I wrote a couple of weeks ago about NewsGator’s subscription plans, and the way our desktop products (NewsGator Outlook edition and FeedDemon) would work with them. Nick Bradbury posted about it a day later. What we were really surprised about is the sheer volume of feedback about this, most of it not-completely-positive. :-)

For those that didn’t notice, Nick posted two days later announcing that we had re-thought this decision. Basically, when you buy NewsGator Outlook edition or FeedDemon, we’re making some changes so those products will continue to work forever, rather than stopping when your subscription runs out.  Certain features (that rely on parts of NewsGator Online) will likely be disabled when your subscription runs out, but the software itself will continue to function.

The plan is to still use the same activation system for this that we have in place already.  So you’ll still need a NewsGator Online account to activate the products…however, even if your account expires you’ll still be able to activate the versions of the products that you had access to originally.  We’re still working out the details, but we’ll definitely let you know as soon as we have something concrete to talk about.

There’s been someone posting a lot of spam comments on blogs and forums about this; for an example, scroll down in the comments on Chris Pirillo’s post here.  You can find this identical comment lots of other places as well, if you look hard enough.  In the middle of that comment is this:

Hi my friend,I want to tell you something about nick’s promising is a lie:
feeddemon won’t work after your subscribtion runs out.

Come on now…no one is lying.  The existing builds of Outlook edition 2.5 and FeedDemon 1.6 will indeed not activate if your subscription runs out…however, we are making changes to both products and the online activation system soon, which will rectify this.  And in the meantime, everyone who is affected by this has plenty of time in their existing subscription, so no one needs to “wait” for us to finish it.

So anyway, I just wanted to publicly clarify what we’re doing, and try to help stamp out some of the FUD that this individual has been trying to spread.