Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

My first answer to the credit card fee problem would be "Then why do they allow it as an option on the site selection ballots?" And now that I think about it, I used my card when I voted in person last year and the charge came from Denvention.

That's because that particular combination of administering Worldcon and bid committees were able to reach an agreement over use of the merchant account and payment of fees. That's not because they were forced to do so, and there's no guarantee that any given such combination would agree to it. For instance, if one of the bids disagreed with the amount the administering convention wanted to charge in merchant fees, then credit cards wouldn't be accepted.

This proposal would force such an arrangement, in practice, which would complicate matters.

I suppose it would be a bigger problem if we went online where that's about the only way of paying for things and thus more fees would be incurred, but it strikes me that "who pays the credit card fees" is already somewhat of a moot point.

Right now, bids have the option of rejecting paying the fees if they don't want to do so.

As for the bit about it being unfair to force Worldcons to have such things as Paypal and credit card machines, it strikes me that, despite being the folks who embrace a genre that's highly future-oriented, we're an awful bunch of Luddites at times.

You won't get disagreement from me on this.

why is there not a PDF of the NASFIC ballot

Because the webmaster can't get the PDF to upload to the site for some reason. I don't know why, but I saw him complaining about it.