What will happen to We Make Zines?

[Nichole]

I saw on Tech Crunch yesterday that Ning will be ending its free service to its users. Free networks will be forced to pay or move their networks elsewhere. This made me wonder what will happen to this community. I just found it, and I would hate to see it die!

Sorry if this was already brought up. I was just curious if people knew about it or not.

[Krissy PonyBoy Press]

Yeah, this is bad news for sure. I don't know what they are going to offer for price packages, but I am thinking people will not mind donating a bit to keep WMZ going. I hope. I will get a donate button and all that going son. But, they didn't give us much time and I have yet to get an email about this.

http://blog.ning.com/2010/04/an-update-from-ning.html

[Tee Rex]

I think the lack of notice is terrible, you can't just drop news like that on people!

I'd be more than happy to donate. I hope the costs will be reasonable.

[NicoleIntrovert]

I think that my running club pays $19.99 a year for Ning. They voted on the fee to keep the site ad free for us. Of course that comes out of our dues and donations and such, and we use the Ning page for the actual club website so it's pretty necessary.

[Carlos Palacios Hidalgo]

i think a donation would be not a big deal for people here,i mean is for keep this page alive and we all profit in the end

[Blake]

I pledge my support.

Krissy PonyBoy Press said:

... but I am thinking people will not mind donating a bit to keep WMZ going. I hope. I will get a donate button and all that going son....

[James N. Dawson]

If it's only $20 a year, I'd be happy to contribute, but I think this development really should get us all to reflect on the reality of how little control we have over a medium we're pouring our hearts, souls and minds into (or at least some of us).

I got a similar wake up call on my Yahoo forum when a few times someone or someTHING "hacked into" it and started messing with it on a couple occasions. Apparently, in one, they had blocked messages from about half the members, and I still don't know if it's fixed, and though I've tried, I don't have the technical savvy to deal with it. I've read from a few other disgruntled Yahoo users that for some bizarre reason, Yahoo goes in and makes these changes themselves, but what do I know?

In my zines, I know exactly what's going on IN and WITH them. With electronic forums, it's very hazy at best.

On another Yahoo forum I'm a member of, one disgruntled member was threatening an appeal to Yahoo to shut down AND MAYBE EVEN ERASE the forum with years of valuable information and discussions, and they feared he had a good technical case to do just that. So there was sort of a mad scramble to save and/or transfer the archive somehow, but the suit never materialized, and I suppose with the heat off, everybody just settled into the usual Internetter complacency.

I wonder if there's any way to automatically save/archive the content on WMZ, and OTHER forums, so they're sure to be preserved. Personally, I wouldn't feel secure until and unless I've got it all ON INK, AND PAPER, but even having it on seperate discs would be better than nothing.

I admit here, I'm not tech savvy, so I could not be understanding the situation that well. But I think it's sad if decades of worthwhile writing, ideas, information, and ideas just goes down the drain. It seems like our controllers might like that.

[Vicky Stevenson]

There's also an option to set up your own ads on paid blogs and keep all the profit. You could always do that, would anyone else mind that? You could either put some bog standard google ads in, or even offer up ad space to members to advertise their zines?

[sandy]

+1 :)

Blake said:

I pledge my support.

Krissy PonyBoy Press said:

... but I am thinking people will not mind donating a bit to keep WMZ going. I hope. I will get a donate button and all that going son....

[Randy Spaghetti]

you got my support

[Yvonne G.]

i wouldn't mind donating to keep WMZ running :)
it would be really bad to lose the contents, specially from the forums, with all the info & advices that are gathered in it!

even if we considered moving to another forum/online community, i can't think of any online (free) service that has all the cool features that WMZ has - the members profile page, members blogs, the groups and their own forums, besides the general forum.
i guess we should have known that the "good times" wouldn't last forever, for free...

Carlos Palacios Hidalgo said:

i think a donation would be not a big deal for people here,i mean is for keep this page alive and we all profit in the end

[kit feral]

oh, that's awful... especially for the zine community! I sincerely hope that everyone that can donate will choose to, I wish there was something those of us without the funds could do. I will definitely donate once I am more financially stable.

[the force of nature]

I'm definitely down to donate. Why are they charging people when they're obviously getting money form ads. Lame