay since its launch, and it’s a characteristic that sets Liberapay apart from almost every other platform. Hiding the identity of the donor from the recipient is often a good thing, both for privacy and to preserve the unconditional nature of the donation, but in some cases it is undesirable. In particular, it prevents creators from thanking their patrons by name.

So, starting today, creators can enable their patrons to donate non-anonymously. The implementation isn’t perfect yet, but it will be improved over time. As always, you can contact us if you encounter a problem or have something else to say.

The rest of this blog post is split into two parts, one focused on donors and another on creators, but reading both is recommended.

Donors

If you’re a donor, please go to your Giving page and click on one of the three buttons that should appear near the top. Think carefully, you won’t see those buttons again after clicking one of them.

Screenshot of the three choices in the “Giving” page.

If you choose to make your donations public, then you may see a message inviting you to fill your public profile, because a public donation is rather pointless if your public profile is empty.

The information you put in your public profile is the only data that Liberapay will provide to the beneficiaries of your donations. Liberapay won’t expose your legal name, email address or any other private information that you provide during payment. (However, PayPal does show your name and email address to the recipient, so there are still warnings about that in the payment pages.)

If you have any active public donations, they will be visible on your profile:

Screenshot of the “Donees” section of a profile page.

If you don’t want to publish the amounts of your donations, go to your profile Privacy settings, check the “Do not publish the amounts of money I send” box, and don’t forget to click on the “Save” button.

Creators

If you’re a creator, please go to the new “Patrons” page and click on one of the two buttons at the top, to opt in or out of seeing who your patrons are.

If you enable non-anonymous donations, then you will be able to download a list of your patrons in CSV format, and the list of your public patrons will be available on your profile page. Of course, these lists only contain the pseudonyms of donors who have opted-in, not the legal names of all donors.

Screenshot of the content of a Patrons page after enabling non-anonymous donations.

Screenshot of the “Patrons” section of a profile. It only appears if there is at least one public patron.

Once you’ve enabled non-anonymous donations, new donors will be asked to choose a visibility level for their donations.

Screenshot of the visibility selector for a donation.

If you’ve only connected a PayPal account in your “Payment Processors” page, then the “Secret donation” option won’t appear, because you have access to the names and email addresses of donors through PayPal.

In the near future, it will be possible to enable or disable any of the three visibility levels. This will allow disabling the “Private” level if it doesn’t really make sense for you. However, PayPal-only recipients still won’t be able to enable secret donations.

In the long term, having support for non-anonymous payments could lead to other features. For example, some donations through Liberapay could become tax-deductible. However, we currently don’t have plans to implement features that would allow sending rewards to patrons. Liberapay is still a donation platform, not a paywall provider.