Did the "pay for the forum or get banned until you pay" remove some of your friends?

That thing had its issues as well as some may recall. Heh.

  On 11/11/2014 at 6:15 PM, StocKo said:

 

  On 11/11/2014 at 5:59 PM, beerwolf said:

 

  On 11/11/2014 at 12:40 PM, BUNKUM said:

Jeez, this site already costs me enough in purchases I keep finding out about on here!

/jk

 

 

 

 

 

Heh, good post, very true. Sometimes I think some of us keep the record industry running lol.

 

I think watmm is essential imo (for me at least) and I would happily pay a sub. But I wouldn't want young forum members to be alienated. I was thinking of donating some money this christmas as Joyrex has worked out of his skin this year. Respect.

 

 

By the way I was wondering about the donations : there was like a status bar just below the donation box, showing how much money had been given and for how long that money was enough to run WATMM, I thought that was quite good to show people how important it was, maybe you could put it again ?

 

The biggest issue with the status bar is it wasn't interactive - in other words, I had to manually update it every time there was a donation, etc. Additionally, if the bar was sitting at say 10.00 at the end of the month, invariably someone would jump in and make a donation to ensure we met the 50USD (Great!). The problem was, it was the same small group of people who felt it was important enough to ensure we met our hosting costs, while many didn't bother, or on the other end of the spectrum, it was at say 45.00, nobody would chip in the last 5.00 to ensure we made it. It also didn't factor in the VigLink payments, etc., so I ultimately removed it for my own sanity.

  On 11/11/2014 at 5:50 PM, goDel said:

Thanks for your answer. I hope it's clear I don't have any intention of complaining about some subscription fee, or whatever the payment-model is you envision. Seeing the way things have been developing (AAA, kickstarter, ... something imminent), I personally don't see an issue in your explorations in that department.

 

My only issue is with not being upfront about it. And I don't think complaining people or some shitface calling you Hitler justifies "silent" decisions with respect to things like this. Even if it takes a year for people starting to notice.

 

If you want payments, than lets do business. And if you want to do business, at least do it in an upfront manner. We're not doing anything illegal here, right? So lets do it in a way which actually says "this is legal!" and "I'm am Joyrex and I stand for my business, regardless of a couple of criticasters!", instead of the silent hush hush I'm afraid anyone will notice crap. That's not how I want to do business, regardless of the price.

 

Apparently I'm in the minority thinking this way, but to me this is actually important. This goes beyond the financials and is about trust and being a trustworthy party.

 

I hope these thoughts are not too "out there" for watmm. Sounding all capitalist and stuff.

No, you make a very good point, and I really do prefer transparency (honesty is the best policy), but I outlined my reasons why I didn't formally announce anything.

Going forward, I want to be as transparent as possible about WATMM's operating costs and income, so people know we're in good shape or not.

There are some big changes coming to the forum/site soon (for instance, bringing the Downloads section back as part of the forum, organized, etc.) as well as moving to a new payment/subscription system that is fully integrated into the forum software, which will make my management of it easier AND easier for you guys to keep up on things (in addition to some cool ideas I'm thinking of implementing).

I appreciate all the donations and subscriptions folks have made, and it feels great to know people see value in what's here - that value will only continue to grow, and hopefully WATMM will continue to do things like the AAA and Kickstarter, and the upcoming deal with Richard in the future.

Out of curiosity, is it consistent across the board that when your subscription lapses, you lose all posting privileges? Or is that an error? That's what happened to me yesterday and it definitely took me by surprise - payed on the spot just to check back on my recent topic and make sure I could respond to people, and I had literally just received the notification that my time was up that day. Some advanced notification would be really helpful I think.

P.S. Didn't help that I had totally forgotten that I had paid for a subscription last year during the AE q&a!

  On 11/11/2014 at 10:54 PM, skytree said:

Out of curiosity, is it consistent across the board that when your subscription lapses, you lose all posting privileges? Or is that an error? That's what happened to me yesterday and it definitely took me by surprise - payed on the spot just to check back on my recent topic and make sure I could respond to people, and I had literally just received the notification that my time was up that day. Some advanced notification would be really helpful I think.

P.S. Didn't help that I had totally forgotten that I had paid for a subscription last year during the AE q&a!

Subscriptions are annual, and you should have gotten a notice that your subscription was about to expire within 10 days of it expiring - I'll check and see if that's working as intended, as you are saying you got the email the same day it was about to expire?

In regards to posting privileges suspending - yes, if your subscription lapses, your account goes into a "Validating" status and you must purchase at least a 3.00 subscription in order to regain the ability to post. You can still access the forums, have an account, etc. but that's it. The limitations of the subscriptions app are such that I can't make it so only folks who haven't had an active subscription go into Validating status (I would have preferred that), but I'm looking into the professional subscriptions app the forum software offers (it's actually an entire e-commerce module) to see if I can do more granular settings, etc.

Anyone's account that is inactive for 180 days gets moved into a Restricted status, and is sent an email notifying them of such - if they come back (and have an active subscription), they simply need to post again for that counter to reset. For those who didn't have a subscription or their subscription expired at the time their account went into Restricted status, they are moved to Validating, where upon returning they must purchase a subscription.

Anyone who lets their account lapse 180 days, doesn't return/post/subscribe and then another 180 days lapses, their account is deleted. I implemented this to trim down the member database which had many accounts that were never used, or haven't been used in a long time (and most likely came back as someone else).

UPDATE: yes, packages all send notification within 10 days, and offer a 24 hour grace period before the sub package expires.

