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Revision 4 as of 2006-04-21 02:43:30

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ProspectiveMemberFaq

TableOfContents()

1. The Most Important Question

1.1. Q: Can I do <something> with an HCoop membership?

A: The answer is more or less a qualified "yes" for anything! We have no fixed technical structure. Everything is decided democratically by the members through their equal voting power. As long as there are enough members willing to share the added cost of the new service that you propose, we can make it happen. In some of the answers below, we address particular common requests that we've already taken the time to set ourselves up to handle, but the sky's the limit.

2. Meta

2.1. Q: Can I edit this wiki before joining?

A: Yes!

2.2. Q: Can I use an HCoop account for commercial purposes?

A: Yes, though we hope that you'll be willing to pay a (not much) greater share of our costs if you are reaping a huge profit by way of our services. :-)

2.3. Q: How does HCoop exist legally? What makes it likely that HCoop will be around a few years down the road, and what prevents the arbitrary whims of the founders or admins from messing it up?

We're a registered Pennsylvania (USA) non-profit corporation with HcoopBylaws that put complete control and ownership of the co-op in the hands of the members. Each member has an equal vote on issues like electing the board of directors. The board makes all of the day-to-day decisions that control how the co-op works socially and technically.

3. Payment

3.1. Q: How much does it cost to pay with PayPal?

See [http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-fees-outside their fees information]. We have a business account.

3.2. Q: I've heard that PayPal sometimes does nasty things like closing accounts without refunding their balances. Since you use PayPal as the primary dues payment method, could something like this happen to bankrupt HCoop?

No, several times a month we transfer our PayPal balance to a Wells Fargo bank account in the name of our corporation. It's from that account that we pay our providers.

4. Domains

4.1. Q: Can I use multiple domain names that I own with an HCoop account?

A: Yes, and we even have our own DomainTool to let you do so without superuser intervention.

4.2. Q: Do you do back-up MX and secondary DNS hosting for domains primarily hosted elsewhere?

Yes; see DomainTool.

5. E-mail

5.1. Q: Can I do fancy things with e-mail sent to my mailbox on HCoop, like both saving it on your server and forwarding it elsewhere?

Yes, members can use [http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.60/doc/html/filter.html Exim filters] to do this and more.

6. Customization

6.1. Q: Can I compile binaries myself?

A: Yes. You can install your own compilers, and we'll install system-wide most any compiler that's found in Debian testing.

6.2. Q: Can I run my own daemons?

A: Yes, though whether or not this is feasible in terms of resource use depends on the kind of server.