I don’t really care about covering the costs. Not even sure if the forum server should be paid by AntennaPod because I sometimes use it for my own projects, too.
If we can’t come up with something that we want to do with the money, users should rather donate to the Red Cross or another NGO
If you want this sorted before moving on; how can we best reach this goal? There’s been quite some discussion and ideas have been shared here in this thread already. Should we put to digital paper
I can set up an Etherpad for us all to work on - let me know if I should.
I think writing a general guidelines document would be good. Doesn’t have to contain precise numbers but just as a general agreement what we want to do.
Some other things I noticed:
Not sure if we are allowed to do that. I think Google only permits using their own payment service.
We don’t depend on money, so I don’t think we should nudge users too much. Having a “donate” section on the website seems enough to me. Also, I think that the website should even state that donating your time (user support, translations, development) is much more appreciated than money.
Eh, it probably is mostly used for this forum anyway so it’s not a big deal. Whoever pays for it should get their costs covered.
Sure, but first we need to actually begin accepting donations. We’re not expecting a windfall of cash to drop on the project. It would be nice just to see what the project gets for a year and cover the existing costs so we can get an idea of how much people are willing to support the project.
I don’t see it as nudging. I think every donation page should say “we prefer your time over your money!”
It makes sense to put it on the F-Droid page since there’s a section for that, and the website. That should be enough.
I appreciate your enthusiasm, but let’s try and avoid repeating the same comments. As noted, I’m all in favour of accepting donations asap, but we also have to respect the wish of the only person who can decide on this: the person spending the money aka the main developer.
Agreed.
Great. I’ll set up a wiki post tomorrow, so that we can all contribute to getting to the next stage! 
Allright - the wiki document is created!
@ByteHamster @Matth78 @Podder @tonytamsf @tenkara_vt and anyone else with an opinion:
please share your ideas/thoughts in this document: Donation spending guidelines
I completely understand this dilemma, because I was in a similar situation myself, with my own forum. I would suggest that if people are willing to make donations to cover the expenses, you could migrate it to a new server (it’s easy, I did it in about 30 minutes).
I was also going to say, once some guidelines are set in place, every six months or once a year (or whatever you wish) you or a team member could make a post. On it you could share (with screenshots or PDFs or whatever you wanted to do) about all donations that were received, as well as all expenses they were used for and whether any balance remains. That would show users what was going on, not mention have some transparency. Similar in a way (though without the legal requirements) to what most NGOs are required to do with their donations.
Obviously it’s not a requirement, I’m fine with you or the Team doing what’s best for you, it’s just one idea.
I was thinking to keep the discussion centralised here, to keep the guidelines a clean ‘document’. I think you should be able to edit the wiki despite the thread being locked (but do let me know if that’s not the case).
I did a minor edits and 2 additions.
“Core AntennaPod Team Members”
I realise this is a bit contradictory to what you have shared (as we can’t foresee the unforeseen), but what kind/type of unforeseen expenses were you thinking of? E.g. would buying equipment to debug a Chromecast issue fall under this?
I was thinking of things like legal lawsuits, hosting fees thst that spike due to high loads, or the hosting provider leaving and we need to switch.
You can also donate a part of the donations you received to fyyd.de or other services/libraries you use in AntennaPod.
I’ve added hundred of podcast to Fyyd, some of them before the availablity in iTunes or Google Podcast, and then spammed “you can find it on an app that supports fyyd like AntennaPod” 
Hi all!
I am a Antennapod user for a while now and after the latest redesign I felt obliged to join this wonderful community. I am happy that the community is talking about donations and what is next.
I agree a lot with starting slowly, probably with stickers etc. But I can also see @ByteHamster slightly restrained about accepting money (when it is a lot I guess?) and I hope he gets more comfortable with that soon though. Having a strong community oriented project for podcasts is important and Antennapod is in a great position to be leading the way. 
@keunes - I just joined the forum an hour ago and I can still edit the donations guidelines. While I don’t expect anyone to do anything bad intentionally, I am a bit worried for the possibility of someone new to the forum removing or editing out some part of it accidentally leading to unnecessary complications. Just wanted to give you a heads up in case you haven’t noticed this. Maybe a higher privilege necessity to edit it might be better? Not sure, I am still catching up on things here.
@thevenin Nice idea. Same for gPodder and the Podcast Index. While discussed here, IIRC they weren’t added to the list yet - would you mind doing that?
@inkspreads Welcome to the active community! Always happy to hear the redesign efforts paid off If you want, you’re very welcome to also reply to this thread: “How are you part of the AntennaPod community?”
About the editing of the wiki post: I thought it required trust level one, but even if it doesn’t, it’s ok: the edit history is saved so if things go wrong we can roll back. And once it’s finalised it’ll move to a more static space (the website).
@inkspreads you already are trust level 1 
It can be reached by:
So, congratulations - you already did that
I’ve added it to the list. Thanks!
Make sense. Thanks for clarifying @keunes . 
Spending a total of 10 minutes reading posts
@ByteHamster - This was the point I was making, anybody who could be a newbie to the forum could edit and possibly make a mistake after just being in the forum for 10mins. But I think it is okay now that @keunes have clarified that we could rollback.
While I like the idea of donating to other services that are used in AntennaPod, I am wondering if there are legal implications of that. Can we really pass money around or could this be considered money laundering?
Are you receiving money from illegal activities?
I don’t think it’s money laundering. You should receive illegal money and donate them to someone else, but you don’t do this.
Wikipedia says “The overall scheme of this process returns the “clean” money to the launderer in an obscure and indirect way”. You won’t receive these money back.
I know may podcasts that donates to other projects they use or support.
Anyway I’m not a legal expert, so I can understand if you don’t feel comfortable doing this.