GCD phone line

[Donald Dale Milne]

    Last year, upon a Board vote, Alexandros set up a phone line for
the GCD.  You may recall that the reason we purchased it was to satisfy
a PayPal requirement that we have a phone to open a corporate account. 
We need a corporate PayPal account because Ralf Haring has left the GCD
(Ralf created and still owns our current PayPal account).  However,
after obtaining the phone, PayPal declined to set up a corporate account
for us because of the mismatch between our US headquarters address and
Alexandros' address in Greece.

    As we do not have a Treasurer this year, I will try again to set up
the new PayPal account.  However, I do not wish to set up a VOIP phone
on my home computer.  So, as Alexandros is no longer Treasurer and has
not been regularly answering GCD e-mails, we need a new volunteer to
receive calls.  Does anyone wish to volunteer for this so that we can
have a corporate PayPal account and continue to receive donations?  Ralf
has so far been kind enough to not close the old account, but that may
not go on indefinitely.

- Don Milne

[Matthew Gore]

I think I could probably set something up, presuming the GCD would be paying for it. I don't see any reason it couldn't be tied to the official corporate address. Would something like, "You have reached the offices of the Grand Comics Database. For research, press 1, for technical support, press 2, to bitch and moan, press 3" or whatever, work? Options would be tied to whatever existing numbers we wanted to assign and could be changed easily.


Matthew H. Gore
Member: ACP, IAPP
Editor, Cumberland Presbyterian Magazine
Publications Manager, Ministry Council
8207 Traditional Place
Cordova (Memphis), Tennessee 38016-7414

m...@cumberland.org

Subscribe Online: https://www.cumberland.org/resources/#!/Cumberland-Presbyterian-Magazine-1-YEAR-SUBSCRIPTION/p/54529101/category=14460471

901.276-4572

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[Αλέξανδρος Διαμαντίδης]

Hi all,

Sorry I've been non-responsive... As I said to Don privately, I've been somewhat overwhelmed with work and family life and responsibilities leaving me little energy for other activities, but I want to get back to the GCD - and reading comics ;-)

As a recap, why I couldn't proceed with my signing up for a GCD business account at PayPal:

To sign up as a business (or a non-profit, it begins the same way), as a first step you sign in as an individual officer / responsible person for the business. At this step, you provide your personal information and, of course, I provided my Greek postal address. This caused PayPal to create our account under EU / Greek laws and regulations, and (although I didn't realize it at the time) wasn't compliant with PayPal's rules - the first sign was that I was unable to link our bank account and credit card with PayPal.

When I started our verification as a non-profit, I submitted our corporate information as well as personal details of the other Officers, and that was when PayPal discovered that, as a US entity, we had registered under an incompatible jurisdiction, and there was no way to fix our existing registration. So, they deactivated our account and advised us to re-register starting from the beginning as a US account.

Regarding the phone line, our account at voip.ms is active and paid for for the next months (it's $1.10/month and we have $12.52 left in our account). I have the phone number connected to my mobile phone (Don called me once, months ago, as a test).

We don't really have to make it public - we can just enter it where a phone number is needed, if we don't want to list our personal number. I can provide the credentials and help with setting it up to whoever wants to handle it, if we decide to use it for PayPal or anything else. We could also set it up with voicemail: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Voicemail
Alexandros

* 'Matthew Gore' via gcd-board [2026-03-16 13:50]:

> I think I could probably set something up, presuming the GCD would be paying for it. I don't see any reason it couldn't be tied to the official corporate address. Would something like, "You have reached the offices of the Grand Comics Database. For research, press 1, for technical support, press 2, to bitch and moan, press 3" or whatever, work? Options would be tied to whatever existing numbers we wanted to assign and could be changed easily.
>
>
> Matthew H. Gore
>
>

[Donald Dale Milne]

    Good to hear from you. I will follow up on PayPal's recommendation
to open a new account, as I can match a US address to our US
incorporation address.  As I understand the phone, we just need a number
for PayPal and I have no intention of publishing it elsewhere, so we
should almost never receive any legitimate calls. Can you set it up for
someone to just take messages and/or forward to their own phone or
voicemail?

    If Matt is up for it, could you two work out some details and let
me know when I can use the number with PayPal?  I don't believe we need
anything with multiple choices such as Matt was suggesting. And thanks
for volunteering, Matt!

- Don Milne

[Alexandros Diamantidis]

* Donald Dale Milne [2026-03-17 17:38]:

> As I understand the phone, we just need a number for PayPal and I
> have no intention of publishing it elsewhere, so we should almost never
> receive any legitimate calls. Can you set it up for someone to just take
> messages and/or forward to their own phone or voicemail?

Sure, we can enable voicemail and make it forward any messages to an
email monitored by us - maybe con...@comics.org? I think this should be
the most convenient, and as you say we probably won't receive any calls.

Alternatively, we can enable call forwarding: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Call_Forwarding

Alexandros

[Donald Dale Milne]

    Sounds good to me.  Can you forward to ch...@comics.org instead? 
That's the Chair's address so we should always have someone to answer it.

- Don Milne

[Donald Dale Milne]

    Alexandros, if you can please set up the phone to forward, I'll
open a new PayPal account for the GCD.  If we can do that I don't think
we will need Matt's suggestion to set up a phone answering/forwarding
system.

- Don Milne

[Alexandros Diamantidis]

Hi Don!

I've just activated voicemail for our number, and set it to forward all
messages to ch...@comics.org. I then called and left a messege - check
if you've received it.

We can change the greeting message if we want:
https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Voicemail#Voicemail_greeting_customization

We can record a new message or upload a recording. We can create a
recording using some text-to-speech software, how about something like
this:

"Thank you for calling the Grand Comics Database. We are unable to take
your call right now, so please leave your name, number, and a brief
message, and one of our volunteers will get back to you as soon as
possible."

Alexandros

* Donald Dale Milne [2026-04-04 11:27]:

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Alexandros Diamantidis * ad...@hellug.gr

[Donald Dale Milne]

    Excellent!  I downloaded and played the message from the Chair
account, so it would be available to anyone with access there.  I think
your proposed message is good, with the possible addition of this
sentence, "If you wish to be contacted by e-mail, please leave an
address as that response may be faster."

- Don Milne

[Alexandros Diamantidis]

Ok, I converted the message to speech through https://elevenlabs.io/
(with the "Liam" voice) and added it as a voicemail greeting. It's
attached in case anyone wants to listen to it.

Alexandros

* Donald Dale Milne [2026-04-08 12:06]:

[Donald Dale Milne]

    Nice, thank you.

- Don Milne