Question about donations

[flang]

Hello. I have a question about a hypothetical donation system:

 

I am wondering if, say there was a system where Nexus users voluntarily paid a recurring amount (say $1 U.S. monthly, or $10 yearly) towards a "donation pool," and that pool was then divied up and distributed by Nexus to all mod authors with a donation option on their mod pages.

 

Ignoring the potential issues with such a system for now (such as the potential for abuse, or how Nexus would decide how much each mod author would receive). I am only wondering if such a system would be legal.

 

Assume that the system would be completely transparent, with Nexus publically disclosing all the funds they received and how they distributed them each year. Would they be legally in the clear?

[acelogan]

They've stated before that Nexus doesn't want to be a middleman for the donations; they don't want the responsibility of handling the money.

 

I don't blame them, leave that to the multitude of other services available. I do wish, however, there was a better way for mod authors to post links to whatever payment platform they want to utilizefor donations; I.e. Patreon, PayPal, GoFundMe, etc. Right now it's not very supportive of this, but I think they're considering working on it/improving it.

[flang]

Did they say why they didn't want to be a "middleman"? Not because it wouldn't be legal, I hope? I feel the advantages to both the Nexus site and its community would be substantial.

 

The purpose of such a system (other than to simply increase the amount of money modders receive) would be to address the problem of users like me, who want to give money to modders but without having to make repeated, individual donations to each author of the 50 mods I've downloaded.

 

In other words, if I spent $20 on Skyrim itself, I'd be happy to add another $20 to pay to the mod authors on top of that. But having to separate that amount into 50 different Paypal transactions is both a hassle, and makes me feel like a selfish jerk because I just gave a mod author $0.10 for the mod they spent 3 years making.

 

Meanwhile from the mod authors perspective, I assume they would be happy if they received $100 for the mod they made, regardless of whether it came from a single donor who gave $100 all at once, or from 1,000 donors who gave $0.10 each. With the obvious conclusion being that there are very few users on Nexus who would ever consider making a $100 donation to anyone, but quite a lot of users who would give $1 per month.

Edited July 8, 2015 by flang