Announcing: give a mefi account as a gift.

October 26, 2006 6:08 PM

Currently in beta: give a mefi account as a gift. I think all the bugs have been worked out. You put in your friend's email, pay the five bucks, and they'll get an email letting them pick a username, password, and other details. If you try it out, let me know if you or your friend gets any errors.
posted by mathowie to feature requests at 6:08 PM (37 comments total)

Well, the first part of the process, where I do five bucks via PayPal, works great. Now I wait 'til my giftee gets email and fills out the "paperwork" for the finale. Thanks, mathowie!
posted by cgc373 at 6:13 PM on October 26, 2006

Yeah, I've ordered one as well. Let's see what happens!
posted by cortex at 6:28 PM on October 26, 2006

Where will we put our answers to the tests? In comments?
posted by bonaldi at 7:05 PM on October 26, 2006

Socks? You shouldn't have!
posted by furtive at 7:06 PM on October 26, 2006 [2 favorites]

Give sock puppets instead of socks this Christmas!
posted by Quietgal at 7:07 PM on October 26, 2006

Hush up gal, you're cramping my style.
posted by furtive at 7:09 PM on October 26, 2006

I sent one to the "future mefite" who attended the most recent NYC meetup.
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:14 PM on October 26, 2006

And Matt can invite people for FREE.

(Of course he always could, but now it look official.)
posted by smackfu at 7:14 PM on October 26, 2006

Has anyone else (er, I mean, anyone else's "friend") received their email yet?
posted by cortex at 7:27 PM on October 26, 2006

My friend received an email and is a new member! All's well, all's well, and all manner of things shall be well!
posted by cgc373 at 8:05 PM on October 26, 2006

Horray, I just sent one!
This is great, thanks Matt.
posted by Quartermass at 8:10 PM on October 26, 2006

yo bitchezzzzz, I'm a new member thanks to my buddy cgc373's gift. no problems to report & happy to be here.
posted by losername at 8:15 PM on October 26, 2006 [1 favorite]

yo bitchezzzzz

Great.
posted by dersins at 8:39 PM on October 26, 2006

yo bitchezzzzz, I'm a new member thanks to my buddy cgc373's gift. no problems to report & happy to be here.

'Sup. Blast Hardcheese. Stand right over here. Nono, don't look up. Just stand here.

*de-orbits elephant*
posted by loquacious at 10:48 PM on October 26, 2006

yo bitchezzzzz, I'm a new member thanks to my buddy cgc373's gift. no problems to report & happy to be here.

Can we pay to have people banned, too?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:44 PM on October 26, 2006

Sorry, that's un-neighborly. Here. Take this umbrella.
posted by loquacious at 11:44 PM on October 26, 2006

I'm sorry too. I just checked, and 'yo bitchezzzzz' is apparently the way that the kids are saying 'I am immensely pleased to meet you, fine new internet friends!' these days.

*gets back into his rocking chair*
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:46 PM on October 26, 2006

I'm not sorry.

"Bitchezzzz" only has four z's. Use a browser with a freakin' spellcheck.
posted by dersins at 11:48 PM on October 26, 2006

Sorry, losername, but all the bitches done gone home. No one left here but us guys. Oh, wait a minute, "bitches" can mean guys now, too, right?

*gets back into rocking chair with stavros*

(But really, it's you, cgc73, hiding behind all those zs, right? Right, cgc?)
posted by flapjax at midnite at 12:35 AM on October 27, 2006

*jingles bells*
posted by NinjaTadpole at 1:28 AM on October 27, 2006

What happens if the account is never activated? For example, the invite gets sucked into an overzealous spamfilter and the intended recipient never sees the invation? Lose your $5?

I assume the invitation can't be anonymous (I didn't test the feature), so while it is unlikely that the recipient wouldn't know who the heck sent the invitation to them, it is possible, especially if the invitation shows someone's username and not their real name. The former may not be a known alias to a gifted recipient.

Just curious. Great idea.
posted by terrapin at 6:06 AM on October 27, 2006

What happens if the account is never activated? For example, the invite gets sucked into an overzealous spamfilter and the intended recipient never sees the invation? Lose your $5?

