[admin]

We're sorry if anyone is upset at the minimum donation amount required to participate. The $20 amount is in combined donations (and one-time only), so you could make a donation of $5 per month for four months if you would like. We've always said it's okay to donate whatever amount you can afford to YorkieTalk, but we've never said any minimum amount would be okay to enter the Gift Exchange until just a few weeks ago. We have never changed the minimum required donating amount to participate in the Gift Exchange, which is $20. If were were only out to make money from the Gift Exchange, we would require a fee for every Gift Exchange a member partcipates in, but this is not what we are doing nor do we plan on requiring a fee each time to participate (unless a member is not in the USA or Canada).

The donation would also allow you to enter one Yorkie in all future YT Gift Exchanges. YT remains free to everyone due to donations and a few advertisements. Without it, we couldn't survive at all and YorkieTalk would be shut down. Thankfully, we have quite a few Donating Members and we do get a bit of revenue from the ads, which helps us tremendously.

A member can search, post, share, get free advice, and upload pictures, all for FREE after a person registers. Our original goal of a free, public Yorkie community still remains intact to this day. To show our appreciate to our Donating Members, we do give them a little something extra.

Again, the Gift Exchange is something "extra" and no one is required to take part in it. We have had several people take advantage of our kind YT members in the past, which we feel is ridiculous and wrong. We have happily made a gift box (and paid for it ourselves) for those that did not get gifts from their scheduled Secret Buddy, however, we believe it is a lot more special and fun when a member gets a gift from a Secret Buddy, rather than from YT itself. It is simply unfair to those that have spent a great deal of time shopping and making the Gift Exchange fun.

We don't "force" donations on anyone, but we simply can't take the risk of anyone not sending a gift any more. Hopefully, this will ensure that everyone that signs up will send out a gift. Members always can exchange gifts with other members or friends on their own if they would like.

We're quite happy with our Gift Exchange signup rate, we've already had 38 Yorkies sign up in just a few days. We had a total of 73 Yorkies in the last Gift Exchange, which was the biggest one yet!