First I want to say that absolutely nobody has to pay for the use of this forum!
This forum was not created for the crowd of the entire internet. It is a place for players of the World Puzzle Days and was never created to entice puzzle players away from their local puzzle forum. As I know most of other forum's or group's owners personally, or since many years at least virtually, we are in most cases friends and my intention is not to entice their users away to catch somebody for my site. Our forum here is a place to clear open questions about World Puzzle Days (WPD), it is a place where new visitors may get informations like this one here, and it is a place where our players may offer their puzzles for sale. The last-mentioned category is only for registered members and only members with the badge "Trustworthy Seller" may enter. So if there is a black sheep who sells incomplete puzzles without mentioning this before, and it is a repeated case, will lose his badge for a while, and so also the access to sell on PP. By this way I try to protect my players against black sheeps. For conversation fun we do not use the forum, we have the page "Channels" where we can create groups for Brazilian, Mexican, US-American, Taiwanese,...players, as well as also an international group. Perhaps I will offer also PERSONAL PAGES for every member who wants one, where he may show all his puzzles. But such a service will have a different price, due to needed web-space. (But it would be only a small part of the prize from an own website.)
So, the access and use of this forum or channels has not to be paid! Players of the WPD pay since many years € 12 for the participation (20 € for a team) to play during 60 days of January and February. Either by themselves or one of our sponsors invites them. The participation lasts 60 days. But the access to use several special pages of this website lasts until September of the year they have played in the WPD. For example: Cobble Hill from Canada decided to invite 100 players. On March 28, 2020 140 players registered for WPD 2021. The first 100 are fully registered and have access since March 28 also here to forum, channels and challenges until September 2021. When they renew their membership next year after WPD 2021 until September 2021, their access will be renewed also until September 2022. If not, then the access to these pages will be disabled for these players. From the other 40 some paid by their own, some decided to wait if we get another sponsor who invites the next 100 players. The waiting players registered, but still without access to mentioned pages, because their registration is not complete.
So Forum, Channels and Challenges are goodies for active supporter without any increase of the ususal entry fee! And there are two reasons why you may decide to send us a few euros yearly:
You want to be part of the next WPD and play with puzzle friends of 35-50 different countries worldwide together, to enjoy thousands of puzzles from hundreds of different manufacturers and to help to assemble 5,000,000 puzzle pieces within 60 days.
You love the idea of the World Puzzle Days and would like to support our great event, based on own creativity, and to support the expensive website, although you have no time to play also, or you are turned off from certain copycats who appeared since the invention of WPD in 2013.