I know. Well, didn't realize it was anonymous but I knew it wasn't by Joel Spolsky. I said it was a rant *on* Joel on Software, which it was. I didn't say it was *by* Joel. ;-)

Tanner, Common Ground is not an add-on to Salesforce. It's a stand-alone offline donor database built on the same platform as Salesforce.com. Yes, a nonprofit can hire a consultant and build a lot of the same functionality, but I can tell you from experience you're talking tens of thousands of dollars. Also, Convio offers phone and email support on Common Ground, as well as continuous updates. A nonprofit can't get that on their own, and that's what you're paying for on a regular basis.

We're not using Common Ground because we've already been on the Salesforce.com platform for 2.5 years, and we're also a Convio customer. But if we were starting fresh now, with the same budget now as we had back then (which wasn't that much) we would definitely do it on Common Ground. It's really good.

Rick, I think so. I don't have Facebook notify me of anything via email. I block all applications requests, so while folks can comment on my status, write on my wall, tag me in photos or send me FB mail, I don't want to hug, poke, squeeze, or anything like that. The only application I actively use is Causes. So if you don't want the requests, then it's really easy enough now to get rid of them/block them out, compared to the way it was before.

Thank you!

Kirby, that is strange. I haven't had a problem at all with spam since switching to Intense Debate. I see that Akismet is doing its thing, but I'm not seeing more modification requests than before.

Possibly, Matthew. I didn't see anything that looked like a kernel panic (trust me, I know what they look like) but there were a few screens that had some sort of cryptic networking error message that I didn't photograph. I just thought it was kind of funny, no big deal. :-)

Thanks for your help, Erik. I'm not entirely sure yet if I'm keeping it, but so far it's better than the other system I tried.

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