To our valued readers and subscribers:
Today, Bright Wall/Dark Room is switching our paywall provider from Hype to Leaky Paywall, a platform that improves the reading experience for casual readers and paying subscribers alike. We’ll provide a little more detail below, but here are the important things you need to know:
Important details for subscribers and readers
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If you have an existing subscription with us, you already have an account under your email address, but you’ll need to reset your password. Can’t find the email? Head here and enter your email address; you’ll get an email with instructions.
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Once you’re logged in, you can access your account details and manage your subscription here. All your subscription details have migrated to the new platform – other than setting your password and logging in, you don’t need to do anything else to keep your current access.
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Subscribed through Patreon? You’ll also need to reset your password. As with the old platform, your profile page will look a little different than regular subscribers; you’ll retain unlimited access to all essays for as long as you’re a patron, but won’t be able to directly manage your payments and subscription through the site. Instead, you can make any updates directly through Patreon.
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If you had a registered account (but no subscription) through Hype, that no longer exists – but we encourage you to sign back up! Creating a free registered account raises your monthly article limit from one to three a month. You’ll find the registration prompt after you open your second essay this month, or you can register for a free account here.
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Never subscribed? Now’s a great time to start! Bright Wall/Dark Room is entirely independent and relies on reader subscriptions to keep going – you can subscribe or gift a subscription here.
Why we’re switching to Leaky Paywall
As we mentioned above, Leaky Paywall provides a better reading experience for anyone visiting the site. With Hype, the subscription platform we were using until today, our paywall was administered via a plugin that ran using popups. As you’ve likely experienced, those popups would launch randomly and unreliably, and would often end up blocked or otherwise broken by common browser settings (we don’t run ads, but some ad blockers would stop Hype from showing up for anyone even if they want to subscribe).
Leaky Paywall, by comparison, sits on our site directly and fully integrates with our site backend. If you have a subscription with us and you’re logged in, it’s effectively invisible, and there’s a fixed place (here) you can always go to manage your account. If you don’t have an account, we won’t get in your way until you’ve read your first essay of the month. If you do have an account but you only read one or two essays a month, we won’t constantly nag you – though we’ll still make sure it’s clear how to subscribe if you’re ready to take the plunge. We’re proud to be a place where the work of our writers is our main focus; our new platform makes that focus a little sharper.
Notes on your data
All payment data used for subscriptions is still stored in Stripe, the platform we used to administer payments through Hype. Additionally, we don’t share your email address or other identifying information with third parties – even Leaky Paywall’s access is limited only to what it needs to charge for auto-renewing subscriptions, and nothing more. We remain committed to your privacy; you can find our current privacy policy here.
If you’re stuck
Having trouble logging into your account? Struggling to manage your subscription? Want to just say hi? Feel free to email our support address: support@bwdr.zendesk.com.
We hope you’ll join us in this new chapter, and we look forward to sharing other updates soon!