Auctions, challenges, and giveaways are a long-honoured tradition of Desert Bus for Hope, and a great way to raise money for the kids. Last year we implemented a back-end system for Desert Bus in order to track these events, and to introduce our silent auction system. On the whole, we felt that it worked out very well, but there’s always room for improvement!
This year, we’ve updated this system with some new features both on our end, and on yours. These changes should make our lives easier as we progress through the run, and they’ll allow you to do all kinds of cool new things!
The first thing you need to do is head on over to donor.desertbus.org and register an account. You will be required to register if you want to issue a challenge, or bid on a live or silent auction item. All you need to give us in order to register is an email address, so that we can contact in the event that you win yourself a prize. Then, using this personal account you can:
- check the status of your challenges,
- track the silent auctions you are bidding on,
- view your donation history,
- pay for accepted challenges and won auction items,
- add shipping information, and
- manage your donor profile.
On your homepage you’ll also receive messages if you have any outstanding items, like an auction item that needs a shipping address.
The account registration process is already live and running, so if you plan to make us act out a scene from the musical Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark with every role played by a person doing a lousy impression of Sean Connery, or throw down with Octopimp in order to win a lot of autographed widgets, you may want to get this taken care of right away. You wouldn’t want to miss out on an auction because you weren’t signed up!
See you Friday!
Update: Please note: you should use the same e-mail address to register a Donor account as you use for your IRC login. Bidbot will only recognize emails it knows! If you used a different address for your IRC login, you can add that address as an “Additional E-mail” in the “Edit Profile” section of the Donor site.
Do itttttt!
[This has been corrected. BidBot will now recognize e-mails even if the case is different. ~Ashton]
BidBot is also case-sensitive, so if you register [email protected] on IRC and [email protected] on your Donor Account, then BidBot won’t recognize you. (Stupid AutoCorrect). I found that by adding the other e-mail address to “Additional E-Mail Addresses” to my Donor Profile, everything worked just peachy. Just my two cents and a heads up to anyone else who might be having issues.
Don’t forget to add your PayPal e-mail to your profile if it is different.
You might want to explain the difference between donation, challenge, and auction. Some people were getting confused about that during the giveaway last night. I think they weren’t clear on what a challenge was and whether the giveaway counted as one.
This looks like a great system and seems to make things really convenient for donors. Great job, guys!
When you say IRC login, does that mean that the IRC is password-protected this year if you want your own username, or are you saying that your username has to be your email addressf for BidBot to recognize you? I’m hesitant to assume either, because the former would be a huge hassle, and the latter would be begging for trolls to abuse it.
Sam, neither is true. If you want to bid in the auctions you need to register your IRC name with nickserv. Your IRC name can still be anything and anyone can get into the chat without registering.
That’s good to hear. Registering now!
[…] And if you haven’t yet, now is the time to sign up for a donor account. It’s fast, it’s easy, and all you need is an email address. This account will help you to track your bids and donations, and will help us to get your items to you more efficiently and with less loss of sanity. We’re crazy enough already, after all. You must have a donor account in order to bid on the auction items. Learn more here. […]
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