Halfbakery Buyout

I am proud to announce that, after somewhat protracted negotiations with the owner, I have obtained the rights to the domain name of halfbakery.com along with the rights to all of the hardware and software that the site runs on and to all of the content. Furthermore, I now also own the rights to the username ‘jutta’; the name by which I should henceforth be addressed.

As part of the buyout I have contracted to finance a number of improvements to the site which, I hope you will agree, will improve the user experience whilst retaining traditional ‘bakery values.

Firstly, halfbakery.com will become a pay-per-view site. From midnight tonight, you will be asked for your credit card details each time that you attempt to view a halfbakery idea. Having emptied the sweetie jar in order to finance this deal, I feel that this action is necessary in order to recover costs and to keep the site running in a professional & profitable manner (something that has been sadly lacking thus far). Whilst this is an onerous new feature, I feel sure that you will agree that it is preferable to becoming a purely subscription based site where everyone would have to pay the same regardless of the amount of time that they spend on the site. Annotating will, of course, remain free of charge, as will voting.

Secondly, you will now be required to accept the terms & conditions of halfbakery.com whenever you log in. By necessity these are lengthy and couched in a considerable volume of ‘legalese’ but can be essentially summarised in a single phrase. All Your Base Are Belong To Us! All ideas, annotations, illustrations, user login names and even your very thoughts will now become the property of halfbakery.com.

Thirdly, in order to enforce my second point above, access to halfbakery.com will require you to download a small and, my experts assure me, harmless application to your PC. This will allow us to ensure that unscrupulous users are not attempting to hide ideas that rightfully belong to halfbakery.com nor to donate them to other, less scrupulous ‘ideas’ sites. It will also allow us to use your PC as a server, thus saving us bandwith costs and helping us to keep the pay-per-view fees to a minimum.

Fourthly, in order to encourage brand loyalty, we will be offering a 'Premium Membership' for those who wish to further enhance their 'bakery experience. Full details have yet to be worked out but will probably involve some croissant-based frippery at minimal cost to me.

Finally, the fishbone & croissant logos are now copyright of halfbakery.com, as are the words “baked”, “half-baked”, “halfbaked”, “custard”, “elf”, “fishbone”, “’bone”, “croissant”, “bun”, “pastry”, “nano”, “technology”, “nano-technology”, “nanotechnology”, “nanotech”, “shirley” (note the lower-case ‘s’) and the phrases “[marked-for-deletion]” and “[marked-for-expiry]”.

Happy baking!