I would gladly donate to this site! This site is now my main web viewing daily dose!. I have learned so much, and feel like i belong to a great community of people here. Great Idea Chris! Any artists out there who are willing able to design us a cool t-shirt???

I’d gladly donate some money to pay for a server that doesn’t do this:

We’re sorry, but something went wrong.

We’ve been notified about this issue and we’ll take a look at it shortly.

Yes please!

Me too, I would donate; monthly or yearly. I love perusing each new recipe when it’s posted, especially if the photo looks yummy. I’m not buying any more un-cookbooks until I’ve tried all the 5,000 recipes here. When I was on the Global Juice Feast (92 days!) and at some point became terribly hungry for something solid, I would keep myself amused daily by checking out the recipes. (I can look, cain’t I? <g>) I have also found the forums informative, amusing, & useful. I like some of the ideas for improvement which others have posted, but nevertheless it is a great site even with the current difficulties. And recognize, complainers, that if you didn’t keep coming back so often, you wouldn’t see those frustrating messages so often, either. :O

About the T-shirts – I don’t myself like to walking around wearing commercial advertisements on my chest. A cool graphic might be okay, though. How about two pointy coconuts, with “goneraw” in-between. LOL. Really, there is a time cost for doing all the work of managing the production, storage, shipping, and financial accounting of T-shirts or other products, which would all take away time from the coding that would need doing to get those website improvements implemented. My vote right now is for plain & simple donations & memberships. One of the main attractions of this site is its simplicity, and it would be good to keep it that way, IMHO.

Here’s an idea: a list of desired site improvements (like the one posted by RCBAlive), with a vote for the ones most popular, decided by how much $$ everyone has invested for its completion. The one with the most investment gets first attention.

I don’t mind the site being slow and sometimes not activated at all. That’s what, for example, the “open source” freedom “fight” is also all about, nobody talks about money, people get committed and give their time freely so that other people can enjoy a software for free.
Then usually the thing grows and slowly a “donate” window appears somewhere, which soon turns into a “register”. There has been a shift in “mind set”, from a nice open mind to something different.
I don’t know particularly for the web or platforms, but I have experience with meditation centers. All the places I have been to that ask for money or suggest you to donate have a special mindset. Some other meditation centers are totally free and sometimes explain at length why they do not charge, and according to me have a very different spirit.
Humboldthoney has already gone into the class system problem, so I won’t go into that again, and I, too, agree that you should be able to donate if you would like too, probably it is more the spirit that drives it that can be problematic.
In my opinion it works exactly like that, someone posts one day something like saying, come one people prove that you love your website, pay for it, if you don’t you’re not patriots, I mean, “lovers of Goneraw”, and you could even have your member card, I mean your “name with a glowing halo”.
Of course nobody asks you to pay, you do whatever you like, but you see what I mean, everybody knows who pays and who doesn’t, who is a good patriot and who is not, and everyone reacts with fear of being considered a non-patriot more than a real desire of supporting Goneraw.
Same, “the set figure” problem has been raised by humboldthone, no need to talk about it again.
Although I said all this I think, a discreet, “Donate now” paypal link is a very good idea, I indeed appreciate this site very much, and I don’t see anything wrong in supporting it, although I somehow believe this would be the first step towards the death of its very nice spirit, probably because it is somehow different from just very enthousiastic people spontaneously wanting to spend time improving the code of the site, because they love it, and not even thinking about having people to donate, because they don’t even think about asking for help.

I mean this

“Come on everybody! Reply to this post with your T-Shirt orders or express your desire to be a ‘Supporting Member’. Let’s show R & K just how much we love GoneRaw.”

sounds highly dangerous and have a tone that remind me of not so glorious phases of history… american and european and else…
If you love your country…

people can easily react to this with the fear of being a communist.

Huh? Really? You think that suggesting that we buy things to support Kandace and Ray who operate this site out of the goodness of their hearts is like asking people to fight for their country? Does anyone else feel this way? It never occurred to me that anyone would take it like that.

I am not afraid of Kandace & Ray’s intentions. I am sure that if they wanted to ‘cash in’ on GoneRaw, they would have by now. Maybe anonymous would be better for the spirit of the site but it would probably raise less funds.

Anyone who wants to can at any time scroll down to the bottom of the home page, click on the link for ’Needmore Designs’ and then scroll down to the bottom of that home page and get an address for Ray & Kandace. I wonder how many donations they have received this way. I would wager very few if any. Creating a more formal way of donating than this current option would raise more funds.

All this (thank God) is up to K&R. They might not want a bigger budget for GoneRaw, who knows?

