Changes to Invite Distribution - posted 5 days, 23 hours ago
[Discuss]
In recent months, BTN has grown closer to reaching the user limit than ever before. There are no plans to raise the user limit, which unfortunately means that we have to find ways to slow our growth. One of the ways we have decided to do this is by limiting the number of invites users are able to send. Two changes have been made to accomplish this:
- The number of invites available to each user has been set to 0. This change applies to all user classes.
- Elites, Gurus, Masters, and Torrent Celebrities no longer have unlimited invites. This change applies to only those four user classes.
These changes only affect how you
get invites, not your ability to
use them. Elites and Gurus have been unable to use their "unlimited" invites for a long time. Masters and Torrent Celebrities will still able to use any invites they acquire. Going forward, we will sell invites in the
Lumens Store.
Overlords, VIPs, Encoders, Guests of Honor, and Legends will retain the unlimited invites privilege. Those five classes are essentially unaffected by this announcement.
If you donated for invites within the past three months, please send a
Staff PM. We will happily give you a different donation reward.
Edit 2014-01-07:
Hopefully the changes to member invites make more sense now that we are no longer recruiting from What. A bit of explanation: we never planned to make only changes to member invites; the numbers we looked at clearly showed that removing unlimited invites alone would not make enough of a difference to our growth rate. Changes to member invites were made first because they have been agreed upon for quite some time now.
Aside from removing unlimited invites, there were two other ways we considered reducing our growth rate: changes to our recruitment effort and changes to our activity requirements. Ultimately we decided that we should favor existing members by changing recruitment instead of changing the activity requirements.
Closing recruitment on What was a tough decision. We have nothing but the utmost respect for What as a site, and we have recruited many excellent members from there. However, closing recruitment there allows us to continue recruiting on other sites, and we feel that overall it keeps recruitment invites more attainable than if we changed the recruitment requirements to Elite+.