I appreciate your vigorous defense of the website Iain.
However, when people take the time to register a forum account and post that they are unhappy about the process here, I do think it's important that we acknowledge their frustration with the steps involved.
ronjf -- as someone with a fairly low tolerance for jumping through hoops, if i try to be objective and put myself in the shoes of someone visiting the site and just wanting to use the software, i think i might be annoyed as well. and certainly the trend these days is to just make everything free and easy, and then either shove ads down your throat, or sneak in adware in the software, or find other sneaky ways to make money off of users downloading the software. either that or have no intention of supporting the software for more than a year or so. we're trying to do something a little different here, and it's not without it's awkwardness. See
this article for more on some of the ideas about behind site.
However, i do want to take issue with one thing. When you say:
People want the opportunity to see if the site is worth while before considering upgrades
This statement is like the emails I sometimes receive from people who say they are uncomfortable donating before trying the software and want to know if we would be willing to let them download it and try it before paying anything. I think some people have a misunderstanding that they need to sign up and/or donate in order to download/install/try the software..
But the thing is -- even the software on this site that requires a license key has always been freely available to download and use without a license key, without donating, without signing up. The worst you'll see if you can't be bothered to get a free license key from us is a message when you start the program asking you to consider donating; there are no other restrictions or limitation of features, etc.
Feel free to email me (
[email protected]) if you'd like your account deleted. And if you or anyone else is reading this has decided they can not or will not donate, but still want a non-expiring license key, you can always email me to tell me so and i will send you a license key.
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