Non-Technical Support Forum

There's no official "hiatus" status option.

What you can do -- some of it more critical than other things:

Set your (other) portfolio tabs to private (except the Portfolio tab itself).

Set your Review Request status to OFF (in the GPs menu in the Reviews tab manage area).

Put a message that you're away temporarily in your BioBlock area at the top of your Portfolio tab.

Put wording in your handle that you're away temporarily.

In My Account/Account Settings --

In the Personal Information section:
Make sure your offsite email address is accurate. This is really important if you can't remember your password when you come back.

In the Privacy section, set these two settings to:
Session Privacy: Completely exclude me
Instant Message Availability: Not available for anyone.

Optional: To allow friends here to contact you indirectly, make sure these two Account options in the Notifications section are not disabled, OR if you're rather not be notified about new emails, turn them off:
New Email Notifications to Offsite Email:
Review Notifications to Offsite Email:

Unsubscribe from the site newsletters.
https://www.writing.com/main/my_account.php?action=ea_form&type=newsletters


If you're not sure when you'll be back, or whether you'll be able to afford a paid membership then -- These are things you can do now to make it easier then to deal with the potential mess later. You'll still have a free account that you can use, in any case.

With a current Upgraded+ membership, you can export a copy of your emails. Clearing out old email now may be helpful if you don't make it back until after you've dropped to a free account, since your email usage would be over-limit, preventing you from receiving any new email including site information emails that you'd want to see. See Setting Up Offsite Mail Service from Writing.Com 101  for directions.

Do a Portfolio Export of your work, just in case:
https://www.writing.com/main/tools/action/port_export

Do an Export Data on your In&Out (in the Item Tools menu) and save a copy of the edit page and the visible page (it's not included in the Portfolio Export), just in case.

Export your Forum posts (if they're important):
https://www.writing.com/main/tools.php?action=post_export

Save a copy on your computer of your Notepad pages. Free accounts can only use 1 page.

Leave your 5 oldest (Static) items visible (because you're a Preferred Author and 5 visible items is a requirement for being one) and set the rest to Private with the PORTFOLIO Access tool above your item listing. This will help keep your Inbox from overfilling with review notification emails.

Use the PORTFOLIO Move to Folder tool to move all your items out of their folders and directly into your portfolio. If they're just basic folders that could be recreated easily, you may want to consider deleting them and recreating them later. If you have any folders when your account drops to free, they'll take up spots that could have been used to save your oldest items. Free accounts can only have 10 items.





Hope that helps.

Northernwrites___

~~Image #6000 Sharing Restricted~~ ~~Image #603504 Sharing Restricted~~