dev.to staff

Posted on May 7, 2020

Grant for the Web Hackathon Help Thread

#gftwhackathon

Looking for help with your Grant for the Web Hackathon submission? You came to the right place!

Team members from Grant for the Web and Coil will be making themselves available to help people who runs into issues or have questions as part of the Grant for the Web Hackathon.

You are encouraged to comment in this thread for asynchronous assistance. We've also set up a dedicated DEV Connect group channel for more synchronous help. To join the Connect group, just leave a comment in this thread asking to be added.

If you'd like to share more general progress that you're making on your project, you can do so in the community update thread!

Coil Trial (Update)

Coil is generously providing a free trial for Grant for the Web Hackathon participants. Please see this thread for more details:

Free Coil trial for all #gftwhackathon participants

Ben Halpern ・ May 15 ・ 1 min read

#gftwhackathon #webmonetization

Top comments (78)

@nobody • May 7 '20

(add @me (.ConnectRoom) 
    :please)

Precious adeyinka • May 9 '20

What language is this?

Elizabeth Alcalá • May 7 '20

Hey, may I be added to the Connect room, please?

Peter Kim Frank • May 7 '20

Please add me to the Connect room.

Eka • May 25 '20

Sorry—n00b question but I just want to confirm my understanding. Web Monetization is run with the document.monetization API (docs), so it’s only supposed to run on the client-side where document is available.

If we have monetized (ie. “paywalled”) content and implement it on a SSR site, the server-generated pages will only have the free content; no way to authenticate user from the server. Is this correct?

ali spivak • May 26 '20

Yes, generally the easiest way to add web monetization is client-side with the meta tag. We are working on offering back-end integration and options.

There is also an option to use the OAuth Web Monetization Script. However, you will need to register your client app and be approved for OAuth access. docs.coil.com/

Eka • May 27 '20

Thank you for your answer, Ali!

Stephanie Handsteiner • May 8 '20

May I be added to the connect room, please? 🙃

John Peters • May 8 '20 • Edited

I'd like to see some other ideas on what these solutions could provide to this project.

For example:

Is there an api to pull down all current payments, registered users for (our and other) sites, people showing interest?
Is there an api, that lists all sites participating?
Should particpating sites provide that type of information?
Is there a need for sites to provide their own registration?
Do developers of this software participate in monetization each time their solution is used by some site somewhere?
Can we market our own solutions (of course right?)

I'm green to the monetization concept but like the idea of micro-payments!

ali spivak • May 8 '20

Is there an api to pull down all current payments, registered users for (our and other) sites, people showing interest?

you can see how much you have received from web monetized users in the wallet's dashboard. Coil doesn't host any public APIs consumed by Web Monetized sites, the only interaction occurs via the Web Monetization API itself. For privacy reasons we can't expose any lists of registered users and we don't even know which users visited which sites. On getting information on all payments the best way to do that is track the events emitted in the Web Monetization API. Once receipts are out those payment events will be verifiable by their backend.

Is there an api, that lists all sites participating?

This is not available through an API, but many participating sites are listed on Coil's website

Is there a need for sites to provide their own registration?

Once you add the web monetization meta tag to your site, it will recognize web monetized users without them needing to provide additional information.

Do developers of this software participate in monetization each time their solution is used by some site somewhere?

Yes, as long as the monetization meta tag with your payment pointer is in the document head and the visitor's browser has web monetization enabled. Technically if the content is an embed then it also needs to have allow="monetization" on the iframe that it's inside of.

Emma Goto 🍙 • May 9 '20

I have a question for the Coil team - what happens if you pay the $5 fee, but then don't visit enough pages with web monetisation enabled to actually spend it all? Where does the rest of the money go?

Jonathan Greenglass • May 13 '20

Great question Emma- its one that we've spent a bunch of time thinking through.

The unused membership fee will either be redistributed to creators or it will go to the creator who originally drove you to sign up and become a member. Example: if DEV is the reason you clicked through and became a Coil member then DEV would receive this money.
This may evolve over time— but one important constant is that unspent membership fees do NOT go to Coil.