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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Even a token fee - refundable to proven works of human authorship - would take care of most spam. The dogmatic response to these and similar suggestions is “under no circumstances will authors ever have to pay to publish” often citing situations such as authors who are too poor to pay a token fee or don’t have access to online payments.

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Any infrastructure designed to accept fees will be used for verifying stolen credit cards. You need to have countermeasures implemented for this. (Or whoever you use will need to.)

Also, a high refund rate will nuke your merchant account with most processors. No one wants to deal with this business model.

This is a solved problem: 3-D Secure

i disagree that the rejection of pay systems is dogmatic. clarkesworld has already published authors who could not make such payments, so clearly any payment system would have prevented those stories from reaching us and we would have missed out.

you may argue that is worth the price, but i would disagree. a submission system that is not inclusive and prevents people from submitting because of material circumstances would simply be unfair and for me reduce the appeal of the magazine.

I'm old enough to remember when submissions to SFF magazines had to be printed out and submitted by postal mail. There was a real cost to doing that - $5 to $10 depending on the size of the submission and the postal service used. No one complained that it was not fair or not inclusive; it was a legitimate, unavoidable cost of submitting original works to the magazine.

sure, noone complained, because the maganizes never even had the reach that we are talking about now.

in particular it was more difficult to submit for anyone overseas, even more so from developing countries. but this is where clarkesworld is inviting submissions from, and it could not do that if writers there had to pay.

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