I am writing to share with you and fellow members of the SVRPAGE Group my recent experience at Paingate. I bought a 60 day membership at Paingate.com a month ago and almost immediately got a bad feeling. After I logged in for the first time with my newly received access ID and password, I was hit by a full page of "site rules", all about not downloading too many contents and not logging in from too many computers. It should be noted that none of those site rules could be found before I paid for the membership. Not that they were terribly unreasonable and I had no intention of downloading contents for any purpose other than for personal enjoyment, nor sharing my access privilege with anyone else anyway. But once I started downloading contents from Paingate, I found out how unreasonably those rules are being enforced.

After downloading just 5 clips with a total of less than 16MB, I was shut out of the members section of Paingate. I immediately wrote to their customer support to appeal for help. The next day, some unnamed person identified as the webmaster replied to suggest that my account was "currently being blocked for a password sharing violation" and that such "accounts have been accessed from too many different IPs within a short period of time." I had of course done none of the above. The webmaster did reopen my account. However, after I downloaded another, the 6th, clip, I was shut out again. I wrote again, advising the webmaster that I had not violated their site rules. A number of email exchanges followed, involving someone identifying herself(?) as Laura who kept claiming that my account was working fine, but I am never able to log onto as a member of Paingate again. I had paid almost $70 for the 60 day membership and only got a measly 6 clips - an absolute rip off!!!

I belatedly realized that Paingate is not on your links nor among your favorites. Now I know why and I believe I have a duty to share my experience with other fellow members of the SVRPAGE Group.