Hi fam. There has been a rise in crowd funding, or setting up a campaign in order to raise money for any particular reason. This may be a great idea in general, but I am going to disallow it to be advertised here. I don't have the resources to verify who all of the campaigners really are, and I don't feel comfortable having them use this site to draw money from you guys without any guarantees. It might not be a legal liability to me, but it's a moral one.

Going forward, please don't use UMD and its user-base to gather funds unless you are offering an actual product or service for it. Contact me and maybe I can help in some other way.

Open to opinions. Go....

...nads

I was gonna get UMD'ers to fund my new laptop and trip to Graceland...are you saying its a no-go now?

Being a Doncaster Rovers fan i Couldn't agree more with the anti Crowd funding

Sounds a very sensible approach to me...cans of worms all over the place otherwise!

Guess I'll have to look elsewhere to fund my brand-new gold-plated lobster shell.

I've always thought it a good idea for a larger-scale video so everyone can enjoy it, or for charity reasons, but not everyone does business the same way Jayce does (I say Jayce because she handles most of the financial decisions at House of Mess while I handle the creative aspect) She keeps receipts for EVERYTHING, she uses store-brand items for people's customs so they can save $$, she even still donates $$ to BCRF for our "3 in the Pink" video and doesn't mind showing the checks and/or receipts to anyone who has any doubts.

I guess because we're tight with money we respect other peoples' money just as much as our own. We'll always be frugal!

Unfortunately there are some people out there who mess it up for the rest of us. I guess from now on if someone wants a large-scale custom or something like that, it can only be done outside of the site and have less than a handful of people all in agreement of what they'll pay. Take the pressure off of the UMD site-owners. Also, if it comes down to thinks like computers, cameras, etc. I don't think that should ever happen, even if I've jokingly entertained the notion.

Personally I don't see how offering a messy custom on this site is any different than offering it via a crowd funding campaign. Either way the customer is paying for a custom video.

Of course this isn't my site so I don't make the rules and don't want to break the rules. I just feel the need to point out when the rules are silly.

In this case I think MM is right. Bad enough when a scammer rips off a single customer for the cost of a non-existent custom, but a well-scammed crowdfunding appeal could easily take a lot of people for a lot of money, all at once. The one-on-one scam magnified by however many people signed up. Imagine if 20 people all chipped in $100 for an uber-custom, and the producer then vanishes with $2k of other people's money...

I think Leila has a point. Crowdfunding at least has the safeguard of not funding unless it hits its goal, so that at least means that a consensus of idiots would have to be thinking with their dicks in order to get ripped off. Plus the person selling has to write a detailed pitch, so they'd have to be a pretty good con artist, at least.

Whereas customs are solicited very aggressively here, and there's really NO public, external accountability at all. If the UMD is going to ban one, it should ban both (or neither).

Plus, I still think crowdfunding could be the only way to ever mount something like a large-scale, Rob Blaine-style shoot in the current economy. What if a respected producer like, say, Mudmadphil wanted to make a comeback and try something like that? I'd hate for us to preemptively nip that in the bud.

Edit: Actually, rereading MM's original post, it sounds like crowdfunding a specific video might be allowed, and only more amorphous "help me make my rent this month" type campaigns are verboten. Which makes sense, although if that's the case it might help to have some additional clarity on where the line is drawn.

Also, if Zach Braff turns up and wants to crowdfund a wam video, definitely ban that shit.

I looked into Kickstarter to get Splatter Island off the ground, and it specifically bans "Fund my life" campaigns. I don't know about Indigogo. Of course, you could have just been sardonic. I suck at picking stuff like that up.

If you believe that then you don't understand how crowd funding works and neither does MM. To start a campaign you have to provide your real name, address and bank account info and all that information has to be verified before your funds are transferred to your account. If people don't deliver the perks they claim to offer then the site has the right to revoke all or part of your funding to refund people.

It's much more moral than letting people get scammed on here or having flakes ignore someone for months after taking their money. At least in this case if people have an issue they can recover their money.

And yes I am aware this post was because of me. I have to deal with people giving me shit about being disable on a daily basis because I don't "look disabled" and I really fucking hate that shit. Just because someone isn't in a wheel chair or doesn't walk with a cane doesn't mean they can't be disabled. Having nerve damage is horribly painful and has severely limited my life. I can't go out to restaurants any more because I can't sit down for more than 20 mins at a time. I can't visit my grandparents because I can't drive to Connecticut and they are too old to travel. It's put a lot of stress on my marriage because I can't do any of the housework. My husband has to do everything around the house and I can't even go out with him to parties or do much of anything with him anymore other than take short walks or watch TV. And I'm up at 2:30am now because they pain keeps me awake all night if I don't take sleeping pills which I don't want to do every night since they are habit forming. So if anyone wants to think I am pretending to be disabled to scam people you can go fuck yourself. If anyone on here does care to see the work I produce in the future you can see it at my clips4sale store: http://clips4sale.com/store/21400

Sorry, didn't realise that, had assumed it was just a general thing, and aimed more at more casual crowdfunding (someone pops up a post asking for "donations" towards a major scene, then disappears) than formal things like Kickstarter. I actually thought the proper crowdfunding sites banned adult stuff. Sorry!

That's ok. Kickstarter bans adult material but awhile back let some guy fund a book about how to rape women so I wouldn't use that site anyway. Indiegogo lets people raise money for basically whatever they want, they just have restrictions on what you can give as perks like you can't offer 10% stock in your company of any other financial perks. I choose them specifically because they have good policies when it comes to the funding. Even if you don;t reach you goal you still get funding so it;s not like contributors gave money for nothing.

The rule prolly wouldn't feel as silly if you were the one with a site that somebody used to grab money from a bunch of your trusting members and then bounce. You feel responsible. Rip-offs do happen with customs, but crowd-funding fraud affects a whole lot of people in one go.

A custom is the promise of an actual product for a payment. Crowd-funding just seems like a nebulous headache, moderation-wise, especially since I cannot guarantee that otherwise legit user accounts haven't been be taken over by malicious business partners hoping to cash in on your trust in that user. It has already burned us here, and so I'd like to just stem it now.


Great call for consistency, but customs and crowd-funding are two different business models (if you can call the latter that). Both are risky and have their share of rip-offs, but obviously crowd-funding does more damage more quickly if and when it goes wrong, with way less warning to others who are also putting their money on the line. People do think with their dicks cuz we're a fetish site. They also think with their hearts, and there are people who are using crowd-funding take advantage of trust built up in a user's profile, more efficiently than ever.

Also, I did not mention a specific crowd funding site, because this goes for asking for money in general, even if through Paypal or whatever: If it's not a straight transaction where the customer gets a product in return, then it won't be allowed.





I'm sure there are various rules / regulations / safeguards that these sites have in place, and they're probably effective. But those are not my sites, and I can't rely on those safeguards for here, nor do I have the resources to keep up on how their policies might change from time to time. For right now I'd prefer to keep plugs for them off the site. You're more than welcome to plug it on your own site, and we'll still link to it. I think that's a fair place to draw the line for now.

And Leila, this is not about you, even though I know it comes right after you made your post. I wish you luck, but I would not make an entire change in site policy just because you made one forum post. We've already had time-consuming issues with crowd-funding, and it's just popping up more and more now. I'd rather spend that time making the site better and helping customers and producers. Nobody has accused you. If I was, you would have heard directly from me. This is a new site-wide policy, up for everyone to opine on, so you don't need to tell anyone to fuck themselves. You just happened to be the last one to sit in the musical chair when the music stopped.