Patrick -

I appreciate your posting an explanation for the sudden membership fee, but I'm more than a little skeptical. A charge of $19.95 a month from your admitted "thousands of members registered" smells like more than just "a student doing this for fun."

That is an astronomical amount of money for user generated content, particularly on a website that has such an unreliable history. And especially since 50% or more of the content is of low quality and can be found elsewhere.

You could have asked for donations of whatever a member could afford. You could have given some warning that you were going to have to charge a fee if voluntary financial support was not forthcoming. And you certainly could have imposed a reasonable fee - say $9.95 a month - that a lot more members would likely have paid.

I enjoyed the site. But what you did, and the way you did it, really stinks. So I'm outta there.