Hello, today I'm going to be talking about minecraft server donations and best ways to do it.

Take note that this is from my personal experience and may have negative repercussions on your part.

So first of all, donations aren't to buy ranks. Donations are a way of saying thank you. However now a days it's mainly used to buy ranks. But that's not our problem today. Our main problem is faulty donation systems and how they can affect minecraft servers.

When you setup a donation system, it is highly recommended that you find an automated services such as: Buycraft or Enjin. These two I find work best for me. The problem is, small servers in general believe that they can setup a donation system without having some form of automation, this can work in some cases. If you have a considerably small community and you can manage donations very well. If however you have a community of say 20 people, this can get somewhat daunting and in the end affect your server very negatively.

Basically here's how the problem starts, Everyone wants money, so they make a donation system. Donate 20 dollars and receive a reward. Simple as that. Where the problem starts is when you have a somewhat large community, say 30 people. This can then become a very hard task when managing donations, especially if they donate multiple times.
Say for instance you're not there, they have to wait and quite frankly aren't happy with the way you have things setup now. So after a while, they don't receive their rank, they will then do everything in their way to defame your server. This can really hurt your server. However there are ways to prevent it.

Automation.
Automation is very helpful, especially with donations and such. I mentioned earlier two automated donation systems. The first (Enjin) requires you to make a website with them, that is no downside, they offer a variety of themes.
Buycraft also requires a website, then again you are required to make a website with them. They offer free domain hosting with the exception of a subdomain (example.buycraft.net). Anyway, you can set either one of these up and they will work just fine.

I do hope that this has helped you in anyway possible.

-Zombie