Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Forum becoming subscription only

How about a metered system where users paid/character?!

Works for me. FWIW, I owe this site a lot and will stick around -- in fact, I had already subscribed before the announcement.

I hadn't contributed anything since a store purchase years ago, so I went ahead and subscribed last night.

I don't see the option on my profile page to display the subscription badge. Hey, Dogperson, I see you have 2 on yours , is one of those mine?

I'll stick around as well. But *if* it was my site/forum I'd think about providing an 'introductory' membership for $1, valid for a year and allowing say one post a week only - for the forum to avoid a death through starvation of new members there has to be an easy entry point so that folks can learn its value.

Agree in concept, although not necessarily in value. Maybe a few dollars, as $1 is too trivial to make it worth while from a bookkeeping standpoint. $9.99 / 6 month intro? Anyone with a question would think that's worthwhile.

What Bruce said. In Frank's post, in the Where's my Badge post, he wrote

S, it's not a done deal, there's no timeline yet etc. "Likely" is a pretty strong word, but I think speculation is premature.

Having said that, I understand the impulse to think about how to react. I've been a member here since 2004 -- 15 years! I have posted much less in the last few years, but always lurk. And now that I'm starting a grand search, I've been posting in the Piano Forum a lot. I have been assuming I'll really rely on the Piano Forum as my search continues. Even if I pay a subscription, how many others would? Would the drop in posting members impact the amount and quality of advice?

Guess I better hurry up and ask all my stupid questions, before it's too late!

Certainly, if you wait too long, you might find there are fewer stupid answers to you stupid questions!

Oh, interesting.
I have just looked up the original post and it says: "The forums will likely be changing to an all subscription model soon. "

Since "likely" is not "certainly"...maybe nothing will change at all?
Maybe this post is just meant as a "shake up", so that people get more aware of the financial burden, that a forum owner has to deal with.

I am very new myself and I probably would not have signed up, if I had to pay for it.

So I think, this option:


is a rather good one.

After using this forum more regularly (for a couple of months or so), I would “likely” ( ) be willing to subscribe it...but I definetly would not do that in advance as completly new user. I wanna know, what I am paying for.

Reading would still be free, so just by browsing anybody can get an idea.

The crazy thing is of course that the content providers would be paying, and the lurkers would be getting it for free. It ought to be the other way around, but of course making the posts invisible to newcomers would totally prevent newcomers from entering - unless it got the status of a mystic cult.

Based on previous discussions about forum slowness, I think the cost of supporting pianoworld is higher than it could be due to forum software being used (ubb threads). Same with mobile support.

I am happy to host an always free piano forum using some other software. I have enough disposable income to host a large forum for many years. Of course building it doesn’t mean people will come. Pianoworld has a long history and very supportive members.

And maybe posting here about a competing forum might get me banned by admins. Or not.

I happened across Frank's post because I never got a badge after donating last year. It wasn't important enough to me to remember to email a request for my badge. But the recent post prompted me to renew my donation (do I have a badge yet?!).

I get so much out of this community, especially finding new music to play. It also helped me in my piano search last year. Definitely worth my support.

I understand that many contributors dislike the proposed auto-renew aspect (but it would only take a few minutes to go in and cancel it), and that many are on tight budgets. So voluntary contributions would seem best, but that has, apparently, not generated enough response to support the forums adequately. Answer: donate, people, if you are able!

We do like in an age of micro payments, and bookkeeping has to be a fully automatic process if you are running a site with thousands of members.

Frankly whatever the entrance cost is it will be too much for many. Going further, even if the financial cost is zero and the process of registering is too fiddly the cost is too high for many.

Personally, I wouldn't dream of a $10 initial hurdle. If I wasn't willing to do $1 for a year I'd do $1 for a weeks questions and unlimited posts to your question's threads, if the forum software supports that sort of thing. Actually I wouldn't, if I couldn't make it pay on a voluntary basis or even run within what I was willing to afford I'd try to find someone else to host the forum but that's just me and I have no problem with Frank hoping to get a return from his time/investment, if that is indeed what he is aiming at.

Now that’s pure irony!. It reminds me of MuseScore, in which you have to pay to become a member if you want to upload your submissions, however, reviewing or downloading submissions is free. That never really made a lot of sense to me.

Lol a couple of people here wouldn't be happy about that!
Surely that would put an end to the endless rambling about the best learning methods, or telling the story of one's life every other post

In my earlier post I jumped the gun by assuming that going subscription-based was a 'given' whereas it was mentioned as a 'likelihood.' Apologies for that.
One of the major advantages of this forum, which I suspect makes it more expensive to run, is the lack of intrusive advertising. It's like a breath of fresh air compared with many other internet sites. Perhaps I'm being over-hasty in implying that I wouldn't pay! Surely it's worth paying for - a haven from the lunacy of the internet to discuss a favourite subject?
I suspect a 'trial period' could be arranged for newcomers, btw, or an 'advert-free experience' for paying members with free members enjoying all the ads (mind-you, ad-blockers can be quite effective, so not necessarily a good approach.) We'll see, I guess.....

Well, I'm retired on a fixed income so I guess I'm out. I can't argue with the decision, it costs money to run these things. Good luck all!

A big part of the cost may come from maintaining the availability of every post made on this forum since its inception. While it's a nice thing to have, is it really necessary to have instant access to historical posts? How often do you come to this forum to read a thread that was last updated in 2005 versus an active discussion that was last updated three minutes ago? Some kind of a rolling discussion where posts older than X months or years are automatically archived and removed from the active part of the forum or maybe even deleeted would likely result in a significant saving in the resources required to run this thing and still maintain the most popular part, i.e. the active discussions.

According to a post earlier in this thread, this forum has 93,000 members. How many of those are what you could call active, i.e. how many of these people come here to read what's new, and how many are people that last visited this site many years ago and have long forgotten that they ever signed up and have moved on to other interests or died. I suspect that the first number is a much smaller number than the second.

I suppose it largely comes down to the reason why this forum exists. Whether it's being done as a hobby or a labour of love, or if it's intended to be a profit-making enterprise.

This would be very boring for us though, because we would answer the newbie's question, give them suggestions, and then we would have to wait for a week to find out what they thought about it.


That is a much better idea!

A language forum recently closed down. The "owner" was frustrated with the drama. And the income did not cover his time at a reasonable rate. That is understandable. On the other hand, some "members" were slightly miffed by the amount of volunteer time they put into educational posts that have disappeared forever. And the loss of good reference materials.

Unfortunately, old websites and images disappear over time. Forums with substantive content are on a downward spiral. Like it or not, this is a consequence of concentrating global media power into just a few hands, mainly those of Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Google.