Although I have never downloaded any lesson plans from this site, nor contributed any, I think people are going a bit ballistic. Yeah, I get people are annoyed by this development. It seems a bit of an underhanded thing to do, but let's keep our rage in proportion to the offense. And it's not as if waygook users were set to make a fortune off their lesson plans, then had the carpet pulled out from under them. Over-reaction to situations, and hypersensitivity to any perceived slight,  is popular on university campuses these days. Let's not bring it on here.

Let's all take a chill pill. Give the guy a chance to explain. You have, after all, been using his website daily free of charge, probably for years. A little gratitude towards the guy might be called for. What have the outraged people here done with their free time since coming to Korea? He opted to spend his time building and maintaining a website that hundreds of teachers (including you) have happily used and relied upon. And he did it out of his own pocket.

I think people need to chill a little bit. Not agreeing with how he managed this situation, but let's not lynch the guy. You owe him that at the very least. Goodness, you're even using his website, which again he built and maintained,  to complain about this situation. Is irony lost on people today?

You've been enjoying a free lunch for years. It's a bit unseemly to now be turning on the cook with such zeal.

Quote from: cracker on September 11, 2017, 03:20:17 PM

I've taken the liberty of zipping my entire file of Waygook downloaded material and shared it with the famous Korean English teachers site. Bomb games for all!

Think of the children! 

You mean the site the foreign teachers have no access to because we are not Korean? Why did you do that?

You've been enjoying a free lunch for years. It's a bit unseemly to now be turning on the cook with such zeal.

Quote from: Maclean on September 12, 2017, 01:57:38 PM

You've been enjoying a free lunch for years. It's a bit unseemly to now be turning on the cook with such zeal.

The cook provided the restaurant and tables and chairs. Paid the rent etc.

The users provided the food, made the food and shared it with each other, to help each other out etc.

One Sunday, in the middle of the night, the cook took all the food and ingredients and locked it in a cupboard and said this restaurant is too expensive to keep going, you can't have your food until you give me some money.

Apparently he's asked for money once. He wrote the request on a post it note and stuck it under a chair in the hallway. That was the warning he gave.

Arsalan will address the issue shortly.

The intent was never to steal people's content then suddenly charge for it.  As someone mentioned, there's no way the ads alone can cover the bandwidth used on this site. Period. Additionally, there are costs for servers/storage. He's not even close to breaking even with this site. Please don't make a Facebook comparison because it's not even an apples to apples comparison.  If he started Waygook as a business venture to begin with, a different approach would have been used, but that was never the intent. And, yes, there was a donate button (there was big thread about it a couple of years ago), but nobody really donated (duh!).

Also, sorry, you should not be relying on Waygook to store your files? Waygook's main purpose isn't for cloud storage. Do you not have them on your computer, pen drive, external hard drive, cloud storage, etc.?

One alternative could be is not to upload files on Waygook directly, but rather to a cloud storage such as Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. and provide a link. There are obvious issues with that (e.g., access issues), but it's one potential (albeit less elegant) workaround.

Yes, I totally understand why some people are unwilling to pay $20/yr yet they'll happily pay $20 for a few beers in one night. It's a psychological bias called anchoring and most of us are anchored to believe a lot of things online (e.g., forums) are free. But, Waygook is also storing enormous amounts of data for the convenience of its users (but, again, should not be relied as backup storage) and it's worth mentioning even cloud storage isn't exactly free either (Google, Dropbox, iCloud, etc. all charge after a certain amount of space is used).

I do agree that there wasn't enough notice, but, again, Arsalan will make a new thread to address everything soon.

You may continue the discussion once he creates the new thread.

Quote from: CDW on September 12, 2017, 03:05:05 PM

"The big problem are resources, this site has been entirely paid out of pocket.  Costs at one point were a little over 2K a month (yup, you read that correctly, but I had a decent job).  Their prices has gone down some time ago, which alleviated the problem, and we managed to upgrade again a few times."
http://www.waygook.org/index.php?topic=106701.30

I think the owner of this site has been extremely generous. He no longer teaches in Korea but has spent thousands of dollars out of his own pocket on this site. Now people upset about having to pay less than two dollars a month to access lesson plans. Try to put things into perspective.

Leave it to CDW to ignore everything that everyone has said countless amount of times to bring up the $20 which no one has a problem paying for.

Quote from: jddavis7 on September 12, 2017, 03:15:26 PM

The people I see who think it's stupid people are leaving KEEP bringing up the price. Literally everyone has said it's not the price. I pay way more than that a month for streaming service and whatnot. It's just no one wants to pay for something that's been free all this time. People want to share their works with each other freely. I think more people may have been okay if there was a notice posted a few days prior or if improvements were made to the site.

Why do you think "a notice" would make any sort of difference?  You make it sound like others are so fragile, and that they can't simply adapt and adjust.

$20 is as close to free as one can get.

Think of it as a tax or toll for the platform, not the content.

Any idea how much energy and time has been wasted by people who have taken the time to remove their material, when they have the file already?

That is just silly and spiteful towards the host.

The term used to describe this sort of person who reacts in this way is "emotionally stunted mental midget"...it is as they say, an empty barrel makes the most noise.

"Oh, it's not the message, but it's how you say it.", "I don't have a problem with the objective, I just don't like how it is being communicated."  "I don't have a problem with paying $20.  I just want it to feel like it's a donation ;)"