Lovebows, Chris

ps. as a Google advertiser I’m not for falsely clicking on the ads. Google ads help keep web use costs down and are one of the reasons the surfing the internet is still free. I also don’t think the Karma of falsely acquired funds would be good. Great idea though, very creative!

The site totally deserves it – it’s really dumbfounding that it’s been supported SO WELL simply from the goodness of their hearts. Let’s face it, the “goodness of their hearts” also means the depths of their wallets. Yes, I would totally pitch – it’s the least I could do!!!

I’m in

Zoe, yes.
Once again, “Come on everybody! Reply to this post with your T-Shirt orders or express your desire to be a ‘Supporting Member’. Let’s show R & K just how much we love GoneRaw.”

when I read this my hair stands on my head. To me, that mindset when it doesn t have strength or intensity doesn t lead to much damage, when it has intensity it leads to witch hunts and bloodshed.
I thought I wouldn t make a post that sharp, but seeing how, you, Chris, better than taking responsability for your words, sneakingly turns it into “I am not afraid of Kandace and Ray’s intentions”, poor political trick to make people forget about what you said earlier, I thouht I would in the end. I think it is a big lack of honesty.
I really thought I d be very clear with that issue and what I think about it. The sum is no issue, it is not because it is 0.1 pound or 10 thousand that it changes anything. I am not afraid of their intention either, that s just absolutely not my point, it has nothing to do with what I was saying about what you wrote on the post, it’s just a trick.

Yes “anonymous” would raise less funds, and then, who cares? Does the Goal justify the Means? Does it really matters that much that the site is slow? Are we that in a hurry? “Better” is “good”’s enemy, and the site is already very good, and to me it looks like if functions already pretty well. I do not american dream of a perfect high stream site.

Chris, I really think what I say is worth considering. I take the time to write all this because I love this community and I want to share what I think, and not just turning away and not even caring. I do care and I would be the first one to press the “donate button” as I use the site for recipies frequently.
And, yes, the site totally deserves it, Carmentina.

And who cares about knowing if the internet is still going to be free or not with or without Google? Who knows? Maybe it still would be even without them… I would be happier in a world without television and without ads, but that’s only for me, I live in a place where people watch TV, smoke Ganja, drink and eat lots of meat, when I don’t do any of these, and that’s OK, we still get along.

Wait!

What about actually publishing (and selling) annual “cook”books with our best-of’s. I’d certainly pay for our “yearbook” since I cringe at having my laptop anywhere near the blender. Plus it might eliminate some of the site congestion (which seems to plug up around dinnertime ha ha).

Given the popularity of RAW cuisine, and this site, I’m sure we could gain TONS of income for all the whistles and bells people seem to want. So many Raw books are outdated now and way too complicated for the day to day.

Instead of cash donations we could (knowingly) donate our recipes!

Thanks everyone for this thread – we’re definitely basking in all the warm wishes and mulling over the ideas presented.

A bit of backstory: We haven’t taken any donations to date because we have always considered Gone Raw to be a community offered without pay and hopefully supported through advertising revenue (sometimes Google, sometimes folks in the raw world). This is our first foray into an advertiser supported community and we’d like to see if this is sustainable (rather than ask for donations from you folks). You really do so much by participating and showing that a raw, vegan community is viable and growing!

Happy to note that we are able, with the growth of Gone Raw lately, to move to an improved server, which should help quite a bit with the slowness issue.

http://goneraw.com/forums/5/topics/6576

On a side note, we adore the idea of Gone Raw shirts, etc.

We’re thinking about both “best of” cookbooks and t-shirts. We’re not going to charge or have membership levels, for many of the reasons already discussed. In fact, we’re thinking about a way to hide ads for anyone with a membership – we’ll see!

However, we won’t be putting any such stuff up for sale until the site is fixed, once and for all. It just wouldn’t be fair!

For now, trust us that we’re putting time into moving the site to a better host this week, and we’ll keep y’all in the loop. As always, thanks for using and supporting the site. It’s what makes it all worthwhile!

I do love the t-shirt idea and i would support that. I’m still getting over my weekend frustration with the slowness issue. I’m so glad to hear that is being addressed.

I would donate money, do the membership thing, buy products, buy tshirts..whatever. I get sad when I come to the site and it’s down!!!

This is such a fabulous site – I second what meganthevegan just said! :)

and I think that hemp t’s and a cookbook are great ideas as well!

wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! :) :) yeah!

kandace and ray – I’ve been surfing around the last few days trying to fill the void, not to replace you, just to keep a connection to the raw world while the site seemed to be down and I was LOST!! Nothing I found felt right, looked right, not even close, and then tonight I find you’re back. Aaaaaah. After reading your posts I realize why this site fits me best – your generous spirits shine through everything here. Thanks for keeping it up!