[lurker]

There is no agreement that is presented to you when you sign up or post to the addventure that mentions assignment of copyright or even giving BotComics a license to do anything with it.

Therefore, legally you retain all rights in the content.

( I am not a lawyer )

[blender]

As an aside, I do not understand why content creators will post their work on a site that requires a paid subscription to view it, without getting a share of the profits.

I never understood that either. It is another way way of saying "give me free stuff that I can sell over and over again. To add insult to injury, I'm going to charge you to see the free stuff other people have given me"
It is rather brazen when you look at it that way. In this incarnation, that really is what prosumerism  is. Toffler really wasn't that clever and he got more wrong than right and the stuff he got right was fairly obvious.

Of course there are expenses incurred from the operation of the platform and those need to be dealt with.
There should also be an opportunity for profit (why not?) for the owner.  There are standard ways to do this and there more creative ways.
If one is a community then the street goes both ways. Everybody wins and is happy. 

I do not see this new platform as community based,  but a shift away from it.
I freely admit I could be wrong. Time will tell.

 In the interest of full disclosure;

I have been around since forever.  I never (with very rare exceptions) post. Either in the forum or a morph.
As to the forum, there really isn't any reason to reply as most topics hold no interest and those that do, previous comments have covered my thoughts.

As to morphs. the BEA and I have a slight problem and it is irreconcilable. It revolves around methodology and  liability.
The first thing I do is strip any logos/watermarks, regardless.
I will also alter morphs. A guaranteed way to start a pissing contest. I don't care. If they can alter a photo then I can alter their photo.
The rules and prohibited list is constantly changing.  ( not that it matters because I already stripped the logo. How many Playboy/score morphs are here that have been stripped?)

Make no mistake, I fully understand their position (been there like Zimmerman and many others) and respect that by not posting.  I just don't want the hassle of it all.

As to the more prolific and well known, I dare say that if you were to put a Patreon page with  a zip of  "every morph I did" offer at $10 (whatever)  you would be able to buy more than a pizza and a beer.

(edited by moderator to fix a formatting problem only)

[blender]

Whet the hell is a "pin" and why do I need 50 or a million?
Are we hemming dresses now?

Your link to the Botcomic Faqs hangs on loading and offers no useful information.
I also need to sign in, yet again (with google+ ??), to add  a comment.
Man, you guys don't have clue one.

did anyone bother to test the new site before launch? 
If you payed money for this,  you were swindled.
If this is in house then,  somebody needs to be shot in the foot and kicked in the balls and sent to the corner with no milk and cookies.
If you're going to make it a pay site then just nut up and do it.  This is ridiculous.


pro tip boys.
It's better to have some of something than all of nothing. 

[The Arrogant Nair]

"The more you squeeze, the more sand disappears between your fingers."

Look, BotComics, I understand exactly what you're attempting to do here. I'm not an idiot, I have eyes, I have common sense, and I can analyze a situation without making myself look like an abject fool. Since it's inception, The Unending BE Addventure has always been very loosely attached to the rest of the archive, enough so that, as others have pointed out, it was entirely possible to pursue the Addventure without ever knowing about the Archive that hosts it. That's a lot of potential traffic that's largely just being wasted from a business perspective, and you want to try and lure those users into creating paying memberships to generate additional revenue, or at least free memberships and engaging in the community to generate additional content, (and hopefully eventual paid membership). It's an incredibly simple and sensible business decision.

You've just done it wrong. You've done it so wrong that if the only result of this decision is absolutely nothing, then you would be incredibly lucky, because I simply cannot imagine any better outcome that isn't ludicrously optimistic.

More likely than nothing however, is the possibility that this change will cause serious damage both to the health of the Unending BE Addventure, but also to your brand. Potential readers and contributors are simply not going to be enticed to join and will in all likelihood just leave upon seeing a login page without any indication of what's behind it or a compelling reason to risk signing up. Existing readers and contributors are both extremely frustrated and demoralized by this change because it's not only intrusive but as aforementioned will almost certainly result in less readers and less contributors.

Now consider your original intention. You wanted the users of the Unending BE Addventure to become aware of the Archive and you wanted them to become paid members, and potential consumers. I think you've succeeded in raising awareness, but it is certainly not true that all publicity is good publicity. I know I would never purchase snack foods from a company which I only knew of through an FDA probe on the amount of rat feces present in their goods, or who were dumping so much waste into the local water source that my hair was starting to fall out in clumps. What I'm saying here is that you're not just building awareness, this sense of disregard is actively creating animosity and contempt. If the most likely result occurs and the community surrounding the Addventure is crippled by your actions then they will almost certainly hold you responsible and what were contributors and may have been customers will simply refuse to have anything to do with you out of principle.

