There are two problems with MissionFish. The first is that they charge the seller directly for the auction. This is not as bad as I first thought: they don't charge immediately, the seller actually has until "the second Monday after the auction closes" to pay them. If you don't pay by that time, they charge your credit card automatically.

There is (apparently) also a dispute process, for those rare cases where the buyer never pays for the item. If the item never really sold (the money didn't change hands), then clearly MissionFish shouldn't take the money from the seller. I originally thought they charged the seller's card immediately, but that's not true.

The problem is still there, but it's not as significant as I thought.

The second problem is that MissionFish takes the full amount from the seller. If I auction an item for $1,000 and donate all of it to the PMC, MissionFish gets $1,000 from me. They take $3 + 2.9%, and give the rest to the PMC. Sounds fair, right? No! If the item sells for $1,000, then I've paid eBay about $40, so I'm netting just $960 for the sale. eBay donates a small part of their $40 (just the listing and reserve fees, I think) to the PMC also, but in the end I've paid eBay $40 for the privilege of donating a $1,000 item to the PMC. In other words, the seller is out the $1,000 item plus the $40 fee.

There are alternatives:

• I could sell the donated software without MissionFish. Unfortunately, I have zero feedback on eBay, so I'm not yet "trusted." People would have to just take my word for it, that I really will donate the proceeds.
• Tack on a little extra for shipping and handling to recoup some of the fees. There are limits to this, and all the extra costs have to be stated in advance. eBay's fees are percentage-based, so there's no way for me to know what to charge.
• Find a donor willing to cover the fees by paying *me* the difference. Yuck. Not sure I could find such a donor. This would still be fair, but it would take too much explaining.
• Donate less than 100% of the auction price to the PMC. If I kept 5%, that would cover eBays fees and the PMC still gets most of the money. Unfortunately, I told the donors that I was going to donate 100% of the sale price. I could probably talk most of them into letting me donate just 95%, but that's a huge headache and would drag this process out for another week, at least. (Maybe next year, though.)
• Let the PMC list it! I could give them the information (including all of the HTML for the description), and they'd run the auction themselves. That takes me entirely out of the financial part of the loop. Bing bing bing! I believe we have a winner.

Looks like I'm going with the last option, but it still means the items won't be available for a couple of days because of logistics with getting the items listed by someone at the PMC under their own eBay account.

I know some of you (readers) are actually planning to bid on some of this stuff when it's available. Thanks for being so patient!

The crew of the Atlantia -- Will and Margaret Rudd -- have posted their latest travelogue entry, starting with their trip back to Scotland in August and ending with their current locale in Camden, Maine.

After posting it, they wrote to ask if I was "proud of my pupils" for managing it on their own. I am! They even managed to edit their previous entry, to put in Corinne's name instead of just referring to her as my wife. (An omission they apologized for, twice, when last we met.)

Not sure how they became my pupils, actually, since Susan (their daughter) did all the work to teach them how to use it. Still, I'm happy to see that they managed it on their own, including the pictures! Soon they'll be giving their daughter a "run for her money," when it comes to computer skills. ;-)

(Updated much later: that last bit was a joke because Susan is going to Strathclyde University, studying CS, and in fact may be going for her doctorate.)

I just talked to Mary at the PMC. They, apparently, weren't aware of the problem with eBay's fees, and aren't very happy about it either. They're going to help me work it out, but Dave-the-eBay-guru is out of the office for a few hours.