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xwordinfo.com requiring registration soon

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ebirnholz:
It appears that the terms have been laid out on XWord Info's front page:

Users can donate either $10, $20, or $50 to register and receive access to the full site for a whole year.  Do so by March 15, and you get full access for 15 months.  If you've ever donated to XWord Info before, you'll have free access for the first year.

It's not unreasonable to ask users to commit a minimum of $10 for an entire year, so I won't mind donating at least that much.  Hell, if I ever sell a puzzle to the NYT one of these days, I can make that money back 20 times over!

worldofcrosswords:
ebirnholz,

I sympathize with you. I paid for a cruciverb gold membership last year. It was a bit of a stretch for me. I'm not sure that the $35 will ever pay for itself. I recently started a  small business, World of Crosswords. It's running in the red, and I have to really carefully evaluate every expense.

I will also pay the registration fee, but I feel disgruntled to get hit with a fee almost as soon as I started using the site (I am using the site manually). My hope is that the costs will eventually be recovered, and my disgruntlement will become a dim memory.

I'm a little surprised to read SJS's suggestion that the site owners of cruciverb and Xwordinfo are making sacrifices to run these sites. I don't know how they feel, but I'd be happy to run a site like this! I'm surprised if the sites are not running in the black.

Marya

SJS:
ebirnholz,

Good comments above.

worldofcrosswords,

I'm sure it's a labor of love for both Kevin and Jim and I have no doubt they are both gratified by all of the support they receive from the community they helped to build.  I'd bet they would agree with you that 95% of the time they feel lucky to be hosting such well-used and well-respected websites. 

But even still, that other 5% of the time... like whatever it was that caused XWordInfo to change their policy.  One day things are going great, then all of the sudden the website is crashing.  And Jim probably gets a ton of emails saying "Hey, why is your site crashing?"  And he feels terrible, because he knows so many constructors depend on the site.  So he probably spends a few hours figuring out what's going on.  Then he realizes the only way to stop the site from crashing is to set up a registration system.  That means spending another who knows how many hours researching registration systems and buying a program or self-programming the registration.  And worrying about the people who've already donated.  And wanting to make sure there's no snafus with the new system.  And dealing with all the emails from people who don't like the idea.  And all of this probably in the middle of a week he had other plans.

Stuff like that probably doesn't happen very often, but the more popular your site is, the more that when it happens, it is a major stressor for the website owner.  Who probably spends at least some time thinking "Do I really need this?"  So when stuff like that does happen I think it is especially important for folks like us (the users of the site) to be patient and to give the website owner the benefit of the doubt.

IMHO!

--SJS

worldofcrosswords:
SJS,

I've never complained about the outages at cruciverb or Xwordinfo. I'm a patient person; if the site is down, I wait a little while and try again later. And I like both of these websites and find them useful.

However, speaking as both a web developer and website owner, I would love to have the problem of my site crashing because there are too many users! :) Now if it's a DOS attack, that's something else. But there's no need to add a fee when that happens, so I'm assuming that was not the problem for Xwordinfo. The switch to fee-for-service implies that the site is not making sufficient money off ads. That surprises me a bit.

Marya

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