As of January 1, 2019, we have closed our forums. This is a decision we did not come to lightly, but it is necessary. The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk. The server software itself must be updated, and it cannot be without removing the forums.
So it is with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to our long-running forums. They came online in 2000 and brought together so many wonderful Disney fans. We had friendships form, careers launch, couples marry, children born ... all because of this amazing community.
Thank you to each of you who were a part of this community. You made it possible.
And a very special thank you to our Guides (moderators), past and present, who kept our forums a happy place to be. You are the glue that held everything together, and we are forever grateful to you. Thank you aliceinwdw, Caldercup, MrsM, WillCAD, Fortissimo, GingerJ, HiddenMickey, CRCrazy, Eeyoresmom, disneyknut, disneydani, Cam22, chezp, WDWfan, Luvsun, KMB733, rescuesk, OhToodles!, Colexis Mom, lfredsbo, HiddenMickey, DrDolphin, DopeyGirl, duck addict, Disneybine, PixieMichele, Sandra Bostwick, Eeyore Tattoo, DyanKJ130, Suzy Q'Disney, LilMarcieMouse, AllisonG, Belle*, Chrissi, Brant, DawnDenise, Crystalloubear, Disneymom9092, FanOfMickey, Goofy4Goofy, GoofyMom, Home4us123, iamgrumpy, ilovedisney247, Jennifer2003, Jenny Pooh, KrisLuvsDisney, Ladyt, Laughaholic88, LauraBelle Hime, Lilianna, LizardCop, Loobyoxlip, lukeandbrooksmom, marisag, michnash, MickeyMAC, OffKilter_Lynn, PamelaK, Poor_Eeyore, ripkensnana, RobDVC, SHEANA1226, Shell of the South, snoozin, Statelady01, Tara O'Hara, tigger22, Tink and Co., Tinkerbelz, WDWJAMBA, wdwlovers, Wendyismyname, whoSEZ, WildforWD, and WvuGrrrl. You made the magic.
We want to personally thank Sara Varney, who coordinated our community for many years (among so many other things she did for us), and Cheryl Pendry, our Message Board Manager who helped train our Guides, and Ginger Jabour, who helped us with the PassPorter-specific forums and Live! Guides. Thank you for your time, energy, and enthusiasm. You made it all happen.
There are other changes as well.
Why? Well, the world has changed. And change with it, we must. The lyrics to "We Go On" for IllumiNations say it best:
We go on to the joy and through the tears
We go on to discover new frontiers
Moving on with the current of the years.
We go on
Moving forward now as one
Moving on with a spirit born to run
Ever on with each rising sun.
To a new day, we go on.
It's time to move on and move forward.
PassPorter is a small business, and for many years it supported our family. But the world changed, print books took a backseat to the Internet, and for a long time now it has been unable to make ends meet. We've had to find new ways to support our family, which means new careers and less and less time available to devote to our first baby, PassPorter.
But eventually, we must move on and move forward. It is the right thing to do.
So we are retiring this newsletter, as we simply cannot keep up with it. Many thanks to Mouse Fan Travel who supported it all these years, to All Ears and MousePlanet who helped us with news, to our many article contributors, and -- most importantly -- to Sara Varney who edited our newsletter so wonderfully for years and years.
And we are no longer charging for the Live Guides. If you have a subscription, it's yours to keep for the lifetime of the Live Guides at no additional cost. The Live Guides will stay online, barring server issues and technical problems, for all of 2019.
That said, PassPorter is not going away. Most of the resources will remain online for as long as we can support them, and after that we will find ways to make whatever we can available. PassPorter means a great deal to us, and to many of you, and we will do our best to keep it alive in whatever way we can. Our server costs are high, and they'll need to come out of our pockets, so in the future you can expect some changes so we can bring those costs down.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your amazing support over the years. Without you, there's no way us little guys could have made something like this happen and given the "big guys" a run for their money. PassPorter was consistently the #3 guidebook after the Unofficial and Official guides, which was really unheard of for such a small company to do. We ROCKED it thanks to you and your support and love!
If you miss us, you can still find some of us online. Sara started a new blog at DisneyParkPrincess.com -- I strongly urge you to visit and get on her mailing list. She IS the Disney park princess and knows Disney backward and forward. And I am blogging as well at JenniferMaker.com, which is a little craft blog I started a couple of years ago to make ends meet. You can see and hear me in my craft show at https://www.youtube.com/c/jennifermaker . Many PassPorter readers and fans are on Facebook, in groups they formed like the PassPorter Trip Reports and PassPorter Crafting Challenge (if you join, just let them know you read about it in the newsletter). And some of our most devoted community members started a forum of their own at Pixie Dust Lane and all are invited over.