Well, those are two different issues. In real life, if you send someone a gift, and the person never uses it and never tells you that, too bad. Same here. Your $5 is lost but that's the choice of the recipient.

OTOH, if the person tells you they never got it, and you tell Matt, I'm sure he would cancel the old one and send you a new one.
posted by smackfu at 6:40 AM on October 27, 2006

OK, so I tried this out. I'm thinking of giving a gift membership to my 20-year old nephew. ("Gee thanks, cheap uncle Bob!") So I sent one to myself. (It's a donation, not a sock puppet...)

The only issue I had was that I would have liked to have seen a preview of the the email that goes to the recipient. I want to know what he see when he gets the gift. Ideally, I'd like to add my own "personal message" to the email, but I know that pony might not come out of the stable.
posted by Robert Angelo at 6:41 AM on October 27, 2006

Right after I posted my query--and I don't even have any plans to gift anyone, I was just curious--I read on Matt's site that he invited his father to vox, but his dad never activated the account.

My question is more along those lines. What is the account isn't activated? Also, what if it is refused? Is there a way to refuse an invitation/gift other than to simply not reply? It would be nice if the person being sent the gift could refuse it with a click and have the gift refunded. Is there a way to request a refund IF an account isn't activated for whatever reason?

Just curious about how this works.
posted by terrapin at 6:56 AM on October 27, 2006

Friends don't let friends join Metafilter.
posted by crunchland at 7:20 AM on October 27, 2006 [1 favorite]

terrapin, there are no refunds, just like in giving a gift in life.

You put in your friend's email address, you pay five bucks. They get emailed a special unique one-time-use URL to pick a username and password, which completes the process.

Right now the email just says a friend has given you a metafilter.com account, click here to complete the process, but I might add the original user's full name and email from their account, or send it from their details so their friends are more likely to open the email.

That's why I wanted to test it here with a few people first, because email is notoriously flaky and yeah, it costs five bucks whether or not it gets used, and there's really no way around that.
posted by mathowie at 7:21 AM on October 27, 2006

Heh, turns out my friend already has an account. It caught his email address and told me so. Interesante.
posted by sciurus at 7:23 AM on October 27, 2006

Thanks, Matt. That clears things up. The check against active email addresses is cool too.
posted by terrapin at 7:26 AM on October 27, 2006

The active e-mail address check is indeed cool, although it does compromise anonymity a wee bit because someone can now learn whether I have a MeFi account if I used a known address to sign up. Probably not a big deal for most people, but theoretically it could blow someone's cover ("hey, my husband said he never even reads MeFi, but look, he has an account!!").
posted by brain_drain at 8:31 AM on October 27, 2006

Friends don't let friends join Metafilter
posted by matteo at 8:33 AM on October 27, 2006

What about regifting? And what's the protocol for weddings, do you give two Mefi accounts, or one?
posted by blue_beetle at 8:35 AM on October 27, 2006

I tried this. It worked. Awesome. Thanks.
posted by dead_ at 8:41 AM on October 27, 2006

Oh man, I just realized that I could do a gift status page for the gifters, with a "resend the invite email" button, and a "accepted/no response" status for each account you gifted out. Lemme work on those over the next few days.
posted by mathowie at 11:01 AM on October 27, 2006

Yay. This is excellent.
posted by evariste at 9:24 PM on October 27, 2006

terrapin, there are no refunds, just like in giving a gift in life.

Huh? In "real life" the giftee can often return something to the store that the gifter bought it from, for cash.

IMO, I just don't see a reason you should charge paypal until after the transaction is complete.

I guess it's more like, rather then giving someone a metafilter account as a gift you're giving them a "gift certificate" to the "MetaFilter account store"
posted by delmoi at 11:22 AM on October 28, 2006

Heh. I warned my friend you'd suppose the account was me being a sockpuppet, and I had to explain what a sockpuppet was. No, losername's not me. And yeah, losername had some idea what snark might be forthcoming before the initial comment, so it's cool, I think.
posted by cgc373 at 3:45 PM on October 28, 2006

Thanks. Works like a charm....
posted by klausness at 11:54 AM on October 30, 2006