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 Members help other members with technical questions and problems using Writing.Com! |
| I've repeatedly gotten the "heavy server volume" message whenever I try to load an interactive story. I'd like to know what it means exactly and if there's something that can be done about it. |
| It means the server is under heavy volume so interactive stories are unavailable to visitors and free accounts while that's happening. You can do something about it by purchasing a paid membership. Paid members pay for their use of the servers and we give them first priority under times of heavy demand on the site's resources. ~~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/faqNeed Non-Technical Support? "Non-Technical Support Forum" |
| Hi, Thanks for the answer and for your time. Though, inviting people to pay or just "deal with it" isn't enough nor it is a correct answer in my humble opinion. Because writing.com isn't a simple B2C website, it's a B2C2C, in which, I mean, it provide a way to people to share content with other people. Im an upgraded member since a bunch of years here now, and I pay each year this website for the nice services it provided. And so far, I don't regret it. I don't mind paying myself to create content and to make it availabled in writing.com. But, the point is to make it available to the people following me, the other people. If I pay for a service allowing me to share, but the same service itself block users from simply accessing it, requesting them to pay for it, the service you provide to me, paying content creator, is severely damaged. Because, let's face it, most people definitively won't accept to pay every month just to be grant access to the website. And all these would be fine actually, and the issue won't much bothered, if it doesn't impact, us, content creator, the ones who pay in the first place. But it does, since it means we, creators and paying member, pay writing.com services as a platform to share our content...but you block our content from being view by a large amount of people by forcing them to pay for it, which most won't. This choice of limiting free member access to our content is understandable as a financial/marketing plan, but in the end, limiting access to our content by forcing implicitely people to pay, it punish more us, creators, than the free member. The free member will just get away and move on somewhere else, while we, paying creator, wont have these viewers because you block them, while we are paying in the first place to share content also with them. I understand the server cost, but haven't you a solution to allow people to access our interactive content we're paying to make available? I don't even mind paying a bit more myself, as a creator, to solved this servers issue. Because technically, what is the point to pay a service to host our content, if nobody can access it because of "sorry, server full, have a nice day." ? If the great majority of our audience just can't properly access our content, it makes it really questionable for us to agree to pay for your services in the first place. I hope you understand what I mean. It's a real issue here. Thanks in advance for your attention and your time. Cordially, a customer |
by Past Member 'northernwrites'| You might find these much more recent posts more informative about the current interactives situation: "Re: Server Volume error" by The StoryMaster  due to the advent and proliferation of ad blockers, we've had to significantly limit the amount of server resources available to free accounts as they produce a whole lot of load on the servers with no revenue to pay for it. "Re: Re: Re: Server Volume error" by The StoryMaster According to our server logs, some 11,000 people a day are logging in and using interactives for free despite the limited server available. At present, we're serving over 600,000 free interactive pages per day. Other folks are certainly deciding they're ok to support the site with $0.06 per day to use our services. "Re: Re: Site is becoming unusable" by The StoryMaster as it stands, we have no plans to increase the spending on our free member resources. To be sure, though, we're still providing a lot of free resources. Some older but still relevant posts regarding ads on interactive items: "Re: Irritating new Anti-Adblocker System" by The StoryMaster "Re: Re: Re: A suggestion for ads." by The StoryMaster Although your paid membership includes the service of storing an interactive on the site and your own page views, most of the cost of interactives comes from server resources required for viewing interactives from other people's use of the site. ETA: See instead: "Re: Re: Re: Re: Server volume message" by The StoryMaster .This older post, which so far as I know would still be correct, details the level of membership required to have the option to disable ads for all visitors to your portfolio. The Professional membership referenced in the post is now called the Premium Plus membership ($419.95 per year): "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Rating" by The StoryMaster Hope that helps.  Northernwrites___ ~~Image #6000 Sharing Restricted~~ ~~Image #603504 Sharing Restricted~~ |
