I've been reading this thread since last night (with a Halloween party and a sleep in between.)
The meat of the argument is some people here want Rick to implement a simple and free login to minimize, if not prevent, mass feed harvesting allowing anyone with a valid account to be able to read as well as post feed information. Because, let's face facts: his site is a feed site.
This doesn't seem unreasonable. Yet, if uplinkers know about the sites, you can be sure that a number of them are reading the forums, and probably a lesser number are reporting what they find. After reading through 22 pages of back and forth on the topic, I believe that we should all be well informed. Therefore I could understand why Rick could say in so many words "Why bother? It's out there anyway."
But playing devil's advocate for a moment. How can anyone here ask another site to do something when we don't do that ourselves. If it's good enough to ask Rick to implement a simple and free login to minimize, if not prevent, mass feed harvesting, then I think the WUT should be the same. Otherwise at best we're saying "Do as I say, not as I do." And I say this as someone that has access to the WUT.
With regards to the WUT. I think Rick's site serves/acts as a much better WUT than our WUT, in my opinion. It seems to me Rick's has a lot more "hard core" feed posters than we do here. Maybe that's due to many, but not all, people here being collectively frightened that if something gets posted it's going to be posted somewhere else, or a big wig is going to find out about it, and then it's going to go encrypted. And maybe our WUT seems lacking to me because of the lack of a simple and free login to minimize, if not prevent, mass feed harvesting, but allowing anyone to read and contribute.
I remember the the first time I stumbled onto Rick's site. It was before there was a WUT here. I could hardly believe my eyes. I knew stuff was available but I had no idea just how much. And I couldn't justify to my wife the expense of a bigger this or better that without being able to say that the stuff IS there, if not there for now. I had enough trouble getting a T90 on the house when Equity was around. But after seeing Rick's, I got a 7.5' BUD in the air, and I've switched that out for a 10.5'. The neighbours either laugh, shake their head, hate it, or don't care. My wife puts up with it because it gets what we watch.
I can't afford a sub these days. I didn't want to afford one when I had one. I'm the type of person that rathers own than lease. I'd rather spend the money on the dish than pay month after month after month after.... So I can see Rick's point about having feed information available.
I got FTA down here. I got a lot more use out of it with info from Rick's. His site requiring a login to read wouldn't have stopped me from registering, however.