I am a blender user from China, and I have seen the discussion about the difficulty of donating in Chinese community more than once. In fact, the number of CN blender users in is quite large Many of them want to support blender through donation but they can’t because of the limited donation method.
In China, the most commonly used and convenient payment method is Alipay. In recent years, more and more foreign companies began to support Alipay, such as steam. Obviously blender is backward in this respect. I hope blender could consider this donation method.
I don’t know if posting here is correct, because I can’t find the email of blender developer. I’m sorry if it causes trouble.
From the Stripe documentation it does not seem to be complicated to integrate, and I vaguely remember this topic being discussed before. Maybe there are some not-so-obvious stoppers of why we can’t just enable it.
I actually dug a bit deeper. It appears that using Alipay and some other systems in China for donations is against their terms of services. We even had some of them enabled in our configuration, but they eventually force-disabled it.
If you have experience in making it possible to have those systems work for donations, please contact the fundsupport, so we can look into it again.
Thank you for your time, but unfortunately I’m just a common user who want to support blender. There’s nothing I can do about the conflict of terms.
I later learned that blender CN community is also receiving donations, and they will transfer them to blender foundation regularly. However, I believe most CN users tend to get information directly from Blender’s official website instead of CN community, let alone this donation page.
If the conflict of terms is hard to be solved, maybe put this page to a more obvious place of blender’s donation page without violating the terms would be a better option? I’m not sure.