Here’s an idea I’ve read elsewhere in the community: a waiting list for anyone who tries to join an up-front creator’s supporters really close to the 1st. Say, if they sign up on the 21st (a date I’m pulling out of nowhere to illustrate the point), they don’t actually join or get the tier benefits until the 1st, when their first charge happens and they are allowed to get what is promised for the tier.
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I saw that too. LOADS of options to A/B test before upending the system.
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THIS would be a huge help!
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- I would love to see Patreon help browsers discover cool content and creators they might like to support. This would be super helpful.
- Let patrons pay in their own currency. I would especially like to see the Australian Dollar added.
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My biggest pain points:
MESSAGING
- I’m really missing some basic functionality: the ability to add a subject line, option to “mark unread”, and a way to either sort, label or add messages to a task list. I’d also love to have an option to save frequently used snippets, a bigger area to compose my messages and some formatting options. This would make the customer service part so much easier. I now need a 3rd party app and still fail to keep track of messages that require some kind of follow up.
- Messaging multiple patrons from the PRM shouldn’t cause individual messages to be marked as read.
- Messages currently break when you use a “<” symbol.
PATRONS / PRM
- Automated reports (or notifications) on declined pledges, but also previously declined pledges that went through months later. I believe this happens when patrons return, after their last pledge was declined. This should be more transparent. I don’t know if I still owe any patrons any rewards, I can only imagine what an off-putting experience this must be for them.
- It would be such a time-saver if I could do custom csv exports: for example all €25 patrons who pledged in the past two months, or all patrons who pledged €10 for >=6 months.
- Exit surveys: currently anon, make this optional. Some Patrons assume I know who they are, and it really sucks when I cannot reply to them to acknowledge / inquire / follow up on whatever they shared. It’s quite painful when someone passed, or lost their job/house, or had a baby, when you cannot respond, because you have no clue who it came from.
- Lifetime support data is inaccurate and hard to get insight into. I would like to track pledge-anniversaries, but join dates do not take into account pauses (patrons who cancelled and returned months later).
POSTS / ARCHIVE
- Select tier-posts show up as locked to patrons who pledge to higher levels, without any kind of explanation. I made it a habit to use the snippet to explain this, but it would be nice if Patreon can add some kind of clarification so people don’t lower their pledge.
NOTIFICATIONS
- Not working properly in the app, deleted pledges aren’t showing.
- New Pledges that are Cancelled are removed completely, this is very confusing. I want to see 2 notifications instead of none.
- I want email notifications for cancelled pledges.
- I need some reassurance that patrons cannot claim a slot on a limited tier without actually completing their payment first. This has happened once before, and I found out by accident… (Ticket is still open).
BENEFITS
- Tracking: it seems broken, data doesn’t match the PRM, so I don’t rely on it and never dared to use it.
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We’re told they won’t add this function because it “bums out the CEO” of the company. Seriously…
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Kickstarter has this amazing feature to check off on a list that you’ve fulfilled an individual backer’s rewards. There is no notification, there is no requirement to do so, it is there purely for the creator to remember and visualize who’s received rewards. I would love to see a feature like this (completely optional for creators to use) for fulfilling physical rewards month by month. I know it would be tricky considering it should reset each month, but it’d really truly be a quality of life improvement if implemented in some way.
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The CVS files I download from Patreon ‘corrupt’ special characters. Whether I open them in Excel, Numbers (built-in Mac spreadsheet app), or directly open them in Google Drive, most special characters become corrupted. This is only true for Patreon; I regularly download CVS files from BigCartel, Kickstarter, etc. and have never seen this happen. By corruption, I mean “ä” turns into a “???ñ” and I have to manually fix the spreadsheet. It’s bothersome because I have quite a few international Patrons whose addresses contain special letters (because their languages use special accents).
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Preview the blurriness of images for Patron-only posts. I posted a clean, clear image for my Patrons, then realized that the blurriness did nothing for me after posting. I recognize I could change my graphics to compensate, like maybe maybe the main image smaller, but it’d be nice to preview the blur or even change the overlay to be blurrier/less blurry/different color or vignette.
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Hope this helps:
#1 this feature already exists in the PRM. You can mark Patrons “Complete”. You can pull up this column from the cogwheel, and then use the Filter to filter patrons based on completion status. Must have a billing cycle selected or it will not show.
