Several suggestions to improve this service

[KungFuChe]

SUBSCRIPTIONS

The price for a 1 year subscription is given as 52 U.S. dollars but many U.S. retail stores only sell prepaid debit cards in $50 or $100 amounts. This means that U.S. customers must purchase a $100 card to get 1 year of service and then go around trying to spend the balance of $48 somewhere else. This is a big nuisance that will drive people to the competition:

I referred some friends to CS and they complained about this. So I think you will sell more subscriptions if you make the 1 year price exactly $50 instead of $52. If you decide to lower the rates in future, just keep the $50 price and extend the time period, or include a secondary account which is capped at something like 3 to 5 MB/s, good enough for mobile roaming.

INSTRUCTIONS

The official router setup instructions should not be stored in the forum: this belongs in a dedicated wiki or help section on the main web site.

FORUM

The forum colors are nauseating, the page headings and message body also have poor contrast. How about changing the color scheme eh!

[cfghfdhj]

► Show Spoiler

lol wtf

[KarateChick]

Please add "PaymentWall" as a pay option, it's available all over the globe...

[df]

@KungFuChe
Good point. Will look into alternative payment methods soon...
As for the instructions, for years I've been pushing for instructions being placed on a dedicated blog/wiki, really anything that doesn't require a forum visit to get on CS.
Since I'm the only CS staff member left from the original 3, I guess I should do something about that now instead of bitching at the wall ;-)

And I like the forum colors :x

@cfghfdhj
:-P

@KarateChick
PaymentWall may be available everywhere, but it is still a US company, which from our perspective makes it not much different than PayPal (Although I'm sure anything is better than PayPal).
I'll add it to my list of merchants to consider.

[nadha]

I would like to suggest CS offers payment by paysafecard. https://www.paysafe.com Paysafecard (Paysafe Group plc, according to their website headquartered in Austria) is more private and more easy to use than BT . It is a prepaid card available without ID. phone number , email or other identifiable information in 43 countries and can be bought at newsstands, fuelstations etc and works well since many years. You get them in countries where other anonymous payment instrument are very hard to get by (BC is not considered anonymous by many and much more complicated to handle compared to paysafecard). Pls check it out.

[dsagg]

Paysafecard Paysafecard
https://www.paysafecard.com/en-us/data-protection/

[df]

@dsagg
Yea,

"We may share information with:
Law enforcement, Financial Supervision Authorities, government officials, or other third parties when:
we are compelled to do so by a subpoena, court order or similar legal procedures.
we need to do so to comply with law.
we believe in good faith that the disclosure of personal information is necessary to prevent physical harm or financial loss, to report suspected illegal activity, or for investigations.
"

Still though, I've heard what the ultra-paranoid do is just have a friend (or hire someone) to go into the store to buy/load the PaySafe card. But if you're going to do all that, you could buy one of those prepaid debit cards the same way, unless you live in a region where they're unavailable.

[guest]

In this country one can buy paysafecard on many newsstands. No ID , name etc needed. Cash for code. Basically one only gets a paperslip with a code. Thats it. So, if you buy via cash that way, they have nothing to share except city and amount. All prepaid cards in this nation demand some registration. Hence paysafe looks minimum exposure to data abuse solution - at least here.

[KungFuChe]

Good point. Will look into alternative payment methods soon...

Not sure what other payment methods I want to see yet -- just wanted to clarify the issue here:

There are different kinds of prepaid debit cards: one kind has a fixed value at purchase (like $50 or $100) and the other kind can be loaded or reloaded with any amount you like.

The problem is that many reloadable cards have high fees to spend/recharge/transfer funds. For that reason, some retailers will not sell these cards and the sale of such cards is actually banned in some jurisdictions because the high fees constitute "racketeering." In that case, only the cards in fixed amounts of $50 or $100 may be available. So if you buy a $100 card to get $52 worth of service you must spend the balance some place else. Now from time to time, hackers have found some blocks of prepaid card numbers so if you dont use the card promptly you could lose the balance. It also might compromise privacy if the user puts multiple purchases on the same card. Best security practice is: use the card immediately for just one purpose and then dispose it. So you need to sell service in $50 increments, see? I'm not really asking for other payment methods, I'm saying that a price of $52 will (in some markets) defeat the purpose of using a prepaid card and may result in losing the customer.

As for the instructions, for years I've been pushing for instructions being placed on a dedicated blog/wiki, really anything that doesn't require a forum visit to get on CS.

Many moons ago I wrote an OpenVPN troubleshooting guide for routers and some other dox but I think that belongs in a Wiki since I have seen posts with config files that apply to obsolete versions of the client which really should be removed.

[df]

@KungFuChe
I understand what you're saying. I've seen those cards in stores before. Some of them are reloadable, some are not. For the ones that aren't, if you only want 1 year worth of CS, you'd have to get a $60 or higher card since most of them only do increments of $10, $25, $50, or $100.

I can't remember why we ever decided on the uneven amounts we currently have, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to change it around to something even. That will take some time though because there's alot of server-side code, payment button code, tokenbot code, etc. that need to be changed for that.