So how is it going to work then, this paying for the services thing? I got the email asking me how much I would be prepared to pay to remain subscribed to Word of the Day. Will this affect the rest of the site? Or will we be able to use it without paying a membership fee?

JtW.

This has to be an April fool joke!

Nikos

Will the Agora remain free to peruse and post on?

- Robby

How will the new subscription service for Word of the Day affect the rest of the site?  It will allow us to keep the rest of the site free and actually improve it.  The money from the new subscription service will go to hire a full-time web developer who will maintain the link farm better than it has been maintained, up-date the games (which will now cost the minimal fee of $14.95/year)—maybe even come up with some new ideas.  

We license the American Heritage dictionary and the licensing fee doubles in October (to $20,000/year) and we simply need help paying this fee. We also send out the Word of the Day to more than 100,000 people a day.  This gives us a burst in bandwidth demand from our server connection that is costing us $1500/month more than we paid when we only had 50,000 subscribers.  So we are looking at a $28,000 increase in costs for the word of the day this year, a cost that will rise if we continue to add 2500-3000 new subscribers per month as we have over the past 3 years.

The Agora will always remain free, as will all the pages except the Word of the Day archives and the games.  We simply are not making enough from our other enterprises to cover the growing costs of the Word of the Day.

—RB

Katy,

Please tell me the 2 hours or so we (usually I) put into our daily words are alone worth $.04 to you.  Then you add word games, including 3 that specifically test your knowledge of the WotDs—something no other site offers.  It has to add up to close to 4 cents a day.  

Do you guys use the AHD4 on the front page? How do you like the integrated dictionary-thesaurus. The thesaurus has a couple of unique features, such as back-to-back antonyms and multicolumned categories.

—RB

I thought that this was old news.  Or am I one of those compulsive pay-on-timers?

Of course the laugh is on me, if my recollection of paying is based on paying for the cartoons that come once a day to my inbox!

[quote author=Dr. Language link=board=news;num=1080913807;start=0#4 date=04/15/04 at 14:03:34] . . . The Agora will always remain free, as will all the pages except the Word of the Day archives and the games.  We simply are not making enough from our other enterprises to cover the growing costs of the Word of the Day.

—RB

Some suggestions to ruminate over.  Perhaps Andrew The Board God could roll a quick look-up function for the WOTD Archive to check for the existence of a word.  Checking for a suggested word in the Suggest A Word Forum, currently unsearchable, would be icing on the cake!    

Also, how would that affect quoting the URL of a WOTD in a post, as in anfractuous, perspicacity,[sub]subliminal[/sub], baleful,  and dolorous?

For paying customers, you might consider buying Ekkis’ search solution (currently free but obviously unable to remain so) that lets you do a search of the WOTD Archive based on any word in the definition, not just the word itself.  

Whatever.