This is a bad decision. It's obviously a bad decision. Several years ago when a similar glitch happened and a friend and fellow contributor was worried that the Addventure had been deleted or was being made pay-only, I explained to them how unlikely that was simply because of how obviously bad of a decision that would be. I would be giving you this exact same advice regardless of if I was a contributor, a neutral party, or even a hired consultant on your part; this is too intrusive, it's going to blow up in your face, think of something better.

Design a splash page that shows up once on the first domain access to advertise the Archive and leaves behind a cookie to prevent it from reoccurring.
Add a footer to the bottom of each episode explaining that "The Unending BE Addventure is hosted by The BE Archive", complete with a link.
Get really exciting and design a landing page that entices addventure users to use it as a bookmark, serve up a random sampling of free archive materials, some news, and provide easy access to the Addventure itself and all of its utilities.

[rtpoe]

Personally, I never really followed the Addventure. I did add a few items, but I lost interest in following them after a while.

As I recall, the Addventure opens with the stereotypical "guy is woken up by his alarm clock, and has to get ready for school". For me, that's an instant turn-off. The implication is that the protagonist is a high-school student, and I am NOT interested in reading about the sexual escapades of someone that young. Can't you writers have someone getting woken up by their alarm clock, and they have to get ready for *work*?

My real concern about all I've been reading is that people will stay away from the BEA, and we will lose revenue. I know nothing of the financial situation of the site, but as someone who's been around here for something like 15 years, I'd hate to see it go away.

[Post-Bop]

The Addventure hosts countless stories, with a variety of characters. The specifics of "Jim" in particular are variable. There are many threads where he's a fully grown adult.

While it's neat that readers can backtrack all the way to the very beginning, from a practicality standpoint, most things begin from a restart episode, with some kind of new plot hook.

[rtpoe]

The Addventure hosts countless stories, with a variety of characters. The specifics of "Jim" in particular are variable. Tthere are many threads where he's a fully grown adult.

While it's neat that readers can backtrack all the way to the very beginning, from a practicality standpoint, most things begin from a restart episode, with some kind of new plot hook.

True, true. It's just a general gripe of mine and not a knock on the Addventure in particular.

[PyroWild]

The Addventure hosts countless stories, with a variety of characters. The specifics of "Jim" in particular are variable. Tthere are many threads where he's a fully grown adult.

While it's neat that readers can backtrack all the way to the very beginning, from a practicality standpoint, most things begin from a restart episode, with some kind of new plot hook.

Hell, in all my time writing on the BEAddventure, I've never written anything for Jim, Rick, or any of the characters revolving around them. They just aren't appealing to me, and, since I didn't create them, I feel that writing for them would be no less fanfiction that writing for Samus Aran or other established characters like her.

[Adama]

Add a footer to the bottom of each episode explaining that "The Unending BE Addventure is hosted by The BE Archive", complete with a link.

I'd have been happy to make modifications to the Addventure that "advertised" the BEA more... but nobody ever asked.

[Tritan]

I would not be surprised, Adama, if whoever did this has only recently come onto the site. They probably only noticed the addventure, saw it wasn't making them any money directly, and threw out this ham handed "fix"

Honestly I'm really surprised this is a site that has any sort of membership fee. All this time I thought this was an amateur run passion project.

[Adama]

From BEginner:

I've spent 17-ish years creating free content for these people's website and an arbitrary decision by them that I had no warning or influence in cut me off from the hundreds of pages of content I've created.  Is the next arbitrary decision they make that I have to pay to access any of it?

[gonZo]

Seems to me that if promoting the pay sections and sites associated with BEArchive to Addventure users was the intended goal of the new registration requirement, it would have been simpler and fairer to just add a banner to the top or bottom of the Addventure pages. I realize that banners would be intrusive, but not to the extent that a reader/contributor lockout is intrusive.
_
gonZo

[TheEngineer]

Honestly I'm really surprised this is a site that has any sort of membership fee. All this time I thought this was an amateur run passion project.

same, and honestly I wish it were. If the issue isn't fixed, the addventure should be migrated somewhere else, if at all possible.

[Bio]

Count me in as being very annoyed by this change, and frankly it killed a lot of my enthusiasm to continue working on here. I received an email yesterday saying that someone updated one of my threads and I hadn't yet read it. Now that I found out I have an account here, I'll be able to, but, I just hate how this killed so many people being able to access it.

Especially when I find this, and I see so many of my favorite authors complaining about it: Pyro, Post, Surplus, Nair, Lumitiel, it's frustrating.

Also, I loved the simplicity of the site. No bullcrap like writing.com had. I could easily look at the site from work if I wanted to, since it's just text. But now there's that big splash screen there, nope, can't look at that safely!

[Adama]

I could easily look at the site from work if I wanted to, since it's just text. But now there's that big splash screen there, nope, can't look at that safely!

Yup, one of my gripes too.