It's the Summer Fund Drive 2025! Please support DU!

Hello everyone,

It's time for another one of those weeks that we (unfortunately) can't do without -- from the morning of Monday August 18 through to the morning of Monday August 25th we'll be running our annual Summer Fund Drive.

Why are we fundraising this week?

As most of you know, DU is funded by a combination of ad revenue and member contributions, and we need both to survive. As most of you also know, at DU we don't like to constantly bombard people with fundraising requests (unlike, ahem, a few other folks I can think of) which is why we restrict our fundraising efforts to three single weeks in February, May, and August, and we try to make them fun.

Does this make us Internet millionaires? Certainly not! Does it stand in contrast to the rampant enshittification now widespread across all sectors of society? I'd like to think it does. Since we started fundraising more than 20 years ago, we've never switched to a paywalled subscription method, and we've never raised our prices -- because you can pay or as much, or as little as you want. Whether you want to contribute financially or not is up to you, but we hope you think DU is worth it.

This year, we have upgraded our servers to improve performance, and we've also spent a significant amount of time working to reduce bot traffic -- particularly AI scrapers -- which have not just become ubiquitous over the past year or so, but also potentially threatening to independent sites like DU given the amount of unwanted stress they can put on site servers. I'm pleased to report that our efforts have been quite successful, with only one or two minor hiccups (which I'll get to in a moment).

As part of this effort, we've also been working to fix issues with our ad services that were causing some odd glitches (like random cookie permission banners appearing) and we hope that most of those bugs have now been squashed.

Summer Fund Drive Bonuses

The Summer Fund Drive has some additional bonuses that you can't get during the other fund drives:

• For every $5 you contribute, you can add a sticky to Grovelbot's Big Board.

And members who contribute $35 or more can:

• Gift a free Star Membership to another member who doesn't have one


• Get a classic DU bumper sticker!

If you contribute $35 or more, you'll receive a DU Mail message with further information.

However... here's where one of those minor hiccups comes into play: When we began testing the fund drive last week, we realized that image uploading was being blocked by our firewall, and we haven't been able to fix it in time. So currently you can't directly upload image stickies. I'm sorry! However, if you want to add image stickies, you can just send them to me via DU Mail, or email (earlg@democraticunderground.com), and I can add them manually for you.

So, two steps forward and one step back in the tech department this time around -- but let's be honest, DU wouldn't be DU if we didn't run into janky nonsense like this from time to time. What can I say.

How to contribute

• Monthly contribution or yearly contribution: As always, it's beneficial to us if you sign up for a recurring contribution, because it helps us to stabilize our budget -- but if you do this, please check to make sure you don't already have a recurring subscription with us, because starting a new one won't cancel your old one. If you need assistance or information about the status of your current contribution, please don't hesitate to contact me and I'll help you out.


• One-time contribution: You can make a one-time contribution with or without a PayPal account, and should you need it, I've got some new information here on how to easily make a guest payment through PayPal's system without signing up for their service. If you already have a recurring Star Membership, making a one-time contribution does not affect anything -- it's just like giving us an extra tip.

Thank you for being here!

It's safe to say that in the almost 25 years DU has been running, the "American Experiment" has never looked quite so bleak. These are tough times, that will require solidarity and courage to get through. But while reading the news can be painful these days, it makes it easier for me personally to know that there are like-minded folks out there sharing the burden. That's why I still rely on DU every day to bring me perspectives and community that I can't get anywhere else -- and it couldn't be done without all of you, and your support.

Thank you!