Thanks for your patience as we’ve made some changes to civil3d.com. We have one more change, and things will settle for a while. Today, you’ll need to update your membership information to include more about you. You can skip right to it and hit the Member’s Area page if you want to skip the reasoning below.

Since we’ve made the change to logins, I’ve received a number of e-mails from our readers. They generally fall into two camps: the first group wrote to say thanks for the great posts and comments that the team puts together. I really appreciate those. The second group wanted to know why the site can’t continue to be free all the time. There are three reasons we felt this change was needed, so let me explain them.

One, we’re consultants, we hope civil3d.com is your introduction to Engineered Efficiency, and what we can offer you. By knowing more about our readers, we can tailor our posts and features to the users we most want to reach. We want to be your one-stop-shop for all things Civil 3D.

Two, the site has a fair amount of traffic. Not like the Halo 3 blog or anything, but more than I want to count on my fingers and toes. A quick search through the Technorati listings shows civil3d.com in the Top 10 among CAD related blogs. Cool. But also attractive. As we’ve grown, the amount of spam comments and users that Dana and I have to wade through has grown as well. By requiring users to be more than a fake name and a stolen e-mail address, we can cut the amount of back office work we do on the blog, and spend more time writing.

Three, we want the site to be free. All that traffic means more bits and my cheap little hosting account is starting to look a bit undersized. We considered a subscription service, but you told us loud and clear that wouldn’t work. We listened to you. We need to make the site financially viable, and to that end, we’re talking to a few sponsors. In order to make that arrangement work, we have to provide some demographic information. We don’t share your information with outside parties, but we do have to tell them how many, where from, what type of visitor sort of information. If you’re interested in being one of those sponsors, drop me an e-mail.

Thanks again for your understanding, and for being a member.