What happened to our Patreon? (Patreon)

Hi everyone. So, we are back. It's been a bit of a stressful and frustrating month or so trying to get this back online but I thought I'd just post a quick update to let everyone know why our page was suspended for the last month.

On 16th Dec Patreon contacted us to let us know that (without any prior warning I might add) they had removed our page because we were breaching their "multi-level marketing (MLM)" rules. According to their community guidelines this is when you share coupons or discounts via Patreon which confused us because we have never done this.

After quite a lot of emails back and forth, with standard delays in between waiting for a reply, we were told this was because our posts on Patreon linked to pages on our website where we include affiliate shopping links for sites like Amazon, Newegg and so on. This caught us by surprise as nowhere in their documentation or rules could we find anything relating to this practice, something which is pretty widespread across blogs, websites and YouTube channels as I'm sure you've all seen.

We appealed of course, and to help move things along we deleted all of our old Patreon posts here to avoid any of them falling foul of this apparent rule. We escalated the matter to their management team for review, and eventually we finally received a reply yesterday that our appeal had been granted and our page would be re-instated.

It seems from their reply that they will also now be updating their rules to actually allow this kind of practice, although we are double checking this before we make any new posts on Patreon which point to pages with affiliate shopping links on them.

We're really sorry for the long outage, and thank you to everyone who continues to support our site here, it is truly appreciated.

We are also working on some new member benefits and a new members area on the website which will make it easier to keep track of members perks, updates, news etc. I will post up separately on that soon with all the details and improvements we are making.

thanks

Simon