What is a supporter?

A supporter is any dancer, musician, caller, dance organization or other who has provided material support (in any amount) to the Dance Gypsy.

What are the advantages of supporting the Dance Gypsy?

The most important aspect of supporting the Dance Gypsy is that you help this service to continue. but there are also a number of specific advantages:

* The most obvious is that these ads will go away. That applies to the pleas that periodically interrupt your searches, and to the ads inserted by external ad consolidators (those are the ones that are only tangentially related to dance).

* The second obvious advantage is that the search options that are currently locked will be opened up. these options include, searching by state, event name or keyword; the ability to save searches for the future, choice of alphabetic or numeric display of dates, performer searches by instrument type and more

I get many many interruptions from these ads or pleas. How can I make them go away?

Hmm, the most obvious (and desirable form the DG’s perspective) way is to support the Dance Gypsy by sending a donation.

If you do not want to donate, it does help to know when the ads appear. With that knowledge, you can avoid many if not all of them.

Avoid stealth computing. If you operate in stealth mode — that is, your computer provides no identification (neither referring page nor user-agent description), I am sorry but you will see many many ads. I can’t help you in that case. Similarly, if you turn off cookie support in your browser, many things will cease to work correctly.

Links into the Dance Gypsy from non- Dance Gypsy origins are likely to generate the pleas. That includes: bookmarks, manually-entered addresses and links from sites outside the Dance Gypsy (e.g. another dance site)... However there are many exceptions to this, including:

• links from known search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc)
• links from or by supporters (that is if an external site represents a Dance Gypsy supporter, the link will not automatically generate an ad
• link from anywhere within the Dance Gypsy site
• links from emails sent by the Dance Gypsy

The other likely generator of ads is large number of requests. If this is your first visit you are not likely to see any ads. But if it is your 100th visit, you will see many ads

When I am interrupted by a plea, how do I get to the page I wanted?

That is actually simple —perhaps too simple. Just scroll to the bottom of the ad page and follow the red link. You will be taken to the page you requested — including the query details

But I am a supporter! Why don’t I get the user privileges?

In that case, we thank you for the donation and are very sorry about the problems. Fortunately, there are many simple solutions:

• First, if you donated via PayPal and allowed the process to run to its completion, you should be protected. But since you are reading this question, I assume something didn’t work for you.
• When you became a supporter, you were sent a welcome letter (email). That email contains a link. Click that link and you will be taken to the Dance Gypsy supporter page and you will then be protected.
• If you deleted the message (or it was intercepted by your bulk mail software), we can send you a new copy... just ask.
• If you are a user-updater, just log in (once) using your user ID. the Dance Gypsy should recognize you on that computer from that point on, your computer should recognize you thereafter.

You used to receive supporter privileges, but they stopped. Why?

There are several possible reasons, the most likely are:

• You changed computers (e.g., went from your home to your work computer)
• You switched browsers (e.g., from Internet explorer to FireFox)
• You did a thorough house-cleaning of your computer including deleting cookies.
• It has been a full year since you last donated to the Dance Gypsy.

In most of these cases, the answer is the same: either :

• Find the original welcome letter and follow the link again, or
• Use a user-updater account to log in once

Sorry but the only recourse after the one year support period is completed is the obvious one

How long will I have to wait (after donating) to get my privileges?

No time at all. As soon as you return to the Dance Gypsy from PayPal, your privileges will automatically be in effect.