I am totally confused with what appear to be format changes on  SA pages when you go to read one of your expert's posts. Sometimes it comes up exactly as it has in the past. Other times it comes up with different font and way too spacious leading, and the comments section is also all spaced out and comments appear in bold. Was there some notificaition somewhere of a format update or change to let us know what is going on/  

I was catching up on comments today and found many of them I went to reply to someone, I could not see the comments forum due to the post now being exclusive to subscribers. The comments used to remain open after the contributor went behind the paywall. Not sure when, or more importantly, why this change was made but it makes no sense to block comments thread on stories we have already read, right? Plus if someone challenges your view you cannot respond.  

SA Admin Richman: This is a great asset (contributor's performance) if it exists, but I looked at the top right of the screen and there is nothing there on your example link for LYFT. Can you be a little clearer on how this works? Is this only for subscribers perhaps? I also do not see any analysis on your link that cites a review of contributors' performances.. 

Just noticed the comment thread now has the box for your post at the top. Cool, I thought, don't have to go to the bottom of 200 comments on T or GE. Then I discovered that the whole thread had been reversed!

Newest comments at the top makes no sense to me. I want to start with the earliest ones to see what is brought up in discussion. I suppose some folks might have a different take though. Is it possible to give us an option (preference that is stored with our user name?)

KennethFine, an excellent point I had not thought of about the wonderful serendipity of experts dropping by to make insightful comments. I often see those and highly value when a telecom engineer, say, drops in on VZ or AT&T articles, or a doctor adds his 2 cents to a discussion on medical office buildings, for example. Losing this is very counter-productive. The 10-days limit is subtle ways blows everything up.

Coming from the journalism sector, the issue of "paywalls" is fraught. With a wall you can vanish entirely from Google News and drop off the Web, as it were. Here it will weaken research and browsing the site. Again, I think a far wiser approach is a membership model, sort of like a co-op, where you join to support the community at a modest monthly fee that restores the old system; if you want more, then you go Pro.

Obviously, I don't know SA $$ numbers or member ##s and how it all sugars off but I urge SA to run those numbers and see how it works out as a membership. Let's not ruin what is a highly successful, innovative crowd-sourced investment site. And put the numbers out there for us to see. Or even offer some choices for the readership, as many organizations do when changing a "dues" or funding structure. ,

I somehow missed the memo about the use changes at SA. Was there an email? I think SA better needs to spell out how and why this happened, both for marketing and PR common-sense. (I'm a journalist and do marketing as well). The link should be front and center on the site and every link. This is basic marketing and user friendliness.

  I am an avid user and apparently (I only scanned the posts above) you are now charging to see older posts? I discovered this when I went back to check comments on  some threads I wrote on and discovered the article was now blocked. I clicked on the "Pro" option to see what was involved and the price was $30 a month. There is no clear explanation what this Pro option allows one to do nor explanation about how the previous system worked and why the change is needed. This is a failure of communication that hurts SA.

IMO, putting older archives behind a pay wall makes it worthless to leave comments when you don't remember what the article said going back and can't look at it again - which is what I was trying to do. I knew I had read the article and was surprised I could not read it now. Unanswered is the question: Can I read it for a certain number of days or not at all? It is not clear. Again, SA is not doing a good job of explaining this. 

My own feeling is $30 a month is way too much and you're going to kill traffic. That is $360 a year, a lot of money for some of us.I would suggest a more forward-looking  "membership model" where EVERYONE subscribes to

use the site at a much lower cost. Much more user-friendly, and accommodative to a larger group and a system that fosters buy-in.

Thanks for listening.