Google – Bookstooge's Reviews on the Road

If you haven’t heard, WordPress now has a new set of plans for us bloggers. HERE is the actual wordpress page, which is so much propaganda. Think 1984 and getting a raise of your chocolate ration, up to 8oz (when the reality is that yesterday you got 12oz). The upshot is that there are now only 2 types of plans going forward. A free ad supported plan and a Pro plan which will cost you $180 a year. THAT IS IT.

Before this, WP had 5 levels of plans. A free plan with 3gb of space, a personal plan with 6gb of space for $48 a year, a premium plan with 13gb of space for $96 or a business plan with 200gb of space and a lot of bells and whistles for $300 and then an Ecommerce version which is basically a fully loaded store for about $550.

For the big players, this new change to Free or Pro probably won’t be a big deal. But for the free, personal and premium members, this is rape, plain and simple. I tried the personal plan last year with a domain (bookstooge.com) and it went so badly that I quit after 6 months and went back to free. However, the ads and inserted posts by WP were getting so intrusive that in January of this year I signed up for the personal plan again, but without the domain (so I stayed at bookstooge.wordpress.com). It was mainly to get the extra space and to get rid of the ads.

When I heard about this plan change, I sent off an email to WordPress’s Infamous (un)Happy Engineers. I asked what would happen to my site when the personal plan expires. I’ve quoted the pertinent part of the email.

When your Personal Plan expires, your site will switch to a free plan with free features.

1). The storage space will be 3GB instead of 6GB.
2). No ability to upload audio files.
3). No ability to add payment buttons.
4). No ability to offer premium content.
5). bookstooge.wordpress.com will be your site’s address.

All the features of a Personal Plan will stop working.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any doubts.

So, once I reach 3gb, I either cough up $180, EVERY YEAR, for a casual hobby, or I end my time at WordPress.com. Also to take notice of, the Pro plan is annual only. You can’t pay on a monthly basis.

I called it “rape” in the paragraph above, but really, it is extortion if you have the personal or premium plan. If you’ve been on the Premium plan for years and have used up 10gb of space, what happens to you when your premium plan runs out this year? You either pay through the nose or you lose. I have reached out to WordPress asking what happens if I have more in my media library than I have space for. I don’t have an answer yet but I will find out.

Another thing to note is just how badly WP botched this rollout. Many long time users woke up Friday morning with a notice that they now only had 0.5bg of space (that’s the new limit for new users who join up after today. Us old guard still get the 3gb). WP forum staff admitted this wasn’t correct, that it was a bug and that “other people” were working on getting this fixed. What kind of idiot coder affect long time users?

If you are an existing free user who isn’t near the 3gb limit, this change by WP won’t affect you at all. But it does affect all their paying users, which is what boggles my mind. I know I am not going to be upgrading to PRO when my plan runs out. If my media library gets close to the 3gb limit and I can’t cheaply upgrade, I’ll just leave. Whether that means to another platform, to a self-hosted site (oh dear lord, I hope not. That’s a lot of work and a lot of nightmares and nothing working right, at least from what I’ve seen of other amateurs like myself) or just in general, I don’t know.

I’m going to be spending the rest of the year looking into alternatives to WordPress. Even if I stick around, WordPress has just shown me that they are predatory pimps who will shank me with no warning if they want an extra $150 out of my pockets. There is no guarantee they won’t do something like this again. In fact, this move pretty much makes it certain they WILL do something like this again in the future.

I’m done ranting.

UPDATE 1000 (GMT-5)

I received the following email response from WP about midnight:

If a site uses more than 3GB of storage space and switches to a free plan, some of its content, including photos, will be removed because it does not have enough space.

WordPress.com has changed its plans recently. I understand your concern. But you can keep using your Personal Plan as it is. The price will remain the same for existing plans.

ps,
just so this isn’t a completely hate filled post, here are 2 solutions for storage space, one of my own posts and another I found while searching for space solutions. I hope they can be helpful to you.

Need More Space? Bookstooge Has You Covered
~~Adding Images with URL Link~~ (now dead 😦 )

*Houston, we have a problem …..*
….. *I want more space!*

Last month when I wrote the When to Dotcom post, my main issue was space. Given, I am only using about 18% of the free 3gb that WordPress offers, but big pictures eat away at that pretty quickly and I’m always looking to the future.

In the comments section people talked about various ways to deal with the space issue and Andreas gave a list of several options. I’m a prime member and a google member, so I tried out both amazon photo and google drive. Unfortunately, I have not been able to make either of them work the way I was hoping. For those of you who saw the original August ’20 Roundup & Rambling post, you might have noticed the big pix I usually put at the top that has all my book covers in a collage picture was missing or saying you needed permissions etc. That was me trying to use google drive.

Both google drive and amazon don’t seem to simply let you give out an url to a picture you’ve uploaded. It is all complicated “share this with these email people” etc. Or “set these permissions, blah, blah, blah”.

Then I remembered I had an old dropbox account floating around. So I opened that account back up and voila, I had another 3gb’s of space available. However, and this is what made the difference for me, I was able to use the dropbox links to host pictures here on WP.

I found several websites that showed me how to do it. Instead of linking to them, I’ll just post the info here so you don’t have to go chasing links down (and as we all know, links die on a regular basis). The following assumes that you have a dropbox account and have downloaded the dropbox app to your computer.

Dropbox
Right clicking a file in a drop box folder will give the option to “Copy Dropbox Link”. This will not link directly to the file, but it can be changed to link directly, which can then be used in the above import.
In order to get a direct link, replace http://www.dropbox.com with dl.dropboxusercontent.com and remove the ?dl=0.
For instance:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/72vf8e2f0qx6vw8/Milan4.jpg?dl=0
would become: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/72vf8e2f0qx6vw8/Milan4.jpg.

(Personally, I just leave the dl=0 myself. I don’t know the reason for removing it.)
Now, doing all of this means there are extra steps in adding pictures to your wordpress posts. But since I’m already creating a whole new process to write posts here on wordpress, another couple really aren’t going to make a difference especially if it means my space limitations are removed.

The other nice thing about dropbox is that you can get additional space for getting referrals. This is known as free advertising for dropbox. Whenever someone joins up for a free account (and the 2gb space), if they signed up using a referral link, they get an extra 500mb of space and I get an extra 500mb of space. Up to 16 gigs worth. And if they ~~sucker~~ convince someone else to join up with THEIR referral, then they both get 500mb. It’s just your classic “get rewarded for working for us” kind of scheme. I’ve used it twice, hence why I have 3gb instead of just 2. If you have any interest in joining up, shoot me an email and I’ll email you a referral.

I’m just glad I seem to have found a way that works for me to host pictures and increase my storage without having to pay. If you have found alternates that work well, let me know in the comments, would you? I’m always glad to learn things (well, ok, lets be honest, I am NOT, as my reaction to the forsaken block editor has shown) and if I can find a better way than dropbox, then I will. Personally, I would love to use google drive, as that has 15gb of free space.

Now, something to be aware of. Should dropbox ever cancel/close your account or go belly up or change or be taken over by aliens, or be ruled to be racist and full of hate speech by the EU, then there is the potential for the pictures you host there to become dead links on your wordpress site. That is right: D-E-A-D-L-I-N-K-S

Ok, this post has gone on long enough. Have a great rest of your day.