A change in the Participant level membership

Effective immediately.

After a lot of thought on this, I decided today to make a change in the Participant level membership. This was designed to be a minimum hurdle to try to weed out false registrations on this site for the purpose of making false statements on the BOI or to abuse the voting mechanisms that will affect members' reputations. As such, I feel that extending the membership period to 10 years rather then making this a yearly fee pretty much serves the same purpose. Someone using the same PayPal account for multiple accounts can be easily determined and therefore whatever trouble they have caused quickly removed. And this most certainly should be much less of a burden on those people who felt that $10 per year was too steep a price to pay in order to be able to provide their input here.

But there is a string attached as well. I needed to widen the gulf between people merely paying to post on the BOI and those people who are truly contributors here. Since many people will use their signature area as an advertising mechanism for their own website and/or business, I have decided to restrict the use of that area to Contributor members and above. Sort of an incentive for people to be truly contributors here in return for the advertising space the signature area provides for them.

And before anyone asks, no the 10 year extension will not be made retroactive nor prorated. Sorry.....