Quote from: 616westwarmoth on October 13, 2017, 03:52:48 AM

Quote from: bible_pay on October 12, 2017, 08:45:34 PM

Quote from: seeksilence on October 12, 2017, 08:28:22 PM

Letter writing should be awarded instead of penalized. Current way is not good. I am really not good at writing. Just copy and make a few changes does not make sense to me. Also there should be a least a cap like 5%. I do not mind to pay 5% to support charity. But any fee above 5% is kind of ridiculous. Let someone with talent to write the letter and get some rewards.

If the fee keep rising without a cap, I will try to follow the instruction to build a pool. But at the first glance, the instruction is hard to follow.

You make a good point.

I agree, its getting to the level where it is almost "redicules" now, so lets all try to think of a stopgap.

Probably the most obvious stopgap is this the short term:

** Anyone who has a pool account that has not written a letter to an orphan yet, please consider clicking on Orphans | Active Sponsored Orphan List, and clicking on one that says "Need Written"=TRUE, and please, write one letter to one of our orphans. **

The intermediate solution: Rewarding the ones that are good at letter writing. TBD. Ideas are welcome.

Yes, other pools are hopefully coming (mine I'm still struggling with but have two days off, so it's project job one!). Two things could be handy, one, capping the max non-writer at 5% or less (3% would be my suggestion). Second, advertising better that letter writing is subsidized by the "penalty" fee. Side note, it may be too long ago, but I cannot find the letter subsidy in my history (nor for that matter the pool subsidy from the Oct 1 issue). Might be because the fields in distribution history look sortable but I cannot do that in firefox.

The longer term solution is to have a definitive reward system for writing and the ability to subsidize it directly from the operating fund. Nothing huge, but a few hundred per approved letter up to once every 30 days. Have the MN give the letter writing priviledge for Orphan 47 to User 113. And really the letter writing should be split from the function of the pool, to a function of a dedicated website or sub-domain.

The letter writing is already rewarded (although I note that the reward seemed to magically appear in my pool rewards, it doesn't appear to be added to the reward history). So there is both a carrot and a stick to encourage people to write letters.

The interface to do so it not as intuitive as it could be though. I consider myself very competent with IT (having a Computing degree and many years IT support and systems administration experience), but I still had to ask how to write a letter. Maybe even just adding some more instructions to pages would help users with how to navigate and read profiles/write letters?