The Globe "postponed" requiring paid, online subscriptions to sometime past October 1.

Is anyone paying to read the Globe online?

AppDev, Do you mean October 1?

Why? There is BBC and Yahoo. Boston just does not have that much to offer aside from Mass news.

While tinkering to support the paid site, Globe technical staff mangled comments at the open site. Readers trying the "Log in" box on a Forum page are likely to get an error message saying, "Sorry, we could not find your e-mail or password." However, that problem can be bypassed.

Once the error is reported, mark and copy the URL (or "Address") shown. Then click the message link below the Login button that says, "Please click here to create your password." The page that comes up next has login fields that will usually work. Once done with them, click the Login button, and a "Welcome" page should appear. Paste in the URL (or "Address") that was copied before, to return to the point of interruption, logged in.

There is no known solution to problems adding comments to Health, Business, Metro or Politics articles shown on the open site. In response to a problem report, Globe customer support replied, "Our technical team is working on a solution, but we're unfortunately not sure how long this process will take." [October 5, 2011]

Before the paid site, the Globe had a vigorous flow of comments on news articles. Now it is just a trickle, since the lifetime of wire service articles that accept them is only a few hours. Losses of "per view" and "per click" Web ad revenue could prove significant.

I subscribe to the print edition, so it's not a concern for me. I come online here for the forums and the debates.

Just stopped by today, I have stopped reading the Boston Globe sence the newspaper said the were going to start charging the public. Most of the news will be picked up by other new outlets. The local newspaper are the places to go for classified adds now; or the internet

Readers who persevere at boston.com without the paid site might miss some gossip, movie reviews, pop music, TV and sports riffs but can find even more at the open site, Metro Boston, NESN and the Phoenix. The Metro and Business news of strong interest also shows up at the open site, the wire services, the Herald, CommonWealth, Central MA News, Cape Cod Today, Mass Live, Mass High Tech, and local newspaper, television and radio sites.

So far, under National or World news, the paid site has carried nothing both unique and substantial. Readers can probably do better with Yahoo or Google news, BBC, WTOP in Washington, DC, Nation and World pages at the open site, or fee-free pages shown at the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post, plus some follow-up with one of the search engines.

Noah Bierman's work might be a loss, maybe shown only on the paid site. He is a young reporter who did a great job with Transportation and is developing a strong grasp of state politics: more grit and less nose-blowing than Scot Lehigh and some other forts.

Does anyone know if Boppie is posting on the paid site?  If he is, then I absolutely will not be interested in paying.

News clips at the Globe's paid site on its main page and its Metro, National, World and other news index pages fail to identify reporters who wrote articles. Over time, readers will become familiar with reporters as "must read," "might read" and "never read." Printed papers make it easy to focus on "must read" and skip over "never read" articles. Stronger sites, like the NY Times, do the same, by naming reporters in news clips.

Erin Ailworth is showing up in general assignments on Metro pages--successor to Local and apparently allowing in some regional and tiny bits of national news. For example: "Heating oil costs projected to hit record," October 13, and "Loyal fans recall sweeter times at Friendly's," October 7--both topics also on the open site. It's a happier venue for her, where problems handling numbers and asking questions might matter less.

With departure of Peter Howe, that leaves only Carolyn Johnson to report the many Boston-area business topics, other than gadgets, that involve some technical content. A good example is "A new toolbox for urban analysis," October 3--not on the open site. With Ms. Johnson, the problem is more likely to be connecting ideas with practical uses. Like Ms. Ailworth, she also rarely asks hard questions or seeks out skeptical points of view.

Comments have recently been defeated on the Community news pages at the boston.com site--joining Health, Business, Metro and Politics as off-limits. This "bug" now looks likely to be an intentional problem--cordoning off readers of the open site from a feature eventually to be restricted to the paid site.

Since announcement of the paid site, readership on the open site already looks to be down, cutting into revenue for Web ads. Some occasional readers took the announcement as an invitation to go elsewhere and did.

Happily, the first day of the paid site as pay-only passed without further effects on the open site. As pay-only, the paid site still displays its main page and most news index pages without a fee. Curiously, National and World news indexes are restricted, but not the Metro index.

As before, the index pages do not say who wrote the articles they list. Enormous cartoons of columnists appear, most likely comforting "Grumbles" McCrory. Scot Lehigh is aptly captioned "Opinion," the most he has ever been.

Again happily, some of the recent bugs in the open site of Globe online are being fixed, and only comments in one segment appear to have been disabled. Comments are no longer invited for Metro articles. Comments now work again for Business, Politics and Community articles but not for Health. The status of other sections is uncertain.

Many bugs remain with login functions, including some introduced in the past day or so. There are several broken links in the index pages to Metro and Health articles, because the URLs are leaving out "/Boston" in what should be, as a properly working example--
http://www.boston.com/Boston/metrodesk/2011/10/state-police-searching-charles-river-for-woman-traffic-impacts-expected-mass-ave/lBO8cMpPVCKSQNxI2eMudL/index.html