Make top up section of site free to access

[#1]

Hi guys, 

As a few people have mentioned, it is free already to access both giffgaff.com and community.giffgaff.com. This unfortunately doesn't necessarily mean that you won't be charged for accessing them.

Firstly, our websites often pull in a lot of elements from other websites. Things like embedded images, videos and analytical tools are often hosted else where meaning that if you load the page you also load these. We have reduced these as much as we can or hosted them on our site where possible, but I'm told that getting it completely removed would not be possible. This does mean though that if you had zero credit and zero data that you can still access the site. 

Secondly, as a few people have pointed out, if you route your traffic through a VPN, proxy or compression service like Opera Mini then our billing systems won't recognise that your phone if accessing giffgaff.com and so we will charge it as if it were any other site.

Any out of the box suggestions to make it completely free to access would be appreciated though.

Will

Edit: I have to admit, I'm not sure how we charge for members accessing through the app. Since those are API calls it seems conceivable to my layman self that we could guarantee zero charge. Take that with a pinch of salt though, I need to check with the people who know more than me.

[#2]

Presumably there is also the problem of the credit card verification pages that are 3rd party and therefore presumably cannot be made free? Or maybe they can but I imagine it would be complicated.

[#3]

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@will23 wrote:

Hi guys, 

As a few people have mentioned, it is free already to access both giffgaff.com and community.giffgaff.com. This unfortunately doesn't necessarily mean that you won't be charged for accessing them.

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@will23 Free but you might be charged? Clear as mud!

One thing; accessing the community is almost certain to raise a charge since you will almost certainly come across content not hosted on giffgaff's servers.

Externally hosted images, avatars and other material is the problem.

Since, it seems, that there's apparently no guarantee of free access that we should stop claiming that any part of giffgaff's web presence is free?

Unless of course a way is found to make that claim true.

[#4]

It has never been free for me,but i have not tried it on my new phone,but it never was on my old one no matter what i tried.

[#5]

Perhaps we could approach this problem from the other direction? Instead of charging up to 20p for the first 1MB and then free for the next 19MB, make the first 1MB free too? It would be a fantastic selling point for low users, and anyone who gets charged while trying to buy their goodybag after they have used 20MB has only themselves to blame.

Edited: typo 19MB.

[#6]

The topup section of the site has always been free to access but only from the stock browser on your phone,if you're using a 3rd party browser you'll get charged.

Quite what happens if you're using a gigabag in a dongle or mifi I don't know so perhaps someone from giffgaff HQ could give us that info.

Re the forum pages,all content hosted at giffgaff.com is free to access but the problem is that if there's content on a page that hosted elsewhere,that whole page will be rejected if you have no credit as the outside content is chargeable.

So just as an example,because my animated avatar is hosted elsewhere,any page that I've posted on like this one is not free and the same applies to any other page with content that's not hosted at giffgaff.com like embedded Youtube videos,pictures that are too big for the giffgaff system so are hosed at photobucket for instance and a host of other things.

[#7]

Exactly!

Even if it were possible, I don't see that there's really much of a case for having the community free to access since, after all, we do get paid for coming here.

[#8]

Although we receive payback for helping in the Community, it is important that we shouldn't eat too deeply into our limited data allowance if we are using 3G rather than Wi-Fi. Community pages take ages to load on GPRS, so they can't be very economical on data.