Have you guys seen the latest changes on BC?
http://www.bookcrossing.com/plus
Advanced searches for all shelves only for winged members,
limited forum and pm usage for unwinged members etc. etc.

Here's are some threads where people already started complaining:
http://www.bookcrossing.com/forum/9/5539355/42
http://www.bookcrossing.com/forum/9/5539509


Do you guys that BC will slowly die because of this?

I feel stupid to wild release any books now with labels saying everything is free of charge! perhaps this place (bookobsessed) will get more users now... I am really disappointed with the new developments.

Forum Posts per Month - 30
Private Messages per Month - 10

:wtf:

Plus sort and print wishlist (very useful when you're going shopping for an exchange partner), search wishlist, access to pre-numbered labels. Those are the ones that I'd miss the most. Sux.

I hardly ever post at bookcrossing, but I imagine those forum post limits would really hamper the whole sense of community - where even if you can't afford to do much in the way of trading/releasing etc, you can still talk books and bookcrossing-related stuff.

I can't believe they did it before informing us (I didn't see a news bulletin and can't find one even now! You have to detect your way to the Member Plus to find out).

I know it costs a lot to run the site, but PLEASE. They should've stripped off some of the extra features first, not gone to the forums. This will lead to member loss, because
A) New people (especially non-English speaking) will find it too confusing
B) A sense of community that makes people active (and likely to buy wings) will suffer.

I thought there was something lost in translation when this was brought up at the Finnish forum. Sadly, there wasn't.

I know the site costs many.

but I'm :rant: over the communication restritions.

the rest sucks but I can live whit it, but

10pms a month
1 forum post per day

bc is no longer free.

its just stupid, they are not giving extra features to wings menbers, they are cutting things from the non-winged

Good heavens God. I had only yesterday bought wings for myself because I wanted to (I liked some of the features involved) and now I'm glad I did because otherwise my Bookshelf info would have been gone and I wouldn't be able to do half the stuff I use Bookcrossing for, like searching for books on other's bookshelves. And the restrictions on forum posts??? It's not like I post too much there so the restriction won't bother me much but the number of non-member plus people who animate those forums?

BC is dying in the wake of its greed!!

I think I'm going to stop using BC labels anywhere. They don't reflect the truth anywhere. I may write a BCID number, but I'm not going to perpetuate the lie of 'literature for free' that has been the hallmark of Bookcrossing all these years.

This pisses me off so much.

word to that.

I had wings for the firts time this year and I liked the extra featutes and was planning to buy them again next month

I dont think I'm going to do that anymore

bc looks like a huge store to me rigth now

And the funniest thing? I bought wings for 3 months plus 1 from a 'promo' they were doing and they only gave me two months (until September!). Fun, fun, fun. As if this whole crappy thing wasn't bad enough.

I'm really really sad about these changes. :(

I am so angry you wont believe it.
Look at my shelf. it is screwed up.
The first weird thing I noticed was that i received a funny email from BC.

Book alerts summary.
Very weird. there were 3 BC entries but there was no link or no mention which books.
So I decided to visit BC and was shocked when i noticed how my shelf looks now.

:rant: :rant: :rant:

Then I visited the announcement forum and got even more angry.

Then i read also that the Buy 3 months wings get one free is also only a one time thing and got even more pissed off.

They always promised us that it would be free.
Well what you get for free is so limited now.

We spend so much already on shipping.
I did not say that in the BC forum cause then I know people will reply with, well you should release in the wild.
is there a throw up smiley? :chained:

This is now such a commercial site. I am disgusted.

Oh and can someone please help me with my bookshelf? :cry: :cry: :cry:

but if were going to wild relase books saying bc is free....

were not only lying,

were releasing our books whit labels advertising a big online store



:steam:

Contact the supply store and I am *sure* they will sort this out. My experience is that those folks are good at correcting errors. :rolleyes: They aren't the same people who've made these new changes.

Exactly.
Like with bookmooch.
I think I will stop using BC books.
Remove the free from the web page please.

What is most disgusting is that they are only telling the good news.
well good news? something about a wish list?
but all the bad they just leave out.

Oh new is that you wont get wings for free if you order for 15 dollars at the supply store. No now you have to order for 30 dollars to get free wings.

I have contacted the Support email they have at the bottom of the page (after much searching, by the way), so I'll be waiting...

Also, I've posted this already in ChitChat, but beware the new email message with release alerts! It seems that if you aren't careful (and don't have wings) you can accidentally ruin your profile page / bookshelf by clicking on the link in the email, and then you can't change it back without wings.

I don't know all the details myself yet, but wanted to get the warning out as soon as possible - I'd be happy to edit my warnings if somebody else PMs me to correct or clarify this information.

I am going to stop using labels on books I send through Bookmooch (that don't already have labels, of course).

I'm so pissed off right now, and I would like this site to reconsider the rule about everything needing to be registered.

I don't want to register anything else.

I'm going to be stuck getting a daily email that I can't opt out of without messing up my profile (that I CAN'T SAVE anywhere), and since I don't have member's plus, I can't switch back to individual journal alerts.

I WAS going to buy my Happiness Day partner stuff from the BC supply store. I'm not anymore.

I'm about done with BookCrossing, and I only hope that doesn't mean I have to be about done with this site too.

And you know something else that got lost in all this? You can't get wings when you make a supply store purchase anymore unless you buy $30 or more worth of stuff!!

So they make wings necessary for a good BC experience, cutting down on the features a 'free' membership has and they make it that much harder to get wings when you buy stuff from them. Sure, you can still buy wings for $5 a month but only gives you wings, whereas before the wings were a perk of purchasing supplies from the store. No more. If you buy $20 dollars worth of stuff, you don't get wings anymore.

