An "oversight" for four months? On a critical part of your business that has a direct impact on the perception of the quality of the blogs you host? Are you trying to become the Facebook of blogging (in a bad way)?
You have a nice service, but this is too much. Also, it prompted me to take another look at your terms of service, which are surprisingly onerous. You've lost a user and an advocate. Good luck.
Good. Tell em! Even better that you're taking a real stand by putting your money where your feet are and moving on. Oh, shit, Posterous is free. Maybe send them a check for the valuable service they did provide you before moving on.
And really, what better blog alternative are you even going to go to?
Free services need a business model. And they need to be transparent about that business model, preferably up front.
If you move on because you disagree with a change in policy you do not owe a free service anything for the time they provided you, I really don't understand where you got that idea. It's not up to the end user to structure a service.
If Facebook decides on some silly move tomorrow which causes users to leave in droves that does not mean we owe them for the time before, the same holds true for posterous.
They could have avoided this by publishing it in their corporate blog and by clearly stating their affiliate trick in the terms of service. Anything less simply won't do, especially not after four months. After all, the only reason it is four months is because some user walked in to it after four months, it could have been eight just the same.
I wonder if they would be calling it an 'experiment' then too, or if they would agree too that that is stretching credulity.
I hate corporate speech.
They should have just written:
"Sorry guys & girls, we've messed up on this one, we have amended the terms of service, and we've reset the 'viglink' flag on all existing accounts, if you feel like giving us a hand then please re-enable it but if you don't we understand.".
That would have taken a bit more guts though, but I'll bet you it would have been received a lot better and would have possibly been a net plus for them.
You have a nice service, but this is too much. Also, it prompted me to take another look at your terms of service, which are surprisingly onerous. You've lost a user and an advocate. Good luck.