Help us help you help us

As we sit down for our breakfast of Thanksgiving leftovers, the reddit staff would like to take a moment to reflect on how awesome the past year has been. The community has grown significantly, you're learning about your powers and how to harness them, and the site's bottom line has improved to the point where we can afford to dump ad networks that piss off our users.

Regarding that bottom line: We want to especially thank those of you who subscribed to reddit gold. Your support has enabled us to pay for:

• 46 new servers (giant ones)
• Half a terabyte of RAM
• A 770 GHz increase in CPU power
• Over 100 terabytes of new disk storage (useful for redundancy and reliability and redundancy)
• This guy

Just as significantly, it's helped us convince you-know-whom that reddit's a flourishing site with a bright future.

The Upright Citizens Brigade made a commercial to illustrate the gravity of the situation:



Anyway, when we first came up with the idea, we had wanted people to be able to buy subscriptions not just for themselves, but for each other as well. However, resources were limited (hence the need for the program in the first place) so we released our half-assed implementation with the intention of finishing it later.

With the holiday season coming up, we'd like to complete the ass. Our goal is to reach the point where you can just go to a user's page, click "Give this redditor some gold" and be whisked off to someplace that will take your money. This weekend, we'd like your help betatesting the non-sales-related parts of the system.

Would you like to help? Here's how:

1. Buy a year of reddit gold the usual way (it can either be a new subscription or an extension of your existing one)
2. Claim it at some point between now and Monday morning
3. In addition to your own year of gold, we'll give you three bonus "creddits", each of which can be used to give someone else a month of gold
4. To spend your creddits, just go to your favorite person's userpage and click this new link:
   
   
5. Fill out the details:
   
   
   
6. The recipient will get the gold and an orangered:
   
   
   

Hopefully it'll all work smoothly. Let us know if you run into any problems (though we'll probably see them in the server logs anyway).

Planned improvements:

• A way to buy gold creddits directly
• Anonymous gifting
• The option of including a personalized message

Got any other ideas?