Dear loyal HOTorNOT star members,

Based on feedback we got from many of you, we have decided to start requiring star memberships on HOTorNOT again. While many of you saw how going free would be good, you also warned us that this would probably lead to more spammers and fake profiles.

You were right, this is exactly what happened. The spammers got aggressive to the point where they were screwing up the system, even causing the "someone wants to meet you" emails to not be sent for periods as long as 5 days.

We don't really regret trying to make the site free so everybody can use it, but it's clear that most of our users believe an inexpensive paid site works better than a free site filled with spammers.

If you left the site after we went free, we hope you'll come back and join again. If you are still here, we hope turning subscriptions back on has a noticable impact for you, helping you meet more people without having your time wasted by the spammers.

thanks, and have fun!

Your friends,
Jim and James
:)

inside scoop is that Hong and the other guy are having problems, can't agree on the direction of the company. Hong wants to take it much further, make it a friendster/myspace thing and throw everything in such as video, blogs, the whole 9. Engineers are leaving and new ones are hard to come by. They may just sell it if they can't work it out in the next 30 days.