The send-a-link feature

That feature has been implemented, and is now active. There is no limit on the number of links a subscriber may create, and no limit on how many people may read an article via a given link. A few caveats do apply, however:

• For the time being, only "project leader" subscribers have the ability to create subscriber links. This restriction is meant to be temporary; its main purpose is to slow the initial use of the new feature while any remaining bugs are shaken out. It would, however, be interesting to hear what people think of keeping subscriber links as a differentiating feature for the high-level subscriptions.

• Subscriber links can be made for individual articles; just look for the "send a link" line in the left column. These links cannot be made for entire Weekly Edition pages, however.

• We reserve the right to turn off the subscriber link capability for specific articles; the annual timeline is a case where we might do that. No decisions have been made on that point, however, and the mechanism to implement an exclusion policy has not yet been implemented.

• We reserve the right to turn off the whole thing if it looks like the feature is being abused and hurting subscription sales. We do not expect things to go that way, however.

Privacy stuff and details: for each link, we track who created it and the number of hits it receives. That information will go away some time after the link expires - which happens when the relevant article becomes freely available. The links are constructed in such a way that they will continue to work forever. Currently, following a subscriber link leads directly to the article in question; in the future, we might throw in some sort of encouragement to subscribe.

We are most interested to see how this new feature - which was driven by requests from our subscribers - works out.

Note: you can avoid this step in the future by logging into your LWN account.