So we encourage you to stay in touch with us and your fellow community members wherever works best for you!
Welcome! We're happy you've found the PassPorter Community -- the friendliest place to plan your vacation to Walt Disney World, Disney Cruise Line, Disneyland, and the world in general! You are now viewing the PassPorter Message Board Community as a guest, which gives you limited access. As our guest, feel free to browse our messages by selecting the forum you want to visit from the list below.
To post messages and ask questions, join our FREE community today and you'll get access to tools and resources not available to guests, such as our vacation countown timers, "living" avatars, private messaging system, database searches, downloads, and a special PassPorter discount code. Registration is fast, simple, and completely free. Just click the Join Our Community link.
If you think you've already joined, log in below now. If you don't remember your member name or password, please visit our Member Name and Password Recovery page. You are also welcome to contact us.
My kids grew up with a 13" TV with just an antenna in an area with lots of tall pines, so they watched one network channel, PBS and a local channel until our little TV was burnt out in a lightning strike. We couldn't get a new TV with a built in antenna so we ended up getting cable. I think they were about 10, 13, and 15.
Maybe becuase the kids had grown up on PBS, they loved and still love the Discovery Channel, the History Channel and Animal Planet. As they grew up they all like the Daily Show and Colbert report. Neither of my boys have TV in their apartments (one in grad school, the other in law school) and neither miss it. MY DD gets limited channels at school.
I just bundled my cable, internet and phone and it save me about $40//month. We have never gotten premium channels until a couple of weeks ago when I was asked about a 6 month for $30.00 deal. I will not keep it beyong the 6 months. Because the house is in aheavily wooded are, I don't think a dish would work without cutting down my trees, which I will not do.
I have not have cable television in years; literally. I don't care for t.v. Most of my friends think it's crazy! Far and few is their a show on that I care to watch. And the few that I do occasionally enjoyed can be viewed online. I watched the entire Big Brother season last year online. And I am currently keeping up with Survivor online. That is literally the only show I watch right now. We only own one television, it gets turned on zero during the week. I made a rule for my kids, no tv on weekdays. They are allowed to watch movies on the weekends. We have a decent size movie collection and I get netflix (one at a time) movies. Most folks I know watch hours of television a day and I simply don't care for it; I know I'm not the norm- but I'm not paying for something I can't stand and even though my kids would LOVE to have cable (or even just the regular local stations); I don't think they need to watch it anyway. They read alot and they don't complain. However, I do notice when we go to peoples houses, they are fascinated/glued to the tv because its something "new" to them.
I had comcast cable for 5-6 years. I had the whole enchilada, all the channels & movie packages. The only thing I didn't take was the extra premium sports channels. Comcast kept raising the prices, changing packages w/o notice. I finally asked them if they gave anything for loyality. They did not. I dropped them & switched to Direct TV. I LOVE IT! Even got a bunch of friends & family to switch as well. I frequently switch my movie channel packages around. For a couple of years I made a point of having only 1 movie channel package - either Starz or HBO. I prefered Starz because you got more movie channels for the $$. But I loved Sopranos so when their season started I would switch to HBO & back when it was over. I know have both HBO & Starz. After 5 years of subscribing, Direct TV gave me a loyality award - without asking. A year of Showtime movie package for FREE!!! Which is great since I now love The Tudors. Since Direct TV is a satalite & does not have franchise, we don't pay any franchise fee & we don't pay any taxes! The taxes on cable tv are like another $20 a month. Plus I have the DVR/Tivo with Direct TV in both my living room & bedroom. Thinking about geting receivers for the kids rooms. We just program what we want recorded with by episode or by series. The machine does the rest & we watch later when we have time.
I will say the downside is the snow. It sometimes piles up on the dish and we lose signal. I intenionally have my dish mounted on the side of my deck I can easily brush it off.
My ex-mother-in-law has Comcast Cable with the internet & phone service. When the power goes out - all of it goes out. I would never go back to cable tv
Registered Message Board Members save 30% off PassPorter guidebooks! When you register you'll have access to a discount coupon good for 30% off the list price of PassPorter books in our online store.
This might be an option you are looking for .... It's called Apple TV. This guy dropped his satalite tv and stills watches his favorite shows for a fraction of the money
We dropped our premium channels over 2 years ago, and just recently added HBO back - at $5 a month. That's a good price to me. If it were more, then I wouldn't want it.
