For those of you who are on the TINS mailing list (And if not, why aren't you? ) you'll already have seen the announcement:

TINS is open to receiving donations: https://tins.amarillion.org/support. I have already received several very generous donations, and I can definitely promise that we will have an interesting prize pool for TINS 2021.

On the mailing list, there were some worries that money will lead to politics and drama. I have that worry too, so I want to continue the discussion here, talk it through and see what we can do about it. It might help to write up a good "terms & conditions". This would include e.g. a clause that I will act as final arbiter in case of disputes, but that I will also exclude myself from the prize pool.

But this also opens up the opportunity to dream up fun new things. For example, how do you feel about a TINS T-shirt? Winners get it for free, the rest will have to order & support the cause!

See also previous discussions on this topic:
https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/618297
https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/618121

T-shirts are a great idea.

The primary concern I'd have would be legal threats. Where there's money involved that might necessarily involve the law where it would otherwise have stayed out of it. It might also vary by jurisdiction both of the hosts and clients. There probably isn't enough money to hire a lawyer to answer these questions though so it's probably also not worth discussing (unless one of us happens to be a lawyer or happens to be willing to hire one). I wonder if it will make better sense to put this conversation off until we come to that bridge (which is assuming we even will, which is perhaps premature).

Append:

Cryptocurrency might be a neat way to do the money transfer, however, I am still a newbie unable to find a trustworthy exchange to buy in... Which unless somebody is aware of a solution to that problem may plague everyone. And without an exchange cryptocurrency is of limited utility.

I think it's fine. I just have a suggestion for the prizes:

1º price: a shirt of TINS
2º price: a hat of TINS
3º price: a pants of TINS
4º price: a hanky of TINS

5º price: a used hanky of TINS

X-D

I want more Alex stickers! I still have some, but never know when you need more

Been there, done that

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Is there a non-paypal option? Paypal is refusing to accept my transaction.

Weird, does Paypal give any info on what is wrong? I hope I didn't make a mistake and ended up on some sort of list If you were in the EU I could think of a few alternatives, but for the USA, I have no idea. Do you have suggestions?

I could still sign up for patreon, that would give you more choice. The only "downside" is that patreon expects recurring donations by default. Which you can stop at any moment, but it's a slight hassle.

Nice, I had completely forgotten about that thread. That's a good source of inspiration for T-shirt ideas

I don't remember what it was, but it seems to be working now. Weird.

I suggest T-shirts (or whatever "merch") point to Allegro's specific strengths: cross-platform, tried and tested with a rich history, hardware-accelerated, supported file types, etc.

A pants of Allegro it is, then.

KISS

It should be simple. A title, a logo, and a website, with maybe one cool thing added somewhere on the back.

Let's park the ideas for the T-shirt design for a moment. I'm currently improving the TINS site itself.

Each entry now gets its own description page. You can edit your own entry's description (if you want, you can do so right now, you can get there from the Entries table, or from your user page). A useful place to gather links, post-competition fixes, etc. Some tags are allowed (such as a b, s, i, img) and youtube links are converted to embedded videos. I eventually will add these capabilities to the logs as well. And look at the !gasp! icons...

{"name":"612856","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/c\/dc0fbb691855116a2ecfb7130b164ee8.png","w":1114,"h":1754,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/c\/dc0fbb691855116a2ecfb7130b164ee8"}
https://tins.amarillion.org/entry/219

User pages already existed, but I've embellished it with thumbnails for each game:

{"name":"612858","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/f\/0fdbed49126116475c4650956c2a788e.png","w":1114,"h":1824,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/f\/0fdbed49126116475c4650956c2a788e"}
https://tins.amarillion.org/user/allefant/

I haven't addressed the styling of the user pages yet, that will be the next step.

very nice.

something day i must change the description.

Who is this user allefant I wonder.

Is it possible to merge two accounts?

Ooh that sounds like some premium account level feature request there. You might need to have a ✨ TINS premium ✨ account for service like that.

Yeah I'll merge them. Do you want to be elias or allefant?

No worries, Elias qualifies

elias, same as here, thanks

I have some games without pictures, but they are in the log of each game. How do you retrieve which picture have to be used ?

Good question. Right now, the screenshots were copied from the logs with this script. For each entry/entrant, it picks the most recent log post with an image.

In the future, I will make it so you can select/upload the screenshot by yourself.

If you don't want to wait for that, just send me a screenshot that you want uploaded in a PM and I'll do so manually.

Edit:
Finally no problem. I didn't submit the entry on given year.
Edit2: While I did submit other finished entries it was for some ChristmasHack and SpeedHack.

Done, I've merged your accounts. You should be able to log in as before.