Validating your Donation

What does "Validating donations" mean?

Simply the process of entering payment confirmation details that you receive from PayPal into the "Donation Wallet" of my plugins. The plugin will contact my "validation server" and provide you with a confirmation (vulgo "validation key") which confirms that you have in fact donated.

Why should you validate your donations?

As a validated donator you get access to pre-releases of new plugins before they are released to the public.
You can use advanced features of my plugins which I will provide for donators only.

How can you validate your donations?

Validating your donations is a simple process which takes less than a minute:
Step 1: Donate
See the Donate page. When you donate, PayPal sends you a confirmation e-mail like this (yours will be in English, en Français, ... of course):

Important: if your E-Mail does not contain an Invoice-ID, please make sure that you in fact donated to me. The e-mail must confirm a donation to "donations@sporttracks-plugins.de".
Step 2: Save the donation details in your "Donation Wallet"
Go to the settings page of any of my plugins and click on the "Donations" button on the very bottom of the settings page.

Note: The plugin must be released after June 12, 2008.


This will open the "Donation Wallet".

Enter the donation details found in your PayPal confirmation e-mail into the wallet:
and press the "Add" button.

Enter the values exactly as listed in the e-mail. You should copy/paste the values to avoid typos.
Please make sure that you use the 12 digit "Invoice ID" ("Rechnungsnummer"),
not the longer "Confirmation Number" ("Bestätigungsnummer").


The plugin checks the invoice ID for plausibility. If it detects an invoice ID which looks strange, it will warn you with this popup. You can however override this warning and click "Yes" to continue.


Step 3: Validate your donations
Click on the "Validate" button.

Note: you must be online at this point of time. Your PC's firewall must be configured to allow outgoing requests from SportTracks. When you can display maps in SportTracks, the validation should work as well.

Within a few seconds my validation server will send you a validation key and this message will pop up.

Please check that the validated totals are what you expect, before clicking the "Yes" button.
If the message tells you that one of the donations cannot be validated, check if you entered the correct amount, currency and 12 digit invoice ID.

The donation list of your wallet should now include this amount in the "sum of validated donations".
For simplicity, your validated donations are converted to Euro (exchange rate as of June 2008: approx. $1.50 = 1.00€).


That's it. Your SportTracks installation on this PC will now benefit from all extras that I offer to validated donators.

Important note:
The validation is valid for this machine only. When you want to validate your donation on a second machine (e.g. your notebook), you will have to go through steps 2 and 3 on the second machine as well.
I will send you validation keys for 2 machines without asking. If you need more for any reason, please send me a personal message ("PM") in the SportTracks forum.