Quick (Rambling) Update (Patreon)

Month is almost over! If you are one of the sketch or color picture folks let me know what you  want as soon as you can.

In less important and kinda annoying news, if any of you have been checking it looks like my patreon has gone up quite a bit... Unfortunately it seems to mostly be bots.

I have no idea why considering everything here is public! Even this post... Regardless it looks like i am making almost a hundred dollars more this month! Well considering almost every single day I get a new "$16 Pledge!" from someone who uses a similar random set of letters to the last person who did it and they actually have an error page for their profile- Pretty sure it's not real.

Why am I posting about this? Well I contacted Patreon about it. They had this to say...

" ...The patrons you are inquiring about have been reported for using fraudulent credit card information from stolen credit cards– this is why their pages have been taken down. 

When their accounts are removed, they immediately lose access to your patron-only content. These patrons will be removed from your current patron list once the new billing cycle begins on February 1st. 

A workaround to help ensure that patrons are not fraudulent is to require that new patrons enter a valid shipping address in order to complete their pledge to you.  ..."

Now this is mostly just fine. I don't really have a big complaint, I'm not posting to complain about this. I'm posting to let you all know and ask your opinion.

I feel like if they had their accounts removed for those reason, mind you I checked these within minutes of some of them joining and from the point of the pledge to me checking their page was within a minute, the page was already removed. So it's almost like they were removed, and yet they were able to pledge? If they got spotted and removed I don't know why they wouldn't just right there- remove the pledges then and there instead of waiting for the 1st of the month.

So here's my next issue, they suggest I require everyone to have a valid shipping address in order to pledge. I asked them to verify if that was a retroactive thing (requiring anyone from the tier to go back and add an address automatically or if anyone approved before the change if they got to stay in). Here is their reply.

" Unfortunately, patrons already pledged to your tier will not be notified that this is a new requirement. We recommend that creators make a post alerting their patrons and asking them to update their pledge with this information.  ..."

This isn't great, at least with the time I have. I feel like a lot of people don't want a shipping address attached to a patreon that doesn't DO anything requiring a physical address. So if I made that a requirement, I feel like I would lose people, and I literally cannot afford that.

Now, it looks like the bots are all hitting the same tier, the 16 dollar tier- because its a tier you can just choose rather than customize your pledge and it has no limits to how many people can pledge to it. So supposedly it can be set to only require the address for that tier, but if the bots are smart enough they will see it requires an address and just go to the 12 dollar tier.

Anyways, that's what going on, I don't know what to do. Let me know what you all think if you have the time. I don't have access to the "charge upfront" which would fix most of this right away. Maybe that's the best answer? I also know some people used to add fake bot trap tiers to trick bots into joining and deleting anyone who tries to pledge to that. Not a fan of that but I also don't like seeing that I'm getting over a hundred dollars more this month only for it all to vanish on the 1st. 

Would anyone have a problem with adding a shipping address? (You don't need to say why, just let me know, I understand privacy is privacy)
If there was a way to charge upfront it wouldn't affect anyone already pledging but do you think that's a good idea?
What's your opinion on all this in general?

Thanks for your time.