#2 can be fixed easily: if you import your csv into Excel, choose Unicode (UTF-8).
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Thanks! I was looking and hoping for those options and never found them. I’ll check again so I can make use of those features.
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This was asked for back in 2018…
WE NEED A WAY TO DELETE PATRONS THAT DOESN"T SEND A NASTY MESSAGE!!!
Is this really that difficult of a fix? Because it is a royal pain to not be able to update a patron list that resembles reality. Why has nothing has been done to address this rather small fix for 3 years? So many people have asked for it!
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Or, just stop the automatic email. I don’t care whether I delete or block someone. But the email notification needn’t be sent upon blocking. What other platform sends an inflammatory notification that one has been blocked? If I block someone, it is for a reason, usually abusive actions on the person’s part. The last thing that is wise it to rile that person up by notifying them of being blocked.
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I’ve concluded that Patreon doesn’t want us to delete Patrons, because that would impact the stats they show venture capitalists. I can’t think of a single other rational reason for not disabling the message or making it optional
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I’m back a few months later! I couldn’t imagine sharing my game without Patreon, so I’m very grateful for its services. I do still have a few pain points, though, one a very big deal and the others very small…
- I wish it was clearer when I am going to be charged for merchandise, and what day that will happen. I only “payout” my Patreon once a month, usually when it’s finished collecting pledges for the new month (around the 2nd or the 3rd), but lately it seems like I can’t do it at any point in the month before I get a message saying this:
I hate this message haha, especially because when I check my merchandise tab, it doesn’t actually show anything in terms of which Patrons are eligible and waiting to receive their merch. (The message above said 58 merch items have not been delivered yet: does that mean it’s due to address issues on the Patrons’ side? Because I haven’t paid for them yet? What? How do I resolve it?)
I wish I could know when it’s okay to payout when all the items have been paid for without having to worry about it. The help page says “Merch items are usually processed on the 4th, 12th, 20th, and 28th”, but could there be some sort of cutoff day or alert saying I’ve paid everything I need to for the month, and it’s okay to pay out? The uncertainty and confusion is driving me crazy!
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The UI for private messages is pretty primitive. I would love an ability to bookmark, mark as read or unread, and have actual group messages rather than “mass” messages to individuals. Also, again, the ability to attach images/screenshots on both sides would really help when Patrons need some help navigating the page or tech support…
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This is small, but having a spoiler text option similar to what’s here on Discourse would be an amazing feature for me. I’m developing a game and sometimes talk about what will happen in future segments of the game. Hiding such text in a spoiler blur such as this one would really help the Patrons who want to go into the final version of the game blind, or even for new Patrons who haven’t had the chance to catch up to where everyone else is yet. This is a minor function, though, so it’s not hugely urgent. Would be nice to have, though!
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The Messaging system, it is utterly archaic. It makes communicating with patrons so difficult (and fails at sending notifications most of the time) that I have to stick to other platforms just to communicate effectively.
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i still have my ability to make new threads on here taken away but for whatever reason, but chrome thinks that the comment section is a form to be filled out. i’ve accidentally knocked it at least once and obliterated what i was writing with “rhode island”
Yes, agreed. I really don’t like the “lock”. What I mean by this specifically is that patron could show the video thumbnail, the post title, the photo and any text that describes the post.This way potential new patrons don’t get the boring posts that don’t sell.
- Allow cloudflare as a supported embedded video. Right now when someone clicks my cloudflare video link it opens up a new page. Anyone with that new page/link can access that video even after they have left my Patreon. If it was embeddable, like Vimeo, that would not happen.
- Notifications are just a mess
- Some kind of notification when a Patron that has cancelled returns. Right now I just play the refresh game to see how many current subscribers I have.
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Main photo is blurry, especially text, due to Patreon resizing / compression.
(Funny, it actually looks better here in the forum than on my page).
I have tried everything: making image much bigger / higher res, resizing image to fit exactly in the width of the display in browser, and finally re-editing to make the image the exact size recommended in your help center. Unfortunately, my beautifully-designed post cover image is just looking blurry and terrible when uploaded to your service. Especially text. I don’t remember this being such a problem before. Please consider asking your engineers for less compression. We do pay to use your service, I want my stuff to look good!
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Thank you! Right like after I block someone and they get a notification m. It will tile them up to sabotage me even more.
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