Hahaha, reading all that US Tax stuff gave me a crazy idea, what with the portfolio thinger they were talking about.  CG can HIRE who they like to make content, and everyone else gets the free upload space!  

(No, I'm not serious, it just struck me as an amusing not-solution.  ;D)

In reply to:

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If this place was working correctly it wouldn't take too long to reach that $600 amount in a years time. With my mediocre attempts at promotion I did around $200 last year. And as for the people in other countries ... try selling something at Amazon.com's CreateSpace WITHOUT providing some kind of tax information. They require it up front BEFORE you can even start trying selling anything. Business is business and the Internet is making the world smaller everyday and sooner or later ALL the barriers will fall. Be sure you not under one of them like I was ... it hurts like h#)).

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People buy and sell things on E'Bay all day long without giving their SSN number away. I know I have. I haven't sold on Amazon so I can't speak to that site's policies.

Well another point from my standing is My main income is SSDI disability income which isn't even taxable. I can make up to $700 a month of outside income before having to report taxes and I haven't come anywhere near that sort of income here yet.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Albert Einstein

You guys are talking like your actually going to have some final say in what this site does.  Sharecg is going to do what it thinks is best regardless of what any of us thinks it should do.

The only influence we have is to stay or go.

In reply to WalkerofShadows
Just to add to the US tax side-discussion:

"For royalty income, a 1099-MISC must be generated for $10 USD or more in royalties. "

Quote from ADP: '"Enter your email address to receive your private access-code via email"

 isn't that hard to fill out. Even not for an impatient Poser user hunting for free crap ;)'

Not difficult to fill out, but not desirable either.  When you know nothing about the site that prompt might as well read:

"Enter your email address so we can sell it to every [censored] site mailing list we can find, filling your email box with a boatload of crap mail every day, so much so that the address you give us becomes useless."

This is my point.  If you don't know sharecg and you have no idea what it's about, it is relegated to the status of yet another site that wants information they really don't need for you to perform a rather simple activity.

Which leads people to wonder why they would want it in the first place, and the most jumped to conclusion will be that they are selling the email addresses for spam.  Oh, and just to head off the eventual "But you could put up a thing promising you don't do that", funny thing is it's usually the sites that make such a big deal about not selling your email address that are the worst offenders.

From Onnetz: "You guys are talking like your actually going to have some final say in what this site does.  Sharecg is going to do what it thinks is best regardless of what any of us thinks it should do."

Umm... well, I followed a link here posted by one of the admins in which he asked for ideas and discussion on what sharecg should do next in regards to revenue sharing.

I thought I was being a nice guy by offering up what I felt were good solutions to the problems to the previous revenue sharing system, and thus far I have to admit all I've really gotten is a lot of face slapping in return.

I didn't come here to start a coup and take over the board, I have no armed revolutionaries and or mercenaries hidden at a boat dock somewhere, and honestly I'm a bit taken aback by the way some people try to personalize their objections to any suggestions made for improvements in the process.

They asked for suggestions, I provided them - thought that was what they wanted.  If they hadn't have asked, I would have just kept my mouth shut and been happy.  Hope that clarifies the situation for you.

From MatrixWorks: "Any user must be registered and logged into the site for views or downloads to be payable"

I have to admit I still oppose this idea strongly, because I don' think it's going to accomplish the desired goal.  The scammers can sign up for all sorts of bogus accounts quite easily, all they need are seperate email addressess, and it's not realy difficult to setup a few hundred on yahoo, hotmail or any of another dozen places out there with free email accounts.

So requiring a login for download in and of itself doesn't really stop the scammers (though admittedly it does make there job a tad bit more difficult), all it really does is make the board far less friendly to people wandering in off the street.  I think the damage you do with that perception far outweighs any good that comes from requiring registration for download.

I think most of the rest of the ideas presented have merit, but the pay per download idea I think is not really going to have the desired effect, indeed I think over time it's going to cost the site a lot in lost revenue.

Right.. go to renderosity and you'll have to sign up for an account.  Go to download a freebie, and a lot of the links in there freebie section lead over here to sharecg, which would then ask you to sign up for yet another account, etc, ad infinitum.

Like I said, yes, requiriing people to sign up for an account will help lessen the abuse, provided you throw in a lot of bot checks and other security measures to go with it.

But lets look at the overall effect that has on your community.  Some guy follows a link here from renderosity, discovers he has to sign up for an account and does.  Then he has to fill in a security check to prove he isn't a bot.  Then he downloads his file, and at the end of all that his thought is "damn, what a pain in the butt for one file, hope it was worth it". 

Whereas that same guy shows up here at sharecg following a renderosity link and downloads his file.  Since he's done and the webpage is already open, he browses around a bit, sees all the great stuff there is here on share cg, and then gets interested.  Pretty soon he signs up, and realzing he can host stuff here for free that people dont' have to jump through hoops to download, becomes a content provider and active member of the community.

Odds are good the second never would have happened if the first part of the process had required the account information and the bot checks and all the other crap that is going to be need to make a pay per download system work.

The whole point for many of us hosting our freebies here is that you can download them without all that extraneous nonsense.  Our focus is on the clients, the folks actually downloading and using the stuff.

That is where I think sharecg's focus must remain if it's going to continue to be successful, I think if they start burdening their new vistors with a lot of extra hoopla and security checks they are going to have a lot of new users say "Nope, just isn't worth the hassle", and go elsewhere.

Make your clients happy and they come back, indeed they bring others with them.  Irritate them and they go elsewhere, it's as simple as that.  So while the account info/bot check/blood sample et all approach would work in weeding out the scammers, I think it would eventually kill the revenue sharing concept in another way, there just wouldn't be much revenue to share.