| Just a follow up on this detailed post -- I have to add to the note about Premium Plus membership which currently does not have an added override for the Interactive limitations... As there are currently no Interactive creators paying for a Premium Plus membership. However, if there's enough interest in the Premium Plus membership, I'd be willing to look into updating the code to account for Premium Plus within Interactives. I'd likely not leave that limitless... as certain interactives do draw very, (very) high usage. After analyzing usage of those under a Premium Plus account, we still may have to place some stated cap on it. All the same, until there's some reasonable number of Premium Plus interactive creators, I can't devote resources to that particular membership level as it related to Interactives. We have only a handful in use as is and not interactive owners. Still, this is rejuvenating a message and reply of mine from 2015, about 3 years ago. It was indeed always the case that free members would view ads to monetize their usage of the site, while paid members paid to cover their own usage of the site. Even then, though, it was difficult to monetize the type of content the majority of interactives on Writing.Com contain. Brands with money don't allow their ads on adult, giantess, shrinking, fan-fic, erotica, etc etc. Most readers of interactives didn't want the type of adult-oriented graphical ads we were allowed to use accompanying the written content they were reading... so limitations were the best option to provide the service ongoing, rather than ending it completely. As noted, ad blockers, now a standard part of most browsers, have more or less ended the days of many sites monetizing based off advertising. Members pay for their own usage and storage... not the usage of other members, most particularly when it comes to interactive stories where our resource limitations are in effect. I understand some members do not and will not like this. We apologize to those members but do believe our model is the best to continue on with our 18+ years of non-corporate, family owned offering to writers. We have to make decisions that we feel are best for the long term, for the community and site as a whole. It should be noted there are few, if any, sites that allow the type of uncensored, unfiltered content that we do; we're extremely proud of our independence and ability to offer a free-speech venue. We do our absolute best to accommodate everyone wherever possible, but we do realize we'll never be able to make everyone 100% happy 100% of the time. 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/faqNeed Non-Technical Support? "Non-Technical Support Forum" |
| Hi, Thanks again for the answer. Yeah, sorry for addressing my concern in an old entry. I just don't like create a whole new topic when its subject was already addressed before (whatever date the same subject was already talked about). I believe reopening a ticket is better than making copy. Anyway, thanks for the explanation. :) Yes, I can imagine how some Interactive Story can draw a freaking lot of database space, after it reached the XXXXth chapters... x) It's bad luck since I believe that Interactive story feature is really what makes writing.com particularity, like you said. :) I was aware of problematic of adult-oriented content, but not about the adult-oriented ads. Though, I'm sure there exist brands or websites who won't be bothered at all to have their ads associated with erotica, adults or specific fetishes, for sure. I'm thinking of sites like pornhub. You may think they might not have the most enjoyable type of ads for the eyes, but if you let these ads only showing on your adult section contents, I don't really think people reading these content in the first place will complain. But it won't change the adblock problems for you anyway. There are solution though to force people to deactivated adblock (unless going with more tricky steps for the user). If no revenue from ads is a critical issue for writing.com, you may consider inquire about those adblocker-blockers you may find on other websites. My issue was addressed because I got several people at once casually telling me they had problem to see even only 2 pages in writing.com before being kicked for full server (despite being free registered members), particularly on these past days. Which makes me wonder if you were driving a more drastic policy on connexion to the website. And yes, always keep your independence and ability of free-speech. As an adult-oriented content creator, I'm very sensible to this, and the simplicity of doing Interactive story with people in writing.com isn't the only reason i'm on here since many years. You don't have this paranoid attitude with sex matters that you can find on (unfortunately) more and more websites. It does good for your image, and I praise website like yours that don't just jumped on the wagon of forbid everything about sex like it was infamy. Hope you didn't felt my issue like a rant, because it wasn't. (i'm just very concern about accessibility) Thanks again for your answers.  And I hope you'll keep going for as long as possible without trouble. Cordially, |
