I let my membership here expire a while ago, and have just recently re-visited the board and saw that I have posting privileges as a guest, which I thought was some kind of loophole/error since my understanding was that after the 30-day guest trial period you had to be a paid member to post.
It seems that the additional banner ads would account for this, plus I have noticed other long-standing members I remember (such as WhyNot) also showing up as Guests, so I am assuming there was a change and non-paid guests can now post indefinitely.
I looked over the vast compendium of rules and regulations, and the registration agreement and couldn’t find any mention of this change. If it is true, can it be put in a more obvious place so returning former members like me would know about it? And if it isn’t true, and this really is a loophole let me know and I’ll pay up - I’m not trying to break the rules here.
Well that’s reason enough to fork over the membership fee right there.
Honestly I probably will again at some point so I can use the search feature, get rid of the ads, etc. but right now I’m flat broke so it’s nice to know I can still participate in this wonderful community.
If you want to use the search feature, I’d consider waiting until it’s fixed, since it doesn’t work too well right now. Most searches for us paid users still result in database errors.
Yep, Guesting is free now, thanks to the ads. Membership is optional, and gets you no ads and a picture in your profile, but I think that’s it at this point. It also gets the SDMB less money for your board experience - the ads pay more than the membership. So while they’re leaving memberships as an option, my understanding is that they’d really rather have less paid Members and more Guests’ ad revenue.
