Since our Messenger Bar was installed nearly a year ago, it has never worked properly. The company who installed it promised to integrate it seamlessly with our site and our friends and membership systems but the job was not done properly. There are still many outstanding problems which the company has so far been unable to fix and in some cases they have been asking for more money just to do what they had already promised to do for free. Also, this bar is Flash based so it won't work at all on iPads or iPhones and it has to be paid for again, every year - another fairly large expense we could do without.
In recent months a new bar has been created by an American company and unlike the one we have now, this bar is designed specifically for our platform and will integrate seamlessly from day one.
It is PHP-based so it will work on iPads and other Apple mobile devices and best of all, it requires one single payment to buy outright, so we won't be paying over and over, for years to come.
It will be hosted off our server though, to help our pages to load faster and that will involve a small monthly charge.
All in all though, this appears to be a much better deal and a better bar too, which will integrate properly and which has many more features than the existing bar.
Having said that, and in view of the fact that we are constantly facing bankruptcy, when the new bar goes in with all of its new features, we intend to make it available to Full Members only. The reason is simple. It's going to cost us a pretty penny and so we just can't afford to give it away free. We are too poor and we desperately need to find ways to get more members to upgrade to Full Membership.
Full Membership only costs about one single dollar a week. Surely most people can afford that. We have many, many members here, who have been regulars for years but who have never once donated a single penny to help keep us going.
Well, this may be a good incentive to help those who have been meaning to upgrade, to actually do so. Imagine what it would be like if you tried to come to the site one day soon, to see all your friends here and instead found a message telling you we'd gone under and had closed permanently.
I'm doing my best to try to prevent that so please see this decision for what it is - a way to help ensure our future. If we give everything that you want away for free, you will not want to upgrade and we will all end up with nothing.
So please help today by upgrading to Full Membership and your dollar a week will enable us to keep your community going.
Just go here - http://gendersociety.com/payment/subscription
If you are already a Full Member, please consider making a donation here...
http://gendersociety.com/pages/donations
...or to make regular donations, join our elite Inner Circle here...
http://gendersociety.com/pages/innercircle2
Thanks, Katie x