New monthly fee payment system.
Simple instructions:
1) Wait for the email and/or IM telling you that your fee is due. It goes out on the 28th of each month.
2) Find your payment box. NFS owners payment boxes are in the Rathaus. CN payment boxes are in the Temple of Minerva/Athena.
3) Touch the box with your name on it to find out how much you owe.
4) Pay that amount to the box.
5) Last day for payments is the 23rd of the month.
6) No more Paypal payments. Payment in L$'s to the Payment Boxes only.
Explanations:
At long last, the monthly fee payment system is in sufficient condition to get started for CDS payments. This post (and email) will explain how it works.
Let me say first that this system was created by Eloise Pasteur, intended originally for a community I operate called "New England". We have used it there for several months, working out bugs. Its quite robust, but little critters may remain to be discovered, so I beg your patience while we discover them and fix them.
Each month, on the 28th day of the month, you will receive an email and an IM, alerting you that your fee for the upcoming month is now due. This is your "First Notice", and you will find that fees cannot be paid until after you receive this notice.
You *must* use this new Fee Payment System. Paypal will no longer be accepted. I will note at this point that only one citizen in our community still uses Paypal, and, the fees which we incur accepting payments via Paypal are very high. So I think that switching to all payments via L$'s should not be burdensome.
Upon receiving this notice, or at some convenient time after that, find your payment box. The boxes are located on the ground floor of the Rathaus, in Neufreistadt, and in the Temple of Minerva, in Colonia Nova. Your box will be in *one or the other*, not in both. I have chosen the location depending on where your primary holdings are. Each box has the name of its owner prominently displayed.
Most folks know where the Rathaus is, the location of our Representative Assembly meetings in Neufreistadt. The Temple of Minerva (Athena) in Colonia Nova may be a bit more mysterious. From the forum, take the east road down the hill towards the river. The first street on your left, please turn into that. Immediately there, behind Torin Goldings store, you'll find the Temple tucked away, with the boxes prominently displayed. If anyone can't find their Payment Box, please let me know, and I'll be happy to help.
Anyway, find the box, and touch it. It will access the server, tell you that your fee is due, and how much it is. If for any reason it does not correspond to what you expect, please let me know.
If you wish to pay, simply "Pay" the box. The only amount available to you will be the amount the system expects you to pay. There are no partial payments, or pre-payments for upcoming months. More on pre-payments below.
Once you pay, you will receive no more reminder notices until the next cycle. Until you pay, you will get further reminder notices, in the form of an IM and an email, on the 4th, 11th and 18th of the month. The 18th one will say "Final Notice". You will have until the 23rd of the month to pay your fee. After this, the payment boxes shut down, collecting no more payments, and it is reported to me that you have not paid.
This means that you can pay your fee for a given month, let's say September, between August 28th and September 23rd. Those same dates will apply each month. If, for any reason, you do not pay your fee during that time, using this system, any further transactions between you and Rudeen Edo will need to be manual. I may or may not get around to reminding you again that your fee is due. After the end of the month to which the fee applies, if you still have not paid it, your land is subject to Reclaim by me (i.e., the government) and re-sale.
If for any reason you know that you will not be able to pay your fee during the period that the boxes are open, this is *not* a problem! Let me know *beforehand*!! Simply let me know that you will not be able to pay during that period, and also, an exact day by which the payment will be made. I *must* know the day by which the payment will be made.... it can be made before, but no later than, that day. In that case, you *must* pay Rudeen directly, and you must let her or me know, as you do now.
Please do not pay Rudeen directly during the regular payment period! And please try to use this system at all times. It's really very critical to my ability to handle the numbers of people which we now have paying into the CDS Treasury.
If for any reason, you'd like a breakdown of your fees; what you're paying for, please ask, I can generate a simple report internally and paste it into an email to you. It will list each of your parcels, and the US dollar fee attached to each.
The fee, however, that you'll see when you pay is in L$'s Here's how that number is calculated.
Property owners pay a wide range of rates for their parcels, depending on their location, and other factors. The base rate on NFS is US$0.0058/sq meter/month, and the base rate on CN is US$0.0070. Many parcels incur changes which are multiples of those, depending on what zone they are in.
When you ask the Payment Box what your fee is, or when you initiate a payment, the server extracts the total US$ figure that you owe. It then instantly accesses the LL Lindex to find out what the current "Sell" rate for L$'s is, and multiplies the US$ amount by that. It then further multiplies that number by 10%, to cover the Lindex transaction fee which Rudeen must pay in order to convert the L$'s to US$'s (to pay the monthly tier), and also to cover flucuations in the Lindex rate between when you pay and when she pays. The result is the current-to-the-moment fee that is presented to you.
The note regarding pre-payments. Obviously, they will no longer be accepted. Going forward, you will need to appear in the sim of your land ownership, at least once a month, and pay your bill.
However, a good number of people have prepaid. I will keep careful track of that. You *will* receive the First Notice each month, but after that I will turn it off for you as an indication that you are paid. If you wish, please do not hesitate to confirm with me personally the exact months which you have prepaid.
I hope this answers most questions. If you have a question, may I urge you to ask it in this thread in the forum, so that I do not need to answer things more than once. I've tried to cover all the issues, but i'm sure there are lots of things I've missed, so please do not hesitate.
And, again, please be patient if we do encounter bugs. No payments will be lost! I will always have a record of Rudeen's transactions throught the LL website (at least for 30 days). The program has been running since May in my other community, but I'm sure things will come up that need to be fixed.
Thanks for your patience!
Sudane......................
... yeah, sorry... I meant to say that 
