Patron changes

Over the past few days I’ve noticed the patron icon showing up literally everywhere. It now shows up in activity when patrons that you follow do stuff, and now I’m getting notifications about other users getting patron as well in my activity section. It even appears in game chats and tournament chats now. I get that lichess wants more donations but this is over the top, and frankly, not something that goes with lichess’s ideals. It’s borderline adverting at this point. I personally would like these changes to be rolled back. Am I the only one?

This makes it sound like you are being forced to donate. You are not, in fact you don't get any extra features, special treatments or anything by doing so, see lichess.org/features

All you get is our gratitude and eternal thanks for helping us keeping this site running.

P.S.: This is my personal opinion, though I'm posting this as a mod for the sake of transparency.

There's nothing wrong with Lichess "advertising" itself. And this is not an advertisement in any meaningful sense. They are against commercial/third party adverts, not drawing your attention to tournaments, features and the like.

You could tone back the patroon flags

and maybe I know this won't be well excepted but maybe give like 30 depth analysis to patroons over say a certain amount.
And I mean it's still free for all but It's like you just gave us the option of using a more expensive server computation plan.

just my little desire hope it bodes somewhat well as a suggestion.

They've already made it perfectly clear that patrons will never get any extra features.

Here is the userstyle to hide the wings (grab Stylus, see lichess.org/page/extend), if this bothers any of you somehow:

@-moz-document domain("lichess.org") {
.user-link .line.patron::before { content: "" !important; }
.offline.user-link .line.patron::before { content: '\e01a' !important; }
.mchat .user-link .line, .lobby__side .user-link .line { display: none; }
}

Adjust if necessary.

#4 - That goes against everything Lichess stands for. Lichess won't hide features behind a paywall.

Paywalls are not necessarily as evil as trackers and ads, but indeed there was a promise made to keep the site free for everyone.

The patron code was untouched for many years, and during this time span, many requests were made about patron stuff (i.e. gifting patron to another user). Recently, Thibault has been working on the patron code, which has at times been streamed live at www.twitch.tv/ornicar2 for all to see. Some of the things which have been worked on recently have been making it possible to donate in your local currency and gift patron to another user. While working on the patron code, putting the patron badge next to patron’s usernames in more places was simply something which was added as well.

@bufferunderrun you say that they don't have other privileges, but I don't think that I know a patron friend who has 11 ids that has being reported several times by many, but she didn't get anything except a chat ban, but shouldn't the account be closed?