PayPal donation widget may have gotten a fellow developer's blog suspended?

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  kode54 · Member · May 21, 2016 at 4:37 am

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  I am asking on their behalf, since it was their wordpress.com site that was suspended for backlink activity.

  Basically, they develop an unofficial image and content downloader application that works with the art community site, Pixiv. The content of the Pixiv site is out of their control, and they make no merits about the ability of this tool to do its simple or complex tasks of mass downloading different artists’ works for personal consumption.

  They did, however, solicit for PayPal donations to support their development.

  They did not actually link to Pixiv, only to their Github repository for their project, and to their PayPal donate page.

  Does this constitute ToS violating backlinks to external services for the purpose of making money? Note they are not selling access to the Pixiv art site, they are asking for support for developing their software that happens to access the Pixiv service in a novel way. This software doesn’t do anything that cannot already be done manually. Also, since it’s actually donations, and not explicitly selling anything, no goods are given in exchange for the money, as the software is Free Open Source Software, or something like that.