Cool that makes sense. It does seem there was an error here, however. Just went and double-checked everything and I was off with the dates (been a busy week) but still not a 10-day period. My subscription lapsed on the 7th, and I received the notification on the 6th. I can send a screenshot if need be. Something to check into perhaps.

Also, just as a suggestion, if you have one of the upper-tier subscriptions, maybe having it temporarily lapse into a lower-teir before going into validating status could be helpful. That way privileges would be slowly drawn down vs. removed at once, and give people more time and flexibility to adjust accordingly. Totally understand that it all depends on what you can tweak in the app but thought I would mention it!

Maybe something you can do in the pro app. (:

  On 11/11/2014 at 11:27 PM, skytree said:

Cool that makes sense. It does seem there was an error here, however. Just went and double-checked everything and I was off with the dates (been a busy week) but still not a 10-day period. My subscription lapsed on the 7th, and I received the notification on the 6th. I can send a screenshot if need be. Something to check into perhaps.

 

Also, just as a suggestion, if you have one of the upper-tier subscriptions, maybe having it temporarily lapse into a lower-teir before going into validating status could be helpful. That way privileges would be slowly drawn down vs. removed at once, and give people more time and flexibility to adjust accordingly. Totally understand that it all depends on what you can tweak in the app but thought I would mention it!

Maybe something you can do in the pro app. (:

Yeah, that would be reasonable - 30 days as a Supporting Member before it goes out the window entirely would be good, I think - gives folks time to decide if they want to renew or not, or come up with the funds, etc. I might be able to pull that off in the current app, but I'm right now reading up on the pro app that would give us so much more in terms of what we can do with WATMM and e-commerce.

Cool man - sounds good to me.

I am too scared to say this or that about this thing

Yeah a downgrade before would be great as I didn't see the reminder email before as it went to my old email i never check. Is it possible to receive some pm reminder in addition to email?

yeah a PM sounds sensible, who reads their emails except at work for work anymore (i check the edm thread so that i don't have to check the email account that is linked to getting that release, hopefully this blasé policy doesn't get me fucked the fuck over, heh, cause you know, that would be pretty typical). PM's on the other hand "uu, cool, someone's a contacting the dleetra, yess, finally"

Confused

I won`t be paying but considering my contribution there (almost nonexistent), it`s not a big deal. A bit sad though.

And a max ten posts a year free membership! ;D

Edit: could be a good way to get more new members in as well!

test

well this is a bit embarrassing, I made a post to test and it seemed to work but now I can't edit it...I haven't posted in years and just observed things and now I post to see how things work and I am too dumb to figure out how to delete a post if that is even possible.

anyways....Thanks for all the fun people. This has been a great community for a long time. This site is pretty much the only source of music news I trust and I am glad I found it years ago. And general banter has been fantastic for years. I joined this site in 2006 to gather info on Boards of Canada and through all the forums and posts have discovered a plethora of fantastic material ranging from amazing mixes, original material, to official releases.

Thanks for all the fun! I'll be donating a bit to do my part for all the great times I've had.

  On 11/12/2014 at 5:17 AM, goDel said:

And a max ten posts a year free membership! ;D

 

Edit: could be a good way to get more new members in as well!

I thought of that too. Maybe 10 posts a year is a bit low, but some kind of free membership would allow more to participate.

But then again, that might just encourage people to flood the forum with dupes, and that would wind up being more work for admin...

  On 11/11/2014 at 11:44 PM, azatoth said:

I am too scared to say this or that about this thing

lol

If the donation status bar came back it'd look like this now:

  On 11/12/2014 at 8:40 AM, Root5 said:

 

  On 11/12/2014 at 5:17 AM, goDel said:

And a max ten posts a year free membership! ;D

 

Edit: could be a good way to get more new members in as well!

 

I thought of that too. Maybe 10 posts a year is a bit low, but some kind of free membership would allow more to participate.

 

But then again, that might just encourage people to flood the forum with dupes, and that would wind up being more work for admin...

 

It's a low risk perhaps.

It's more important to get the lurkers on board and active too. Also from the "attracting new paying members" point of view it might be interesting. Consider all those lurkers who happen to fall into some heated exchange and just before the discussion is finished, mr/mrs lurker stumbles upon the yearly limit. Are you going to pay membership to make your point in a thread? Or are you going to sit it out? ;D

i stopped posting and was lurking as i really got sick of people dropping the n word casually like it was now cool to say that shit

on the interwebs

in real life i doubt many white boys be spinning that yang in the hood

as JR has noted it seems there has been a lot of asshats that have dropped off since this pay for play game

bravo

granted i really only read the artist/music making threads 99% of the time and now avoid the banter in general

word up to this scheme

long live the watmm's

i cant remember anyone dropping an N-bomb around these parts

  On 11/11/2014 at 11:50 PM, o00o said:

Yeah a downgrade before would be great as I didn't see the reminder email before as it went to my old email i never check. Is it possible to receive some pm reminder in addition to email?

Well, a PM would only work if the person was visiting the site on a regular basis... I'll see if it's possible.

  On 11/12/2014 at 5:17 AM, goDel said:

And a max ten posts a year free membership! ;D

 

Edit: could be a good way to get more new members in as well!

Oh, no - the trolls would use it exclusively for "drive by" posts, etc. Nope.

  On 11/12/2014 at 8:40 AM, Root5 said:

 

  On 11/12/2014 at 5:17 AM, goDel said:

And a max ten posts a year free membership! ;D

 

Edit: could be a good way to get more new members in as well!

 

I thought of that too. Maybe 10 posts a year is a bit low, but some kind of free membership would allow more to participate.

 

But then again, that might just encourage people to flood the forum with dupes, and that would wind up being more work for admin...

 

Exactly - see above.

negroid?