Well, if anything this paid mod thing has done is made me realize I have been a bit remiss in my donations. So I went back and checked on my recent downloads. Now I've always just noticed or not noticed the donate button and gone back individually before but this time I noticed something. Totally unscientific but of my mods it lists me as downloading only about 10% have the button at all. For some reason I thought it was much higher. This probably doesn't mean much but I was surprised.

Anyway, I will be more aware from now on. I encourage everyone to at least endorse the mods you like.

Dark0ne recently changed the system at Nexus so that you can choose which of your files you want to accept donations for. Before this change, the donation button automatically showed up on every file by an author. Now is is by default disabled (however, authors have a donation button on their profile page), and the authors have to enable manually for each file.

This is probably the reason why so few mods had a donation button when you checked.

Word of warning: The current nexus donation implementation will give your address details to the mod author as it's considered a "payment". I'm not sure if they got around to fixing that yet.

Edit: On the bright side, it lets you find out you live unreasonably close to the person you're donating to

The http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/tracker/issue-36809-donations-are-handled-as-merchant-payments/ doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. I don't know what that "Waiting for user feedback" status means...

If you give a modder money, does it really matter if you also give your address, and such? Do you think he is going to do something silly with it, like sign you up for more spam than you can shake a forest at??

Or is this simply "I want to donate anonymously".......

Do you really want to give your address to some random person on the internet?

I wonder if they did merchant payment to avoid paypal's taking a cut..

Aha Emma always with the answer.

When I donated to Arthmoor it brought up PayPal unless that changed in the last day or two,

It's not anonymous, because PayPal still gives the recipient your name and email address. It's more that there's no reason for the recipient to be given your address, and while you'd hope the person you're giving money is trustworthy, you don't know that, and there's potential for abuse.

No, PayPal still takes a cut.

Yes, it's pretty basic internet security not to give out personal details. No matter who you give information to online, you should never assume they'll be the only person to see it.

As Wrinklyninja already pointed out in his bug report, that's exactly what they've done. It's set up as a merchant transaction like in the old eBay days. So because of this it's easy to source the ones coming from Nexus. Those that come from the links I've posted elsewhere show up properly as donations and are nearly anonymous.

Paypal is going to take a cut no matter what. Something like a flat $0.30 plus 3% I think. The cut gets waived if it's a direct transfer from within Papyal's systems though.