Donating to BGA

[Josunae]

How can someone make a monetary donation to Board Game Arena above and beyond membership?

[RicardoRix]

donate memberships to your friends..?

You may be able to buy multiple 1-year subscriptions. They should stack.

[cigma]

Have you tried to contact them? https://boardgamearena.com/support
You could try via others -> partnership, I think.

[killjoyprose]

I would also like this option. It would be nice to see a tracker that indicates what level of funding they need as I haven't seen any communication about the multiple times the site has been down over the last week or two and I can only imagine it's because of server issues. Plenty of people use the site for free which is fine but if they aren't receiving enough to fund the site it's going to cause issues that discourage existing backers from renewing. I currently pay for my GFS account and plan on paying for this one again but more could be done to incentivize premium purchases.
I would suggest account customization and micro-transactions to do so as a start.
Add an option to pay for a single premium game for a year or month at a lower cost with the option to switch to full premium anytime when it becomes financially viable (1 premium game for 3$/month 10$/year?) from playing more games
Another thing I would like to see is tournaments organized by users, possibly "sponsored" amongst the players (1,2,3$ buy in) that exist outside of current arena tournament and champion play.
I guess what I'm saying is a lot more could be done to try milking money and accepting donations if the site needs more money. People are plenty more willing to throw a couple of bucks here and there that total well over the upfront cost of a yearly subscription that most people might not feel like they want to invest with things as they are.
Find more ways to get smaller and reoccurring spending on a shorter time frame.

[Andy_J]

I've just joined this site and am liking what I see so far. I'm going to purchase a membership for my son who's a huge board game player. does anyone know of the best way I can do it as a surprise for him (ie so I dont have to ask him for his email address / password etc) ?

[accidentally]

I've just joined this site and am liking what I see so far. I'm going to purchase a membership for my son who's a huge board game player. does anyone know of the best way I can do it as a surprise for him (ie so I dont have to ask him for his email address / password etc) ?

https://boardgamearena.com/premium?offer&src=premium

[cigma]

I guess what I'm saying is a lot more could be done to try milking money and accepting donations if the site needs more money.

"Milking money" and "accepting donations" are two very different things.

I am premium myself, but I very much appreciate that most of the service here is for free and I wouldn't like to change that. Also, any change to the current model would also generate some programming and administrative work and it could deter users. For example, note that some players already complain how difficult it is to find opponents for less popular games. This type of change could throw a lot of things out of balance. You have to weigh up the costs and benefits very carefully, and not only financially.

But since there seem to exist some people who want to donate, I think there could be found an easy way to realize that and it wouldn't harm, but benefit the site.

[cigma]

You may also fund the work of developers, as this player seems to do: https://boardgamearena.com/player?id=85372952

[killjoyprose]

Yes I'm well aware that milking money and accepting donations are different that's why I separated the two with an AND
Absolutely nothing wrong with micro-transactions that are purely cosmetic in nature or allow you to do extra things outside of the free-mium sphere. As far as I can tell all you really get to do with premium is start tables to play faster and don't stop me if I'm wrong because that is the perception that's put out there even in the recent update asking me to switch to premium. I hate to say it but maybe limiting the number of games a day would push more people to buy. There are any number of things the people behind this could think to do but it's gotta be something, if everyone is playing for free and its cashing the site to constantly crash premium users will stop paying and that's just a fact