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Greets, I appreciate the sentiments as well as your help with the miner issue. Following up that thread... there's been very little money in that for the site and I've left it around for folks that enjoyed adding a few GPs to their accounts. You can purchase anything on the site with Gift Points. That includes paid memberships that get you past the "gate"... even journals, t-shirts, pens and more in "The Writing.Com Shop" . The problem, of course, is more that the yield from mining for most people is way low making it take a year to build up enough points for a membership to get through the gate. It was next on the chopping block to remove from the interactive pages themselves in replacement for the miner link we have to opt-in. But the anti-virus folks pushed that along a little faster. All the same, I've addressed a lot of this in previous replies. Yes, it is definitely easy to open a free site... It's very hard to have that site still running 18 years later. Outright free doesn't give anyone a whole lot of incentive to work for it or pay for the resources it needs. Facebook's kind of free exploits the data of its users. Our history, of course, goes back to 2000 when Writing.Com was opened as "Stories.Com"... as a completely free interactive story site. Our goal was to be a sustainable free venture, supported by advertising only. The history as it were, we realized that was not feasible or sustainable. We changed to offer memberships and more while plenty of other sites came and went, attempting a free model of some kind or another... With the advent of ad blockers, many content sites are moving to outright paywalls. But there's a variety of models for this which are sustainable. We've adopted a mix of that; free to a limit, then paywall after -- and only for the interactive stories segment of Writing.Com. I absolutely do appreciate your concern for the site and I don't see your post as malicious. Most of the posts addressing this issue are not, while a handful definitely are. I'm watching all of our statistics and have a long 18 year history to model and chart against. I think, in the longer term, those people who decide to invest their time and creativity into a site where the plan is to just be free or ad supported... Well, I think those people will be disappointed when the owner decides it's just not worth the bills, efforts or aggravation (like the kind brought on by those actual malicious posts). At that point, the site either gets sold to someone who will exploit the content in a nasty way... or it just gets shut down and disappears. In 18 years, we've seen it so many times. Folks are left wondering what happened. Our 18 years of making decisions for sustainability, and demonstrating those in practice, should give us a little extra-credit. Best, ~~SM A Few Helpful Tips... If your problem is with an item, please include its Item ID! New member? Start here! "Getting Started: Table of Contents" Find answers in our FAQ... http://www.writing.com/main/faq Need Non-Technical Support? "Non-Technical Support Forum" |