The Sanctimonious Self Righteous Tossers of the Internets

It's a strange thing the Internet, so much of it is available for free, that we get used to that fact. The moment you even suggest that something previously accessible to everyone will become chargable, pretty soon posts start to appear on forums everywhere which span from, "I won't be paying, I'll go somewhere else" to the inevitable gleeful addition of, "well I never went there anyway, it's rubbish."

Although usually when I state they say the word rubbish, what they really write is the word s***.

Now all this is fair enough, and somewhat typical for standard internet banter. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of originality or any constructive contribution to the subject matter, would enable me to write an automated self content generating forum. It would be easy, just take some basic comments from the odd left wing liberal and the (often more prominant) right wing biggots, and substitute in whatever happens to be the topic of the day.

I often suspect people are the same everywhere, with most well balanced forums representing an accurate microcosm which well reflects the world at large. Of course from this I naturally exclude the BBC's Have Your Say discussion pages, the House Price Crash forums, and pretty much anything related to the Daily Mail. Still, there is a nice antidote to all this reactionary, ignorant, racist, stupid, retarted, unfunny crap, and that is spEak You're bRanes, so it all evens out in the end.

Which sort of brings me on to something I did 6 months ago, the results of which sort of even suprised me a bit. See, I play World of Warcraft a fair bit and over the years I've been developing and extending an addon for it called MinnaStats. One version of it was downloaded over 100,000 times, which isn't insignificant, so I had an idea.

If say even half that many people were really using and enjoying it, maybe a tiny proportion of them would chuck me something like £1, or $1 or whatever tiny little amount was their equivalent in whatever country they used it in. I wasn't asking for a lot, just a contribution towards the ridiculous amount of hours I'd spent making the thing.

When people first used the addon, it would pop up a window telling them I'd spent a lot of time on it, and it would be nice of them to throw me the sort of money people don't think twice about losing down the back of the sofa. If they lied, and said they had contributed, it would never bug them again, otherwise it would bug them once every so many times they logged into WoW.

Well, six months on, over 45,000 people have downloaded it, and I have received precisely three donations, one for £5 and two for £10. So basically nearly everyone who is using it, was content with just clicking whatever they needed to do to stop it nagging them. And I'm completely fine with that, I was never demanding people handed over any cash, merely suggesting they might want to if they really liked the addon and felt like saying thank you.

Three people who use it, the ones who actually donated, went way beyond what I suggested, which seems to indicate that the sort of person who actually wants to contribute towards the costs of things they like, are very generous people.

What I didn't expect was the equal number of people who went the other way, people who felt not only did they have the right to feel affronted by the mere cheek of me even suggesting they give a single penny of their extremely hard earned cash to benefit someone other than themselves, but that they should tell me about that fact.

Someone called Mack55 said, "Downloaded this addon, but before I had a chance to really evaluate it, I received two unsolicited popup messages from developer asking for donations. So, I deleted this mod and will look for something without those annoying requests for money."

This is the sort of person I can only describe as a tosser. I have spent well over 100 hours over the years working on this addon, and yet he somehow thinks I did that entirely for the purpose of then putting out my hand in front of his own person to cheekily demand he gives me cash. What a twat.

Oh, and some other guy wrote to me to say I was violating the T&Cs for addons by asking for donations. I think he's just talking crap really, I'm pretty sure you can't charge for an addon and I'm not doing that I'm giving it away free. But the self righteousness of these people really makes me laugh.

All of this reminds me, I really should finalise and realise the next version...