I’m freezing this site and moving to both Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen) and a new website http://www.profstevekeen.com/. There are several reasons:
- This site’s signup security failed, and something like 50,000 bot-users have signed up.
- It’s just too cumbersome in WordPress to delete them selectively from here, so it’s easier to move to a new, clean site;
- I used to be very active in discussions here, but the demands on my time became so excessive over time that I have virtually stopped participating;
- I am going to retire from Kingston University next year (probably in July), and if I am to continue being a public intellectual and residing in London (which, whatever its other faults, is the best place in the world from which to be a public intellectual), then I have to generate an income that will replace my academic salary. Patreon enables me to do that; this site does not.
- UK tax rules prevent me living here and accessing my Australian superannuation pension, and my pension income from the UK will be roughly £100 a month, which is a bit shy of the cost of living in London
The site will continue to exist (and a supporter David Curwen has recently fixed up many of the problems that arose from an ISP crash some years ago, so my old UWS lectures are accessible now), but I will only occasionally post here, and I won’t engage in discussion here. I will only do so on Patreon.
I am not sure how I’ll cope with the bot-problem. WordPress isn’t helpful here, and the easiest method may be simply to delete all users. I’ll make a decision on that shortly; this bot problem was why the site crashed recently, and it took my new ProfSteveKeen site with it. I’ll regret doing that, but I may have no choice but to do so if I want the site to perform at a reasonable speed.
