> The only thing I pay for online is my ISP. Beyond that, I'm to cheap to pay. It's not that I can't afford it. Like you, I have gotten used to it being free. But I fear it will go the same way TV went. At first it was free. Then when we all got hooked, they gave us low-cost cable. Now...

It's a mistake to carry the analogy of TV and the Internet too far. With the Internet services, there isn't just one "they." Unlike a television station, which buys programs to air, I don't get one penny from your ISP for the privilege of bringing RinkWorks to your computer. On the contrary, *I* have to pay.

If posting to RinkWorks becomes a subscription service of some kind, it won't be a "they" trying to make more money, it'll be a "me" trying to break even without continuing to make concessions to increasingly obtrusive and demanding advertising campaigns.

I'm on my post-RU vacation right now, so my normal routine here on the site won't resume until next week, but I've been keeping up with this thread and have read various opinions with interest. The rest of this post isn't so much a reply to you, Howard, as to everybody.

I think it's perhaps not quite real to some people here what RinkWorks' expenses are. I would love it if I could get by on one of those $10/month plans, but the traffic, CPU, and disk space demands are too high. I am currently paying $219/month. I don't currently have surplus charges for using more than my allotted monthly bandwidth, but every month there is always that danger. Then there is the cost of the domain name itself, although that isn't a huge amount. Then there are the investments of time I make in the site, which are great even when (as now, unfortunately) there aren't a lot of updates. I don't demand recompense for my time investment, because I am conscientious about not losing sight of the fact that I started RinkWorks as a self-rewarding hobby. Still, I don't think it's wrong to seek out recompense for time as well as monetary expenses, and if I get it it enables and encourages me to do more with the site.

I got an email from BitPass over the weekend, inviting me to be a beta tester for their service. Apparently the payment aspects of the service are solid, and it's really just the administrative report services that are in beta. I'll investigate more when I get home. If and when bitpass looks stable enough for me, I've basically decided to make use of it at RinkWorks for, at minimum, a subscription to a non-ad version of the site. (If you've donated through Paypal recently, I'll make sure you've got a subscription for it.)

And I am strongly leaning toward charging for posting to the forum (reading it would remain free), but this charge would be very low. What form the charges would take, I don't know -- I'll have to explore BitPass a bit more and see what is convenient and practical -- but I would keep those charges minimal. Gahalyn, I get what you're saying about there being a difference between charging for creative content and charging for communal interaction, but Stephen and Faux Pas also have valid points: however much communal interaction *should* be free, it's not free for me, and charging for posting access to the forum will undoubtedly eliminate spam and discourage the content-light posts. Like my hosting expenses, forum moderation is not something that's necessarily understood from the outside. If the job is done right, you maybe see a few of the posts that get deleted but never all of them. This may indeed have the side effect of alienating Howard, Sigi, and possibly others. If this is so, I would not undervalue this loss. But if that's the way it is, so be it. If two cents a post, or a dollar a month, or whatever the charges turn out to be is too much to ask, even when you've got the money, happy trails to you.

Chat will remain free. Thanks to the op system, it is pretty much self-moderating, so a charge would not provide any benefit there. And unlike the forum, chat triggers a lot more ad hits than the forum does.

I will almost certainly release the next major RinkWorks game as a purchasable thing, and how that goes will surely influence what other future projects are released as free or part of a subscription package. I can't imagine that anything that is free now (forum posting excepted) would not remain so unless a really good reason comes to light.

The point that hybrid pay/free sites with junky free sections are undesirable is well taken, but that should not be a concern with RinkWorks. I don't know why my internal quality control gauge would change for the free stuff, and I can only imagine it will raise the bar for the subscription stuff. Again, while I do want to make money on RinkWorks, it's not the overriding goal here. I have no use for a substandard feature, free or not. If you don't like something here, it's because we have different tastes or I screwed up, but not because I relaxed my standards.

I'm still interested in hearing people's opinions on this subject, whether they continue to debate the decisions I've almost made with this post or cover the territory beyond. This is a rather important crossroads, and I'm pretty deeply concerned about taking the right path.