We are preparing to launch publicly. Along with this we are starting subscription plans for the use of doingText. And this is how it’ll look like.

In addition to a free account we will offer five paid plans starting with a monthly fee of $5 for the “Micro Plan” up to $99 for the “Really Large Plan”. The plans are differentiated by the number of private discussions and the number of collaborators you can have. Collaborator refers to the feature of adding collaborators who also have a doingText account.
You can up- or downgrade or cancel your subscription at any time. Payment can be made with credit cards (VISA, Master, AmEx).

Every plan, including the Free plan, will have SSL security for the private discussions. Also, all plans will have all the other features like writing messages to other users, embedding the discussion to your own web site, get the whole range of exporting options and so on. You can always start as many public discussions as you wish to and you can also invite an unlimited number of cowriters by sharing the URL. Your cowriters will not be required to create an account in order to work with you (unless they like doingText and wish to do so, of course). This part of doingText won’t change!

Thank-You Plan for Beta Users
We have a “Thank you” offer for all beta users having helped us on so many levels. The beta account will automatically be upgraded to the Micro plan - for free. And the best is: You can stay on that plan forever. All of your existing discussions will be kept. You only need to upgrade if you need more private discussions.
So if you’re not yet a beta user of doingText, go grab your invite key here.

We plan to roll this out within the next weeks. We are currently looking for a credit card company that fits our idea of a comfortable subscription management. However, being a Berlin-based company ourselves this is not really easy due to German legal regulations. We’ll keep you posted.

We have some exciting news this week: Kristina Schneider joined the doingText-team. She’ll take care of design and usability and already has some fine ideas. We’re thrilled and you can be, too. Expect some great changes!
Now for the new features of this week.

Add lines a new way

At the bottom of the discussion field there is now an “Add Line”-button. It adds a new line at the end of the text. We have added this button for usability reasons. People starting their first discussion ever, happened to be startled by the display of text within the lines and thereby not knowing that clicking the line and hitting enter creates a new line.

Growing text area for comments
Just like the line fields of your text grow with the content, now the the text field of the comments grow, too. This way the commenting person always has the whole comment in sight.

Confirming notifications
Inspired by the Growl app für Mac OS X, all confirming notifications now come along in that style. There’s a little rectangle showing up in the upper right corner of the site for a few seconds. It tells you what has been successfully done. It appears after events like changing that status of a discussion, adding collaborators to your discussion, sending an doingText-invite to someone or logging out of your account.

Negative CAPTCHAs
The dark side of being on top of the google search when it comes to “text collaboration” is that we’re becoming interesting for spammers. We have now implemented a negative CAPTCHA to cope with spambots at least for the near future. It’s called negative, because the CAPTCHA works exactly the other way round and you as a user won’t see anything of it. There is no extra field the user has to fill in, but an invisible field for the bots called Honeypot. If something is filled in that hidden field it must be a spambot. Those requests will then be ignored.
More information on negative CAPTCHAs can be found on Ned Batchelder’s site.