Sunday 14th March 2021
Tommaso wrote to me last week to announce that he has to retire from SHF, for the time being at least. He hopes to be back at some point in the future. He has asked that we stop asking for donations.
His battle with blood cancer continues and has reached a critical stage. Tommaso needs all the strength he has to continue the fight and cannot spare energy elsewhere.
I am deeply saddened by this. Tommaso is a wonderful friend and I am infinitely better for knowing him. Please leave your tributes in this thread. He is not visiting these days but maybe one day he will return and read them. We can only hope so.
What follows is the original post from September of 2018.
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How to donate summary:
I cannot open a dedicated second Paypal account. Paypal only allows one account and it is impossible to contact them directly to ask permission to set up a second. Here is what you can do instead:
- Send your donations to my Paypal account. Quick link is: https://paypal.me/DonationsToTommaso?locale.x=en_GB or:
- pianodoodler@hotmail.com
- The account name will show up as Philip Hopwood. My full name is actually Philip Stephen Hopwood. Blame my parents. One wanted me to be called Philip, the other wanted Stephen, so they compromised by putting Philip first but using Stephen as my main name.
- Please mark your donation clearly, “Donation for Tommaso” or some such so I can quickly differentiate your donations from payments to me for coding work.
- Please make sure you mark your donations as "gifts" otherwise Paypal will take their percentage of your money as transaction fee, and we want every single cent to go to Tommaso.
Many of you know that Tommaso (SHF user name milanese) controls the back end of our forum. I suspect that the same level of expertise would cost a lot of money if I needed to buy it in from outside.
SHF is free of spam and attempted scams because of Tommaso. I swear he has in inbuilt bullshit antennae that starts to quiver whenever one of these cowboys start to type their first, and last, demented message. We never get to see it, such is the speed of Tommaso's intervention. I reckon that 95% of new members are joining only so they can spam us. It is comical to access the Moderators' logs to see how most, if not all, of the newly registered members that I sent my Welcome message yesterday, have been banned by Tommaso today.
Tommaso also arranged all the security protocols that defend us from DDoS attacks. I am certain that SHF would not still be in existence without all this.
Such security costs $1,800 a year at the end of November. What you guys don't know is that Tommaso has funded this since he joined in 2013. I could not have paid all that back then. Really. You would not believe how broke I was back then unless you have been in the same position. Besides, Tommaso regards SHF as “his baby” and insisted on funding the forum even after I could have done so. This is staggering generosity. A bit of basic arithmetic will make you think, “Wow”. You might also contemplate the lack of advertising here and the reason for it - all down to Tommaso funding us. Now I understand why other forums are festooned with advertising.
Tommaso's situation has changed. He is suffering from Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma – blood cancer to you and I. Happily there is a fantastically effective treatment through the drug Zevalin. Tommaso's latest blood tests came back clear and any potential relapse can be treated equally effectively with the same drug.
The downside is the cost. Zevalin is mind-blowingly expensive and is not covered by his medical insurance.
Tommaso's mother made some disastrous financial mistakes and he is picking up the pieces. This is costing him a scary amount of money each month. Money is tight and is going to be for some time.
We owe Tommaso big-time and need to send him a lot of money. We cannot send it to him individually. The Italian tax authorities will view our gifts as income if they come from a wide variety of sources; they will accept them as gifts if they come from a single source.
I cannot open a dedicated second Paypal account. Paypal only allows one account and it is impossible to contact them directly to ask permission to set up a second. Here is what you can do instead:
- Send your donations to my Paypal account. This is Quick link is: https://paypal.me/DonationsToTommaso?locale.x=en_GB or
- pianodoodler@hotmail.com
- The account name will show up as Philip Hopwood. My full name is actually Philip Stephen Hopwood. Blame my parents. One wanted me to be called Philip, the other wanted Stephen, so they compromised by putting Philip first but using Stephen as my main name.
- Please mark your donation clearly, “Donation for Tommaso” or some such so I can quickly differentiate your donations from payments to me for coding work.
- Please make sure you mark your donations as "gifts" otherwise Paypal will take their percentage of your money as transaction fee, and we want every single cent to go to Tommaso.
Please give as much as you can now. Please give small, regular donations each month subsequently. Those of you who have signed up for Eaymon's fantastic FX VPS service are already contributing a little bit. I receive 10% of your monthly fee from Eaymon as a thank-you for allowing him to use SHF to promote his service. I have always sent this to Tommaso; it is not a lot but will grow and I can tell you all that he is enormously grateful.
A very, very good friend needs our help folks. Over to you.
For additional information about how vital is Tommaso to this forum, please read these posts:
- http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... 34#p165334 There you will see just how much time Tommaso devotes to keeping SHF alive.
- http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... 82#p165382 There you will see what he does before newly registered 'members' even come to my attention. Wow.
In the interests of transparency, attached is the spreadsheet I have created to keep account of donations. One column keeps the figures. The next the initials of the donor. Please do not get suspicious if your donation does not appear immediately in it; I do need to sleep from time to time - to say nothing of generating entertaining school visits.
The spreadsheet is an Open Office spreadsheet but you can all open it in Microsoft office. I have given up trying to battle with currency conversion when sending on your donations. Instead I do the conversion to GBP when they arrive.
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