Donating brings additional benefits over and above normal membership of the site, such as an advert free experience for example. More accurately it should be thought of as a subscription rather than a donation I guess.

Perhaps there is room for a method to allow people to donate on a one off basis, by way of saying thanks for the help, which does not bring the benefits that a subscriber gets?

If i'm not mistaken the donations feature on daniweb just uses a paypal subscription for recurring billing. Donate a single time and cancel the subscription. You could also go through the donation process and get Dani's email from paypal before you confirm the donation, then close out of all that mess, go in to paypal and just send her money. They also have the mailing address listed on some of the pages on daniweb if you want to send a check. You have a number of options

I suppose you could also dig up her home address on the internet and send it there. That is a little bit more creepy but also more personal.

DaniWeb does have a proper office you know

Address can be found by clicking the Contact Us link at the bottom of every page.

A few years ago i was very nearly going to air-mail a cheque to her, never happened though.

I actually PMed Dani with this same question a few weeks ago, but I received no response. I didn't want to post it on the forums though. If you guys want to get a one time donation system set up, let me know when I don't have to go out of my way to give you money. But I imagine the real reason no one time system is set up is that it actually makes more money to set up a monthly system because people who might just make a one time donation and then never bother again will sign up monthly instead. Which is perfectly ok if that's the case. But you have to consider people like me who are students, or simply don't want to donate periodically, but would like to do so once in a while.

For some reason, she never reads them
I'll try to bring this thread under her attention however.

Hi ... sorry, I don't really read PMs. Email is the best way to get in touch with me

Our donation system simply lends itself the best to a subscription-based service. Aside from all of the benefits such as access to Area 51, a bold username, custom user title, larger avatar, etc that you get for the duration that your member subscription is active, you also receive advertisement-free browsing on DaniWeb. For the most part, the cost of the monthly subscription balances out with the missed revenue from not showing you advertisements over the course of the month. Having it be a PayPal-based subscription also makes it really easy to manage and keep track of, since the forum system automatically integrates with the PayPal API to auto-promote you and auto-demote your DaniWeb membership if your subscription doesn't get renewed.

If you just want to say thanks, you can PayPal me at cscgal@daniweb.com or mail a check to 1140 RXR Plaza, Uniondale NY 11556.