Announcing the IFTF Patreon!

General IFTF News and Feedback
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The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s board of directors is thrilled to announce the creation of a new way that you can help support our mission and get some fun perks in the process. This initiative has been in process for many months and we are delighted to finally launch it for the public.

You may now support IFTF on the Patreon platform, at the following URL:

https://www.patreon.com/IFTF

Backing IFTF on Patreon provides an additional, accessible route to helping us continue to serve the community of narrative game lovers and its ever-evolving needs. By becoming a member of our Patreon, you can unlock various perks, such as:

  • A special role and access to an exclusive channel in the IFTF Discord ($5/month tier)
  • A unique profile badge here on the Intfiction forums ($5/month tier)
  • A scaling discount on NarraScope admission ($10/month tier or higher, after 6 continuous months)
  • Access to the Secretest Discord channel ($100/month tier, for you wild and wacky folks!)

We plan to continue to expand the perks over time as each of IFTF’s committees hooks into the system. We also are open to suggestions about additional things we can offer, so if you have ideas, please feel free to contact IFTF.

IFTF Patreon Q & A

Q: I already financially support IFTF another way. Is that changing or being eliminated?

A: No! This is simply another option for helping out.

Q: If I support IFTF via PayPal, it’s considered a tax-exempt donation. Is that still true with Patreon?

A: We advise checking with a tax advisor with expertise in your specific jurisdiction, but Patreon states that “if the creator is a legally recognized not-for-profit company and you receive nothing of value in return for your payment to them, then some jurisdictions allow the patron to take a tax deduction.”

For more information, this is a good place to start: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/207099326-Is-my-payment-to-a-creator-tax-deductible

Q: I have an idea for a perk or feedback about the Patreon!

A: That isn’t a question, but you can still get in contact with us via the many routes outlined on our website: Contacting IFTF

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation is registered in the United States as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.

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Which channel is the deluxe channel :woman_detective:

E: this sounds like a joke but I really can’t tell

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My guess is that if you don’t see it, you need to wait for an admin to add you.

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tax-exempt donation

Well, Patreon have a habit of adding sales overseas. Personally I think this is incorrect, but that’s another story. But the pertinent fact is that donations do not attract sales tax.

So that means, if Patron add sales tax to your “donation”, it’s not a donation and therefore not tax-exempt.

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This is not necessarily the case – I really doubt Patreon’s algorithm for assessing sales tax is 100% accurate, for one thing, and at least under US law a vendor incorrectly assessing a sales tax on a donation wouldn’t automatically prevent it from being tax-deductible. On the other hand, it might make the IRS ask some questions if you claimed it as a deduction and they saw the sales tax on the receipt when doing an audit.

So the FAQ’s “we advise checking with a tax advisor with expertise in your specific jurisdiction” is probably the safest way to go if the potential for a deduction is a big deal to you (though in that case, I’m sure they’d ask you some hard-to-answer questions about how to estimate the fair market value of a secret Discord channel!)

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you’re right. I don’t think their sales tax levies are correct either. But if they aren’t, isn’t that illegal?

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Yeah, at least in the US, overcharging sales tax is illegal, and has penalties attached to it (from my general understanding, overcharging but remitting it all to the government requires you to repay your customers but usually doesn’t come with much else in the way of punishment; overcharging and keeping the money may get you into criminal territory). So a nastygram to Patreon might be effective; reporting violations to the relevant state or local enforcement agency could potentially work, but I doubt most have the resources to take on what I’m guessing would be a big complicated investigation with generally modest sums at stake, which I suspect is how they get away with being sloppy.

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I’m not seeing another channel on Discord yet, and I signed up as a Patreon supporter over 3 days ago.

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Re: Taxes. I believe the wording “tax-exempt” was really meant to be “tax-deductible”, i.e., deductible from income when filing your income taxes.

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We’re looking into this!

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The IFTF board will consult with the IFTF treasurer to see if we can clarify this.

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I just checked the settings, and the Patreon/Discord native integration seems to be functioning properly, and the backer roles do have access to the appropriate channels. Have you linked your Discord account with your Patreon account? The only way that Discord can see your backing is if you have both connected.

If that’s not the issue and the Discord bot hasn’t granted the appropriate roles in another 24 hours or so, I’ll see what could be further clogging those pipes.

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After experimenting, I found that I needed to reconnect my discord to patreon, leave the itif server, then rejoin. Sorry for the small fonts!

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Mine has been linked for a very long time. I also checked it was set up ok last night.

However @kamineko’s tip about leaving the server and reconnecting fixed my problem just now. Now I can access the special channel. It’s a bit unintuitive, and not really how things should work ideally. But we both got there in the end!

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I think it’s just a small confusion of terminology - IFTF is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, and as such donations to you are tax-deductible.* So it’s a “tax-exempt donation” to the extent it’s a donation to a tax-exempt organization, and a “tax-deductible donation” to the extent the donor can deduct it from their taxes. But I agree with Phil that the latter is probably clearer and more familiar to most folks.

* With the caveat mentioned in the FAQ that the fair market value of whatever a donor receives in exchange for a contribution needs to be subtracted from the amount of the deduction; dunno if there’s case law or IRS opinion letters on how to assess this for Discord channels or forum badges! The NarraScope discount seems to have clearer economic value, though!

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When I was writing donation receipts, I was careful to say something like

IFTF is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit organization. Your donation may be tax-deductible as a charitable contribution.

I don’t want to say your donation is tax-deductible, because that would be tax advice which we are not qualified to give! Not everybody will be able to deduct that particular contribution on their tax forms. (For example, you might already have exceeded the amount the IRS lets you deduct. Or you might not be a US taxpayer at all. We don’t know!)

I would rephrase the original Q to “If I support IFTF via PayPal, it’s a donation to a tax-exempt non-profit organization. Is that still true with Patreon?”

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