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Annual Fee For Your Comment?
CaptainThunderbolt writes "Imagine this: you read an interesting story on Slashdot and you have a comment to make, so you login only to be greeted with a message saying you will need to pay a fee in order to make your comment. Seems ridiculous, doesn't it? Why on earth would you pay just to make a comment? Well, that is exactly how thousands of Aussies feel right now. AtomicMPC is an Australian PC Magazine with a fiercely loyal readership and an equally loyal online community. Yesterday it was announced that access to the most popular sections of the forum will soon attract a $20/year fee unless you are a magazine subscriber or a high-ranking forum member. The reaction to this announcement triggered the most vicious backlash I have ever witnessed as the website feedback forum went beserk. Users baulked at the idea of having to pay to access a community which the feel they are responsible for creating and I must say I understand how they feel. Is this a trend I should worry about? Will I one day have to pay a membership fee to access other popular forums?"
I was going to comment to say basically this. Yeah, SA attracts some 'unique' characters. You could say it's tasteless and unsavory, but it doesn't have trolls (that last), jokes/catch phrases don't get beaten into the ground (since using one that's been deemed 'old' will get you probation or a banning), and people generally don't talk in AOLspeak.
There's a sense of cameraderie there and the forums are much more close-knit than say slashdot, where I seldom remember another poster by name. Because you stand to lose something real (your right to post or 10 dollars), you're more likely to behave, contribute, and get something out of the forum.
All in all, I'd say that this is a good move. SA did this several years ago. When they moved to the payment system from being a free forum, users who didn't post comments lost their accounts and contributors kept them. This makes sense more in light of the 'one-time cost' model than a subscription one (a subscription for life saves you much more than $10 in the long run and is much more a liability to the owner). I know people who lost their accounts then. Years later, they don't care. Most of them payed the $10 and kept on lurking. If anyone was bitter, it didn't kill the forum.
Now if we could only figure out how to keep these annoying as fuck highschoolers out...then we'd really have it figured out.
I don't know about the Atomic boards specifically, but in general, charging money for forum access keeps out the riff raff (read: trolls, spammers, etc.), and this is a good thing.
Slashdot's discussions do okay because of the moderation system, despite its flaws. But ever read an unmoderated discussion on say...Ain't It Cool News? Read their Talk Backs for 10 seconds and you'll wish you still had a CRT monitor so that you could punch through it and end your painful existence.
By charging for access, you keep out the riff raff.
The ViewAskew.com boards (View Askew is Kevin Smith's production company), among others, has been doing something similar for a while now. To register on the View Askew boards you need to pay 2 bucks. It's a low fee, and it all goes to a rape/incest survivor charity, because, after all, Smith isn't trying to make a profit from this registration...the money is really just a gate keeping mechanism. $2 is low enough to not be prohibitive for legitimate users, but high enough to keep out the idiots.
After all, Capitalism is the best, right?
Good point, yes it is. Free Market systems will choose the best course. Naturally, a website cannot simply sit around making no money and expect to continue providing content.
The real problem is the people who have come to expect a "free as in I'm too cheap to pay" community on the web. Of course, I guess we could just ask the government to entitle us with "free as in payed by taxpayers who are too stupid to notice the rising taxes" web services.
-- Should there be smoke coming out of my CPU?
What I don't get is why, when the moderation system and filters available allow for you to screen for almost anything, people seem to read a -1 then rant about First Posts and trolls, but hey, that's just me.
I'm a /. fanboy, I like /. warts and all. I see it as a the net's agora. Like any open gathering place you should take what you value with a grain of salt, until you've been able to substantiate it. Reading /. at +4 gives results equal to the best techno sites, but it's up to the reader to validate the information.
I liked /. best before it was sold, but think, that to date, it was at it's best about 3 years ago when the post grad ratio was at it's highest and the best and the brightest seemed to post. But again that's just me; I don't subscribe, not because I don't want to support /., but because I get alot of value out of the ads and think they're germane.
cheers
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Long story short, the *CODE* for the RPG was all GPL, but all the game content, was curiously licensced under the planeshift license, which was bascially, "we o3n jou!" I started asking people, hey, why shoudl I as a musician assign my copyrights to you again? Why do you need that in an open source game? The were bullheaded and said basically "thats how it is."
Like a year later it leaked that the top brass had secret plans to sell the game all along, and were basically harnessing open source enthusiasts and naieve artists/musicians/writers to develop a proprietary game for them. I confronted one of them about it and all they had to say in their defense was "we never said we WEREN'T going to sell it."
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I'm not sure where to even to begin here. First the name is PlaneShift not planescape. Second the content is licensed under a different license because it offers both the team and the person some protection. If somebody later on decides 'I don't want that model in game anymore' then we are screwed. Many artists want their stuff not opensource so they can control how it is used. I suppose you think that if I write a book with OpenOffice I should have to give that away for free as well? As for the last stuff I hope by 'brass' you mean the sink or something. What you claim has *never* been the policy and nobody from the team has ever said anything like that.