| There's plenty of threads here in the support forum from the months we spent attempting to block the ad-blockers. It was a time consuming and generally annoying effort that led to, believe it or not, more complaint threads in here than our resource limitations did. With your suggestion of a site like Pornhub, it should be noted that most such ads don't pay just for showing ads, but instead pay based on individuals signing up for accounts or paying on those site... which we found through various past attempts, don't actually pay anything. The act of showing an ad, even getting past an ad blocker, does not mean there's revenue from it. In the case of interactive stories, even without ad-blockers, most people mentally block out the ads as they are just clicking from chapter, to chapter, to chapter... regardless of ad placement (of which we've tried many, many different placements over the years). And so... Professional adblocker-blockers offered by other companies actually cost more money than we'd earn from any ads "seen" -- given that our content does not lend itself to ads that pay per view, but instead ads that pay per action by the users. Free account holders here are simply not likely to pay for accounts or buy services elsewhere. Historical attempts at this have shown us this to be true and affiliate ads simply didn't produce results. Instead, we've actually removed the vast majority of ads from our interactive pages. They used to be loaded with annoying, intrusive and as it turned out, rather fruitless ads. There's now just a couple Amazon ads (that pay very little, again, because people have to actually buy something for us to earn money) and ads for our own paid memberships. We do think the experience for our free users now far surpasses the experience before, when the resource load is low. In the past, we tried to load the pages up with enough ads to make a penny here and there and it led to a cluttered and ugly page. We also recently, before implementing more strict limitations, tried crypto-coin mining, which may have been slightly promising, except that free account holders complained far more about that when it was "forced" onto them than they have for the limitations we have in place now... We removed that and now we offer it to everyone as an option for people to mine Gift Points to earn a paid memberships, rather than paying money for it. An "offer wall" where members can complete action, like watching a video ad or completing a survey, may end up an additional option, like mining, for all members to earn additional Gift Points. We're currently researching that and may implement it if a good option is available and worthwhile. We will also continue to look for ways and options to offer people the ability to earn paid memberships, rather than paying for them outright. Yes, our policy is absolutely "more drastic" now than it had been for limitations in the past because it's simply just come to that. The point of this particular response of mine being that in our 18 years, we've tried many, many (many) ways to monetize the interactive stories. They are a small subset of the actual writing here on Writing.Com but the highest (by far) use of resources. We're happy to continue providing them, unlimited in use to our paid members (6 cents per day for a 1 year basic) and with limitations to free members and visitors to the site. This is not to offend anyone, but instead to be realistic with the economies of running such a project for the long term. As many other free venues have come and gone, we remain strong and stable, and with our proper planning, will do so for a long time to come. 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/faqNeed Non-Technical Support? "Non-Technical Support Forum" |
| I seen all that was said in this forum and I will have to back lefrenchfox, I am a free user, yes. But I do review a few things as much as I can and when I can and because of the lack of being unable to see things I get annoyed as I can't really read or enjoy a good story or anything. I don't see why this website can't just be like Da, they have adds on the side and they keep the writing and things going however unlike Da I come here more as that site has become more laggy in the times I have been on it and I have been on it for last 6 years and been on here I would say about 5 or 4ish years and I think the idea of making free members pay is just bad as reading a good story or stories that have a way to change where it goes was something I liked and gave me ideas for more of my own writing work. I know what am saying maybe rude or bad but I am talking from my heart here as I loved reading the stories and the stories that let me change or add what I think would be good to keep It going. |
| So you’re saying you don’t use the totally free site as much because it’s laggy? And yet you seriously can’t understand why we are limiting resources? 😂👍 I don’t mean to laugh but it’s hard to make a serious response. All I can say is that servers, resources, the time to manage and update a site all cost money. Nothing is “free”. We don’t want a laggy service. We have no intention of providing unlimited free resources at our expense. It’s really as simple as that. If folks looking for unlimited free service move on to some other laggy site, we will just accept that as being the way things are. Best wishes, 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/faqNeed Non-Technical Support? "Non-Technical Support Forum" |
by Suspended By A Forum Leader| ** Message suspended for further review. ** |
| SM has given detailed and repeated explanations on this matter. I don't understand why, if someone wants to use this website for whatever, they wouldn't be willing to pay 6 cents a day for a year's membership. To be honest, if people aren't willing to pay, and demand usage is free, well that is the joke. |
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