While Micro.blog avoids viral features, making misinformation less likely to spread quickly, we still have a 30-day free trial that content spammers sometimes try to use. Thinking about going paid-only without a trial until after the election, to remove another potential source of problems.

@manton isn't a credit card required to sign up? I know many apps and programs do this thing where you can opt out after two weeks and don't get charged... maybe that's an option.

In any case, locking down until after the elections sounds reasonable. My two cents.

@manton what about still keeping the free trial but insisting on adding a payment method first. Worked for Ghost

@manton Do you have HTML in the web editor yet? Don't worry, I'm paying, and would never talk about politics, although blindness and libertarianism may be an interesting topic, just after the election. I think I going to blog through the entire Simpson trial archive. In order to do so, I'm going to need to set up a different domain, thankfully I have plenty of those around.

@gregmorris @jtr @manton Yeah that seems reasonable.

@manton Also, a question on using www. Do you have to use that? My registrar doesn't support forwarding, apparently.

@manton or perhaps make the trial drastically shorter? We do a three-day trial. It’s long enough to explore features if you’re genuinely interested, but not really long enough to make it worth the trouble if you’re not

@ladyhope Nope, no requirement to include www for custom domains. Markdown and HTML are both supported too. Let me know if you have any questions!

@gregmorris We require a payment method now, although there are ways around it. Not sure how but I’ve seen people provide fake (stolen?) credit cards that can be saved but fail after the trial.

@Annie That makes sense to me too. We started with 10-day trials and expanded to 30 later. Really a couple days should be enough to know whether it works.

@manton Oh cool! Mine is stuck on www

@manton Well thankfully a redirect is working. It wasn't working a week ago or so when I tried it.

@manton Probably virtual/masked cards, i.e Privacy.com. Serves a legitimate purpose, but by its nature can be used maliciously.

@manton that’s strange. @matt any ideas on this?

@manton paid with a 30 day money back guarantee maybe?

@manton What about a 30-day trial for $1? Would that be enough of a deterrent?

@manton how about read-only free, pay to enable posting. (Maybe that’s how it already works; I wouldn’t know.)

@dejus That's sort of how it works now. But it's a little clunky and confusing for the user.