"I have put about 400 hours into building up a private Wetpaint wiki. Quite a few colleagues who I would consider my friends kindly donated many hours to the project. Our site involves confidential information, and I've given them my word that I will protect that information. Given Wetpaint's decision to no longer support invitations in private sites, all of that effort is simply gone. What the teenagers defending Wetpaint don't understand is that saying that the site will only be public for 5 minutes at a time is simply not an option for many private sites.

As far as I can tell, this was announced casually in the 6th post in a forum thread. We were not given *any* advanced warning. Many people who have invested many hours in their sites probably still don't know that it has happened. The disorganization and incompetence here is breathtaking.

Wetpaint clearly is a company that is reeling. It just laid of over a quarter of it's workforce, and no company would do something this amateurish (i.e. failing to at least give notice) if it weren't struggling.

A community based web company like this has nothing if it doesn't protect its reputation. Why should anyone here invest another second of time into this company if the company can go out of business at any time? It clearly has no interest in taking care of it's customers when it leaves a market. Why bother investing in your wiki if your host will turn around and stab you in the back like that?

I came very close to leaving a forum post on every major Wetpaint injected site explaining my story. Wetpaint is a closed source system, so if they go belly up, the companies doing business with them could lose their entire investment in an instant. The careers of the IT professionals advocating use of Wetpaint injected are at risk if this happens and they would certainly want to know how incredibly poorly this was handled."

"My group is a volunteer professional organization and we can't open our site AT ALL due to privacy issues, but sometimes we have new team members come in. We won't be able to use your site any more.

The decision to stop supporting private sites is completely up to your company, but it will open you up to more competition. You're missing out on a huge market of companies, professional organizations, and other groups who won't be able to use your site for secure internal collaboration. I encourage you to reconsider the long-term effects of this strategy."

"I don't know how I could coordinate the lives of 25 people on different school, work, and life schedules to all get and respond to invites within one or even two days. And I really don't want to make their e-mail accounts vulnerable. It would kill the community openness and trust it has achieved."

"See above for another customer who Wetpaint has betrayed:
http://www.wetpaintcentral.com/thread/3303758/Invites+and+Private+Sites+-+not+working?offset=20&maxResults=20"

"Another customer that has lost their entire investment:
http://www.wetpaintcentral.com/thread/3303758/Invites+and+Private+Sites+-+not+working?offset=20&maxResults=20"

"Naru and Walrus,

I appreciate that the two of you are just trying to be helpful here, but I think that this comes down to the difference between how adults and younger people look at responsibility. I hope for your benefit that some day when you are older you get a job where you hold some professional responsibility. When and if you do, I think that your perspective will change and that if you were to reread the relevant threads, you would realize that the adults who are saying that they have no choice but to leave Wetpaint are telling the truth.

We also understand how Wetpaint works. Many of us have probably invested hundreds of hours in it. Many of us have also studied internet marketing, so we understand that the odds of a bot indexing our site when it is public for a very short period of time are extremely low. All of that doesn't matter though.

I'm sorry that I don't have the patience to explain why this is true to you. Perhaps you can see from the certainty in the voices of the people that I have quoted above that this is simply not negotiable for some wikis. We have lost our entire investment. "