Shit, you just touched a very important point. How are we going to be able to use THIS site in conjunction with BC when they're ruining things on that other end?

I don't know, but they're going about this whole thing wrong.

Free members add to the community of BC, and they promote it just like paid members do. This is not the way to entice people to spend money there - and what about people who CAN'T because of the country they live in/their credit/etc? That's hardly fair.

The way to do things is to ADD features for those who pay, not take away features for those who can't.

I'm off to edit any BC-related stuff out of my favorites list.

:ditto: I have fantastic experience with them (and problem I had was much harder to solve)

(still reading this thread)

I have nothing more to add. But if this was case few years ago it would be impossible for me to become a member precisely because of issues you mentioned.
And of course only logical thing would be to ADD thing for winged members, not to cut from non-winged ones :angry:

Didn't they promise not to do the things they did just now?

I remember they said all the time it would be a free site.

And did the people behind the scenes change?
Bosses?
Ron?

It seems they know you too well, your shelf is now SO YOU :lol: (sorry babe but I had to)

OMG It seems if you don't have wings you cannot even search for books other than the ones on your own shelf. :angry:

What the hell.

This has become a money scheme site.

zzz No My shelf was like me, but now it looks like I've lost a lot of data and I do not dare to change anything.
sorry I am to angry. :rolleyes: :giggle:

How dare they touch my shelf anyways. I am a paying member :evil:

Darn. I wish we could do out own site where we can register our books and make release notes and such.

I knew about the 30$ Dollar supply store for getting wings but not about all the other changes. After reading this thread and the ones at BC I am shocked!!!! Why do they do this??? There must be other ways to earn money and when BC was free I am sure a lot of members bought stuff at the supply store or wings.

The 30 posts doesn't bug me that much but only 10 PMs a month? I usually join quite a lot of audiobook rings in the German forum and then you usually have to PM the next in line. Can't be done with only 10 PMs!

At the moment I have Members Plus until November because I got a year long membership as a present last year but after that...?!

This SUCKS!!!!

[EDIT]

Oh, misunderstanding, SORRY!

I'm still getting individual journal entries, but got the daily alerts sum-up today as well - surely it should be one or the other, not both? Plus, the daily alerts sum-up had 3 books journalled - all the same book. I looked to see if someone had journalled 3 times, but no. :shrug:

From the BC forum about getting back your original profile:

- Search at google for
"the [yourBCname] bookshelf" (no brackets[ ] of course)
- find your shelf (most likely (one of) the first entry)
- click on "cached" - I repeat: "CACHED" ;-)
-> you'll see your profile page as it looked some days or hours ago
- save the source code of that page (how to do this depends on your browser) to your harddisk
- if necessary find someone to help you extract your data from this file (search for the string "profilebio"- your profile content starts a few lines after that).

Be quick! You never know when google will check your page the next time.

Oh my, Marlene, your profile looks terrible now! :o

They should at least have given a warning beforehand!

Yes I know. :cry: Thanks for your honesty babe :wub:

I did find the cached page but then what to do.
I did open with note pad and then saved that. :erm:

Did you go to View Page Source? That's what you want. Then you need to find the section with your profile and save that. (If you're not sure how to do it, I just grabbed your Profile section and I can PM it to you.)

This truly is awful - and I can't really add anything to what's been said already...

I think we need to give Bookcrossing a few days to sort things out - there is always some chance they'll change a few of these things back once they see the backlash from what they've done....

Once things have settled somewhat and we know for sure what's happening, we will do another poll here to see if our members want to reverse the ruling on having all our books registered at Bookcrossing and take it from there.

This could have a real negative impact on our database if we become unable to easily track books.... just when we were getting things flowing smoothly.... :(

Good point.

And here's a summary of what the new system is (for now): http://www.bookcrossing.com/plus

I do think that since BO has gotten bigger and bigger with more swapping we need to have a way to track books.

You are right that they will probably change some things.
Like maybe they will say oke you may pm 20 times a month and post 50 times, but WTH, I just don't want that.
I feel betrayed in a way.

I am curious though. What happened with Ron and was Matt in there from the beginning.

I recall seeing him on a video on TV saying that BC was free. The journalist started to ask about the wings and such. O that was just a little bit, a few dollars :rant:

OMG. Reading the Dutch discussion about what has happened makes me so angry. even more.
Of course a few there defend what has happened. (I had expected that) They understand it. Yek. Typical


There is just such a difference in the Dutch discussion if I compare it to all the other forum threads where they discuss it.
Thanks God there are still a lot of them who think the same as everyone else.


Sometimes I am ashamed to be Dutch. :blush:
We should make a fist.

Judging by the furore on the BC forums we're not the only ones who feel this way.

To be honest I've been concerned that changes like this may be in the offing ever since the structure of BC was changed to a more 'corporate' one.

I'm sorry about your profile Marlene... mine was messed up but not as badly as yours - and I stupidly made some changes which now look like they're permanent.

I'll be watching the site very closely over the next few days to see what develops - and what impact it has on this site.

ETA: I've uploaded the picture you provided into my profile, Marlene. I suggest those of us who CAN change our picture (and are game to faff around in their profile) do the same!

Apparently unlimited forum posts and PMs and search functions have been brought back to wingless members, as well as profiles. Anyone can confirm this?

I wanted to do the same but it won't let me. When I click preview it's as if I erased entire profile :huh: :angry:

the picture thingy can be changed using the link on the top right hand side of the 'edit profile' page.

Really! They've managed to make the whole thing LESS user friendly :rant:

Hopefully your profile is OK, Milan...