Help the Internet Archive - their offices were destroyed in a fire

The crowdfunding campaign will probably be more effective at raising money for this.

Fortunately, there is effectively no middleman here, according to the campaign's description:

> * I've spoken with June from the IA, who will ensure that funds go directly to them.

> * Crowdtilt has agreed to waive their card processing fee!

Does crowdtilt only accept credit cards? Fortunately https://archive.org/donate/ accepts PayPal and other methods. Personally, I only impulse donate to small causes and having finding my CC is enough to make me "just do it later" (aka, forget to do it at all).

This is also how you can donate with Bitcoins. The crowdfunding site doesn't seem to allow that option.

I think it is too early to start a campaign to raise funds. They first need to meet with their insurance provider to find out what is covered and what is not, then go to the public for funding. Unless they were grossly under insured and knew it, 1 day isn't enough time to determine what's covered.

I must be naive too, then, because this is what I thought at first. Anything that gets dollars into the hands of the archive.org folks is fine with me, but this is what insurance policies are for.

I was wondering this too. Won't they get back most of their loss from the insurance policy? Unless the fire was not covered due to a specific cause.

There will almost certainly be costs not covered by insurance.

I would guess a good portion of it, though not all, but that will probably take some time. As a non-profit that provides a widely used web service, they could probably always use more cash, so it's better to get donations now rather than waiting for their insurance to pay out. It's possible they were underinsured on some of this stuff; since they had a lot of custom hardware for scanning books, it may have been hard to price it accurately. It can also be a good fundraising call to arms; people who may have been on the fence or said "well, maybe I'll donate later" now have a reason to donate immediately.

I'm doing the same right now

Thanks to the headline, I finally remembered to set that up, too. I suspect that if they need anymore money after insurance and such, the most effective time is to fund raise immediately. Hopefully it doesn't happen again, but maybe that's a silver lining!

Ah I fat-fingered that, for the record it's tracey_pooh with an 'e'.

Thanks :). We designed it in-house. One of the great benefits of balanced and stripe is complete customizability of not only the look and feel, but also of which fields to include/leave.

downvote away humorless nerds.

Your reddit is leaking. Mop it up.