Hey Sylvani,

Sorry to hear you've been having problems uploading videos.

You're right that a three-minute clip can come out over our 600MB limit, and I'm sorry for the wasted effort. Here's the quick fix:

Your phone is almost certainly filming in 4K, which is the factory setting on most handsets now. 4K uses three to five times the space of 1080p for very little visible difference once a video is playing on a web page. Drop the camera to 1080p and a three-minute clip lands around 200–250MB — well inside the limit, and the quality on the site will look identical.

iPhone: Settings → Camera → Record Video → 1080p at 30 fps. While you're in Settings → Camera → Formats, choose High Efficiency rather than Most Compatible — that roughly halves the file size again.

Samsung / Android: open the Camera app → Settings (cog) → Rear video size → FHD 1080p (30fps). Some phones also have a "High efficiency video" switch in the same menu — turn it on.

One thing you can do with your current clip, you don't have to film it again. Open the clip in your phone's own editing tool (or a free app such as CapCut) and export at 1080p.

On our side, the 600MB limit was set when 1080p was the top setting on a phone, and it's overdue a rise. I've put that on the list to fix properly, so this stops catching people out. In the meantime, 1080p will get you through, and if the next one still won't upload, send me the error you see and I'll look at it directly.

I've made a change to the way the viewing limit it calculated, which will hopefully make things seem a bit fairer.

Up until now, the limit was actually counted by chapter page views, not distinct chapters. So if you refreshed a page, went back to re-read a paragraph, or your connection hiccuped and reloaded the chapter, that counted as a second view and ate into your daily allowance without you actually reading anything new.

I've changed this so the limit is now based on the chapter itself, within the rolling 24 hour window. That means you can open, refresh, or revisit the same chapter as many times as you like, and it will only ever count once. I realise this won't stretch your 20 chapters into 21 or 25 chapters' worth of new content, but it does mean you're no longer losing your free allowance to something you'd already used up a 'view' for.

Hi Lynne841, Just to let you know I've read your post and will be giving it due consideration

Thanks for your support. We are a small business so we don't actually do this for free, but there are only two of us plus the volunteer moderators, so we can't always respond as quick as a big corporation, but we do our best.

To address the chat issue, yes we are aware of the resetting issue and this is in our program of work to address. We'll try to get a fix our within a week or two so please be patient for now and hang on in there.

Hey Bassbum60,

Thanks for your post. That's a lot of fair questions and I'll try to answer:



That's essentially how most free-to-access platforms work. The people who use the service most heavily are the ones the cap touches, and a smaller number who choose to subscribe help keep the whole thing running for everyone else.



This is the point that's come up most in this thread, and it's genuinely on my to do list, although I can't at this point give timings. For authors who do want to earn, we have our Earners program which pays commission. Anyone can apply and we encourage authors to do so.



This isn't something we're planning to do. Free reading isn't being phased out — it's the majority of what's on the site and I want it to stay that way.



We've tried advertising in the past but it's just not worked. The mainstream ad networks won't touch us, and in any case they come with tracking, malware and other privacy problems that I'm not willing to put the community through. We've also tried web model banners, but most girls just tend to do this for a bit of extra cash and there isn't enough in it to keep us going. As for porn banners - well we're not a porn site and most have objected quite strongly to this in the past.



This is a fair suggestion, only for the people in this thread it won't change the underlying sticking point: pay-per-page is still paying, just measured differently.

On 'extorting writers' — I want to push back gently there, the cap is on overall platform use, not a toll on any one writer's content.



I'll say this much, because it matters to me personally: I've run this as a free platform for over 20 years, back when there was almost nowhere online for this community to exist at all. So "stop making feederism something you have to be rich to be part of" genuinely lands — because that's a big part of why I built this site and why I'm still here. That's exactly the thing I'm trying to protect, not undo.

Thanks for taking the time to write your comments, it's genuinely more useful than you might think.

Hiccupx

The change we made recently (making the first chapter of every story free), means that it doesn't count towards your viewing limit.

The navigation is the same and hasn't changed, so yes, you have to load the first page to load the chapter drop down, but then you can quickly pick up where you left off. This is the same as it always was.

Sounds like it may not be displaying the thumbnail images for some reason. I'll take another look at it.

Hopefully this has been fixed. Please let me know if you're still having problems.