I have an unlimited membership but sometimes I will look something up quick on my phone or a computer I am not logged into. usually it’s no problem but today I did it and got hit with a big pay wall after looking up a couple articles saying “We hope you enjoyed your fee content, to keep reading, become a member today”
I was really disappointed. I got my FWW membership after listening to shop talk live, but I would never have stumbled across it if I hadn’t been browsing the free articles on FWW. If I got hit with a pay wall after looking at two articles I would have just said “forget about it, not worth my money”. It took me more than two articles to realize how great a resource Fine Woodworking is. Not only do I think this is short sighted, but it is also really annoying if you happen to not be logged in.
How long ago did they change this? I don’t remember seeing any sort of announcement.
Replies
You always have to be logged in to view unlimited content. The first thing I do when I open up the FWW website is login. Even if you open an email from FWW, when you open it up, you need to login.
Hey Ecyor, Thank you for your reply. I think this is a different issue than I am asking about. I understand that to view articles marked as "members" articles you have to be logged in. However, I think that FWW has changed the way it lets people who don't have a membership view articles.
For example, Previously, if you didn't have an online or unlimited membership you could have looked up "A jig for planing super thin parts", then "Centerline Layout for large stock", then "understanding Japanese Chisel" and viewed all three of those articles with no problem. all of those articles were free to view, the only ones you couldn't view were the ones marked as "members content". However, now if you tried to view the exact same three articles you would be hit with a pay wall after looking at the third one.
I know previously you could have looked at any number of the articles in FWW without a membership account as long as they weren't specifically marked as "members" articles. Now, if you don't have a membership, you can look at two articles and that's it.
I hope that clears up the issue and I am wondering if anyone has information on why they have done this?
Yes. As of two days ago, we are on a gated system now. It's now more important than ever to sign in.
Since you are gated, can you remove the "Subscribe" and other notifications from your web pages for members who have "logged in"?
Yes! We have updates coming out very soon that start to resolve this annoying issue (among others).
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