Community Support - Some Changes Happening Now, and Coming Up

Hey everyone!

Over the coming months, we're going to be asking for your support a bit more than we have in the past.

Recently a set of emails have gone out to our premium users. Many of you that are active have been used to being automatically made a premium member. Being an active member of the community, good submissions, achievements, etc.

We had 290 premium users. With about 10 paying. And honestly, that has always been fine. I prefer things that way.

But the advertising industry has not recovered since covid hit. You all know about the current economic situation. All of our server costs are going up in December. For previously leased servers. I haven't seen this happen ever before. 

To keep Alpha Coders healthy, it makes sense to put more effort towards contributions from the community. Premium is one of the main ways we currently have to do that, and it doesn't work very well when everyone that really likes the site automatically gets it🙂

Regardless of whether you can contribute via premium or not, we really do appreciate you using the site. It's not something everyone can manage, but we are extremely grateful to those who can and choose to.

There will be a few other premium only features/non premium restrictions coming, but we'll get to those as they launch. The main goal is to add value instead of subtract, and non-premium restrictions will only show up when it has a direct material impact on us (meaning, costing significant server resources)

We have another update. This will probably be the most restrictive one we see.

There are now submission, rating, favoriting, etc limits per account. 10,000 of each per account, unless you go premium, in which case we upgrade it to 50,000 each. https://alphacoders.com/site/premium-features And the ability to go past that to basically infinity if we can work something out🙂

Larger databases run slower. More images take up more storage space. Overall it's pretty simple. 

Now, the less simple part is that many of our members have gone way above these new limits. We're currently iterating on a dynamic system that enforces this based on the account. 

Example time:

Lets say we have an old account that slowly submits a few hundred images a month. It's family friendly content, appropriate to the site it's submitted to. Basically every submission adds value. Alpha System will kindly and discreetly look the other way for the submissions part of this. 

Lets say we have an account that oftentimes does large image dumps. The content may be categorized, or might not, but it's all kind of generic and doesn't get viewed. Alpha System will enforce the submisssions part of this system.

The final example: Someone submits a lot of non family friendly content with artistic merit to Image Abyss. We have no ability to monetize this. So Alpha System will enforce the submissions part of this system.

Long story short, if your account runs into one of these limits, please consider upgrading to premium to support us. We need to have a balanced relationship with all accounts at Alpha Coders, and this should get us closer to that goal🙂If you love the site - support it!