I contacted my hosting service:
“Can y’all help me hide or password protect some posts?”
“Your business is important to us. Type some shit so our bot can ignore you.”
“Open the pod bay doors HAL.”
“I’m afraid I can’t understand you.”
“I’ve got a fever and the only cure is more cowbell.”
“I’m afraid I can’t understand you.”
“You maniacs! You blew it all up! God damn you! Damn you all to hell!”
“Please give me a phone number so I can call you.”
“xxx-xxx-xxxx”
“We will call you in 24 hours.”
The next day the phone rang.
“This is the hosting service, ‘your ball are in our vice’. How can we help you today?”
“Can y’all help me hide or password protect some posts?”
“Sure, how many posts?”
“About 2,500.”
“Standby while I put in touch with a developer.”
“Sure thing dektol.”
“Hi, I’m a developer. What’s dektol?”
“I want to hide some posts. About 2,500 or so.”
“Glad to help. I can do that in a jiffy. It’ll be $165 a month.”
“The fuck you say?”
“$165 a month. Pretty good deal for unlimited support.”
“I’m a guy that writes stories about talking squirrels. $165 isn’t going to happen.”
“But sir it’s unlimited service. In fact…”
“You maniacs! You blew it all up! God damn you! Damn you all to hell!”
“Um…”
“Why don’t I hang up now?”
“OK, have a nice day.”
Standby while shit gets real. I’m reaching for a hard drive with a screwdriver and a pick axe. I’m sure this’ll work out fine.
$165/month over one year equals $1,980. That’s more then I paid for my last 3 vehicles combined. Although 1980 was a good year for me, I’m not into monetary symbolism. Woof!
“I’m sure this will work out fine…” Gee, that sounds…GREAT, yeah, if you could just take care of that, that’d be great…
Good luck for ALL our sake’s, we’re all (and the squirrels) hanging on this.
Tree Mike
I laugh out loud because I’m pretty sure that is a true account of dealing with computer support. Like dealing with many females, just sign and get it over with – you are wasting time that could be spent elsewhere.
For what it is worth this might work. Do a bulk move of the 2500 posts to a category. Then with a plugin you can require a password for any post having that category. If this happens to work you can thank me later. HA
I experimented with that exact thing! I got a bulk move plug in for category and then said paywall this category. Unfortunately, I think people hate visible firewalls. I put up just two “password only” posts and got a few private complaints right away.