Site News & Announcements

Important Changes To Our Membership Plans

Greetings Members!

It's been over one year since Writing.Com first instituted portfolio limitations on free memberships. During that time period, we saw countless free communities close up shop because they didn't plan ahead and evolve to meet their resource needs. Meanwhile, Writing.Com has continued to improve and grow, adding tons of new features, tools and options while reaching more readers and writers than ever before.

We realize that in order to continue on a successful path, we must balance our site's resource usage with both members' feedback and feasibility. Over the last few months, we've reviewed countless combinations of options, features and limitations to build an additional membership plan that costs less than an Upgrade, but is more inclusive than a Free membership. While some members suggested changing the free membership to a "for a limited time only" plan, we feel all members should have an opportunity to interact on Writing.Com for as long as they'd like without having to continuously recreate their identity after their "time" runs out.

As a result, we have updated and expanded our membership plans to better accommodate our membership base as a whole!

Introducing Basic Memberships:
We're pleased to offer our members a new membership plan: Basic Membership. This membership level is similar to our Free service, but offers members more total portfolio items, item types and features at a very affordable yearly cost.

In addition to the benefits of our Free services:
The Basic portfolio item limit is 25 items total.
Basic Members can create and manage Folders.
Basic Members can create two (2) Message Forums.
Basic Members can send Anonymous Reviews.
Basic Members can mass update item access restrictions.
Basic Members have access to the Chat Room.

The cost of the Basic Membership is $15.00 per year. Like our other paid memberships, this plan may be purchased through our store, from your Gift Point Center and/or gifted to other members.

For a complete membership benefits comparison chart, see:

Compare Free and Paid Membership Benefits  [E] #688627 Compare different features and benefits of the various membership levels at Writing.Com. by Writing.Com Support

A Note About Free Memberships:
Free memberships are available to any person that has an interest in reading, writing and participating within the community. This membership level allows new members to join in and learn about the community, its features, tools and benefits. It also provides a limited amount of storage space for those that wish to post a few items of their own. With the introduction and availability of our new Basic Membership option, we've made a few modifications to our Free Membership.

These adjustments still allow for community growth as there is no limit on any Member's participation in forums, interactive stories, reading, rating or reviewing. We are merely resetting reasonable limitations to ensure that as we continue to receive exposure and experience growth, we also continue to keep pace with technology and infrastructure.

These modifications will also help control system resources, such as bandwidth and data base size. In addition, these changes will also provide better exposure to our Basic, Upgraded and Premium Members, as their presence and fuller portfolios will stand out among the crowd, as they should since they are supporting the site with a paid membership.

The following changes are now in effect for Free Memberships:
No daily item creation limit.
We've removed the limit on how many items a Free Member may create in a 24-hour period.
The Free portfolio item limit is 5 items total.
While it might seem as though hosting a few extra items in an individual's portfolio is not resource intensive, multiply those few extra items by over 15,000 Free Authors and the number has quickly grown. This new limitation effects over 60,000 items that we're hosting for free.
Free Members may not create Folders.
With a 5 item total, there is no need to organize using folders. This will also clear up the confusion that many of our new members experience when creating their first item.
Free Members may not create Message Forums.
There are simply too many message forums. The fact that any Registered member could create numerous message forums severely diluted the activity in all of them.
Free Members may not send Anonymous Reviews.
Too often, members were signing up solely to harass other members through the anonymous review feature. This feature is now reserved for those members who are serious about their community involvement.

Grace Period: Current free members who have more than 5 items will have a grace period of 60 days (starting today) to store these additional items in their portfolio. After this period, any items over the free membership limit will be deleted from the system.

For a complete membership benefits comparison chart, see:
         "Compare Free and Paid Membership Benefits" .


A Special Thank You:
We want to thank those of you who have supported Writing.Com through a paid membership or the purchase of Gift Points. We and the entire community of Writing.Com sincerely appreciate your patronage! We hope that those using our free membership plan will join the ranks of our paid supporters and help to ensure the longevity of our online community.

Sincerely,
  ~~ The StoryMaster and
         The StoryMistress

FORUM

Technical Support Forum  (13+) Members help other members with technical questions and problems using Writing.Com! #303715 by Writing.Com Support