Closing new Free registrations tonight

We’ll be closing new Free account registrations tonight, at midnight UTC, June 11, 2025. More info on our Mastodon account:

After this, for a completely free blog, you’ll need to either:

Of course, you can also upgrade to a paid Write.as Pro plan to support our small business, if you enjoy it! :slightly_smiling_face:

Rationale

As mentioned in that thread, this change is largely driven by the large amount of spam, SEO content, affiliate blogs, and automated accounts we’ve been seeing lately.

I’ve started building in some new features to make moderation of these accounts easier, but the flood of junk is still overwhelming, so I need to make this change to slow that a bit and make sure our service isn’t overrun by spammers (which would ruin it for the rest of us).

As part of that, I’ve added a new Account Status page, which will be most relevant to our current Free users. It will explain any moderation decisions, including automated silencing, and in the future provide a much smoother way to appeal moderation decisions.

Please feel free to share feedback here, if you have any!

2 Likes

The quality of the posts on Read Write.as has improved since closing free registrations and so far I’m not seeing SEO slop or marketing stuff.