16 Sep, 2007, Rojan QDel wrote in the 1st comment:
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If we're doing shameless plugs… MOO-Cow Penguin Creations offers free MUD hosting at http://www.moocowpenguin.net/ - Unfortunately due to the increasing volume of free customers, we must now charge a ~$5 setup fee, but you will notice that the resources received for a free account are equivalent to or more than those of many pay hosts. How and why do we offer free hosting? Well, why not? Its my way of supporting new development and coders in the MUD community. Enjoy :)
16 Sep, 2007, KaVir wrote in the 2nd comment:
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So you're offering "free MUD hosting"…for $5?
16 Sep, 2007, Davion wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Tricksy hobbits.
16 Sep, 2007, Guest wrote in the 4th comment:
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You might want to rethink that offer. In some states in the US for instance, offering something for "free" and then charging a "setup fee" can get you sued.
17 Sep, 2007, Conner wrote in the 5th comment:
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Rojan QDel said:
If we're doing shameless plugs…

Who's we? And were they? If so, how come you needed to start a new thread to do so?
17 Sep, 2007, tphegley wrote in the 6th comment:
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I personally like Zeno's offer. His 'free' actually means free. Plus he has an awesome server and is an overall great guy. :)
17 Sep, 2007, Zeno wrote in the 7th comment:
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Slander! :wink:
17 Sep, 2007, Justice wrote in the 8th comment:
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Heh.. in that case…

I dunno about that Zeno guy, he seems to hate being seen in a good light.
17 Sep, 2007, Rojan QDel wrote in the 9th comment:
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Eh, we meaning Zeno and I, I suppose. It has been free for years, with no setup fee, I only recently added the $5 fee as the server was costing a lot more than I was making. I just removed it again as it doesn't seem very appealing and has been driving away new users…
17 Sep, 2007, Rojan QDel wrote in the 10th comment:
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What was that free mud host that eventually became pay? It was pretty big for a while but I'm blanking out on the name…
17 Sep, 2007, Cratylus wrote in the 11th comment:
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KaVir said:
So you're offering "free MUD hosting"…for $5?


There was another free mud host that did this…the name escapes me
at the moment. Aside from the obvious argument of what "free" means,
his explanation of the setup fee kinda made sense. IIRC, his point was that
the mechanism for getting him the money ensured that there was someone on the
other end truly answerable for their behavior, and he wanted to deal with
responsible people.

Ah! FrostMUD, I think it was.

Anyway, that made some sense to me, the "I just want to have a
real person on the other end" thing. However, you can do that with a $.01
setup fee, so the $5 still seems like cigarette money. Not that there's
anything necessarily wrong with that.

Besides that, the fact that you as a petitioner need to go to the
trouble of making this exchange means you're not the "Free
Tibet? I'll take two!" type, just wasting the admin's time. To this
layman, five dollars seems a good threshold for being "pretty much free"
and yet being just un-free enough to weed out time-wasters.

Not that it justifies starting a thread on iffy premises
for cigarette money. I just thought it's worth discussing whether
a $5 start up fee from a "free host" is frownworthy.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
17 Sep, 2007, Zeno wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
Rojan QDel said:
Eh, we meaning Zeno and I, I suppose. It has been free for years, with no setup fee, I only recently added the $5 fee as the server was costing a lot more than I was making. I just removed it again as it doesn't seem very appealing and has been driving away new users…


Back in 2005, you had the setup fee. For a few (specific?) users back then, you said "I felt nice today so i'm not going to charge the $5 setup fee".

Anyway, yeah. Requiring a payment sent to "confirm" the user actually cares, I can see. But $5 (FrostMUD) seems like more than just that.
17 Sep, 2007, Rojan QDel wrote in the 13th comment:
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Well. My main reasons for doing it were to cover costs and to weed out time-wasters. If you look at my hosted MUDs list, the majority are inactive. I feel like if someone pays money, even if its a measly $5, they'll be more likely to actually use the services instead of just wasting my disk space. And though the "real person" argument was not a main one of mine, it is a good reason, to make sure that the person on the other end actually exists and is willing to show me they're at least responsible enough to have and use a credit card ;) Honestly, I'm willing to go either way. I'm perfectly happy to cover costs myself and contribute truly free hosting to the community. But at the same time, if you're not willing to contribute $5 to your MUD's success, are you actually dedicated enough to it to run and develop it? (of course, people who actually don't have the money are excluded from this argument)
17 Sep, 2007, Guest wrote in the 14th comment:
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Well. See. If you start asking for $5 setup fees, it's no longer free. It's just really really cheap. The longer you're using the host, the cheaper it gets because the cost per day drops for you the longer you're there, until your cost per day approaches, but doesn't quite reach, $0.00.

Not that I have a problem with doing that. I just have a problem with people who do and then claim it's free. And as I said, some states have laws against this sort of thing so getting sued for it isn't entirely out of the question.
17 Sep, 2007, Rojan QDel wrote in the 15th comment:
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In 2005, the setup fee did apply to everyone. The specific users that were exempt were ones that were essentially grandfathered in. They had accounts before the fee was implemented but went inactive, when they came back to request accounts again, I didn't charge them the fee since it was really just re-enabling their old accounts. There were also a couple customers who I exempted from the fee since they didn't have credit cards for one reason or another. I wasn't exempting friends of mine, etc., just people with circumstances where they had previous accounts or couldn't pay the fee.
17 Sep, 2007, Guest wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
Rojan QDel said:
If you look at my hosted MUDs list, the majority are inactive. I feel like if someone pays money, even if its a measly $5, they'll be more likely to actually use the services instead of just wasting my disk space.


You'd be surprised. I've actually got customers on my service who are paying the money. Not a trivial $5 one time deal either. Monthly subscription charges that go on for months and months until I get emails wondering why I've been charging them for 9 months when they stopped using it last year. They don't tell me this, how am I supposed to know? Besides, my ToS clearly states that cancellations will not be honored by email - they need to terminate the subscription through Paypal.

For a free host, if you notice someone hasn't been on and their mud is idle, you have nothing keeping you tied up. Gut the dead weight and free up the space.
17 Sep, 2007, Zeno wrote in the 17th comment:
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Rojan QDel said:
In 2005, the setup fee did apply to everyone. The specific users that were exempt were ones that were essentially grandfathered in. They had accounts before the fee was implemented but went inactive, when they came back to request accounts again, I didn't charge them the fee since it was really just re-enabling their old accounts. There were also a couple customers who I exempted from the fee since they didn't have credit cards for one reason or another. I wasn't exempting friends of mine, etc., just people with circumstances where they had previous accounts or couldn't pay the fee.


Actually I wasn't referring to the fact that you allowed people to get in for free. I was referring to you saying "only recently added the $5 fee", which irks me because 2005 doesn't seem "recently".
17 Sep, 2007, Rojan QDel wrote in the 18th comment:
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I do do some housecleaning every once in a while to free up disk space. And its honestly no burden to me if someone is paying me and not using any resources ;) But I do think the list would be a lot emptier if I had the fee in effect the whole time I had been accepting users. And seeing how inactive it is, it would be emptier of inactive users.
17 Sep, 2007, Rojan QDel wrote in the 19th comment:
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Ah, I had it in 2005 but removed it in 2006 and "recently" added it again a couple months ago. Sorry for the confusion, Zeno.
17 Sep, 2007, Scoyn wrote in the 20th comment:
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From what's been said, maybe you should consider rephrasing "Free MUD Hosting" to "One Time Hosting Fee."
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