I think the pit is the right place for this. If it is not, feel free to move it mods.
Sorry if this has been asked/explained before. I asked several other dopers and received a variety of answers. Someone people that I talked to expressed interest in hearing the official answer also, so I decided to post a thread.
There have been a lot of posts by Guests lately that I have enjoyed reading. I’d love to purchase memberships to the boards for these guests in order to keep them around. I’d prefer to this anonymously, simply because I don’t want them to feel they have to pussyfoot around me.
My assumption was, I email a mod (Tubadiva?), pay the mod and then the mod changes the user’s status. However, someone said that I had to log into the person’s account and pay with their account.
You don’t have to log in as the user - IIRC you just do it as if you’re going to reup your own membership, and then in the URL for the subscription page, replace your user number with that of the user you’re sponsoring. You can find their user number by clicking on their name, which will bring you to their profile. In the URL of their profile page, you will see their user number.
I don’t know the answer off hand, but I do know that About This Message Board is probably the best place to get the answer, so I’m moving the thread there.
I’ve sponsored a couple of people anonymously, one of whom got banned three days later. Since there was no obvious jerk behavior and no warnings from Mods, it seems very likely that the person was a sock puppet, and worse yet, it was probably a banned user whom I disliked intensely.
I’m wondering if the Mods would be willing to do a bit of investigation (on request) when someone is asking to be sponsored, so that a sock could be detected before some nice Doper was out $14.95.
The Mods did offer to look into refunding my $14.95, but I declined for various reasons.
If the mods look into refunding for sponsoring a future sock ( no one would willingly sponsor a sock puppet) and lets say they were banned within days of signing on, as described, what if those monies could be reserved/applied to another seemingly hopeful prospective doper?
The Reader’s not going to let us get too fancy here; they really don’t want us messing with this process much, if at all; the bookkeeping needs to be as straightforward as possible.
I’m afraid unless there is overwhelming and/or compelling reason otherwise, if someone with nefarious purpose lies to you and gets you to sponsor them and they end up getting banned, there’s not going to be much we can do to turn the situation around. I’m sorry. Please be careful when you exert those beautiful and most generous impulses to make sure the object of your affection is truly deserving.