I would love to be the type of family who doesn't watch TV. But I think we'd go a bit looney without it. So, for now, we have cable. We're looking into dish and AT&T's UVerse (although it seems as if it's going to cost more than the cable!!)
I've been cable-free for 11 of the past 14 years, and those three "cable years" were only because it was coming into our house for free. Presently we get only NBC, ABC, and CBS (no PBS, no FOX, no UPN, etc,) We get one Netflix per month for $8.99 and have hooked up our TV to their "Play it Now" feature...which is WONDERFUL. Not to mention sites like Hulu or Veoh, these all work great on our TV through our phone company DSL. We also have a lot of dvds and videos.
Once in while I'll flip through the channels in the exercise room at work. What a bunch of junk! And this is coming from someone who s tv.
We have a two year contract with Comcast - we get expanded cable, high speed internet and telephone with unlimited long distance for $99/month for the two years. If we cancel/change any of the 3 services before the two years it increases dramatically! We had this same type of contract with Charter when we lived in MA and every two years I was given the option to renew for another two years with the rates. We had the $99/month rate for a total of 6 years which was pretty reasonable for us.
We also have basic cable...but we are in serious debate about getting rid of the home phone and just having the cell phones.
We did this. Neither of us spends that much time on the telephone. Cellular telephones are much more expensive than the home telephone that we could get from Comcast, but I think more worth it than cable television is. This means not sitting home waiting for a call while I have errands to run. It also means that when I am not at home my husband can do exactly what he has done a number of times already in the couple of months that we have had Verizon: call and ask, "Where are you?"
We had Comcast for many years. I think we had the expanded basic digital package and no premium channels. Then AT & T U-Verse became available in our area and we ended up getting a much better package deal and cost for our internet, phone and cable combined. So we dropped Comcast and have really liked the AT & T U-Verse. We don't have any premium channels with the U-Verse.
We get one Netflix per month for $8.99 and have hooked up our TV to their "Play it Now" feature...which is WONDERFUL. Not to mention sites like Hulu or Veoh, these all work great on our TV through our phone company DSL. We also have a lot of dvds and videos.
Once in while I'll flip through the channels in the exercise room at work. What a bunch of junk! And this is coming from someone who s tv.
Now I did like Netflicks. Our computer was not powerful enough for "Play It Now" through Netflicks, probably because we got this computer in the beginning of 2005. It might be different now though since we have cable Internet instead of AT&T DSL. I don't know if it would work with our television because the television is about 15 years old.
I just couldn't justify the expense of Netflicks on top of Comcast, especially since my husband really wants to go to Disney World next year. I don't see myself getting paid much more anytime soon, even though I make just a bit above the minimum wage at an unsteady job because you should have seen the huge line that went on for hours at the local mall today to apply for minimum-wage work at See's chocolate store, which is certain to last only the holiday season anyway. I am just thinking that if we get rid of Comcast it might be more realistic to save for Disney World, which we have already been doing for about a year now.
Even though it was all that I could do not to roll my eyes at him when my husband said that he "would die without TV," even Third World households often have them. When he is on his death bed mourning his life's lost opportunities, I want him to be thinking of something like a trip to China and not something as minor as the ability to watch television. Nor am I not in favor of becoming one of those self-righteous people who thinks that claiming that I don't watch television makes me seem smarter.
What I am in favor of is a television subscription service that serves me and my husband and not one that we serve. Even if the cable companies are not going to allow a la cart channel selections, they ought to allow special interest packages. If sport fans, comedy fans, tearjerker fans, etc. were allowed to order accordingly, it would be so much easier to attract advertisers who are looking for these niche consumers who are going to be watching these shows. Does anyone else here see the irony of private money going to ensure airtime for so-called public access channels that the "public" clearly isn't interested in anyway?
The guys at the Comcast booth at the mall today clearly had no interest in talking to anyone approaching them today. Even their body language said "Go Away" while they engaged with each other, which makes me wonder if they have reached critical mass with new customers since the digital conversion and assume anyone wanting to talk to them now has a complaint of some kind. I did want them to explain to me how to expedite myself to the channels with content that I might find interesting in a chaos of channels.
What does our contract say??? Maybe your right about getting rid of Comcast to help us save for WDW!!! I think we could get buy with basic channels and Netflicks!!! We just need to check contracts. This weekend I will check out what we have signed.
We have AT&T Uverse. We have every channel known to man. Including all the movie channels, HBO, Showtime, Starz etc. We have all the sports channels all the kids channels. In all we have about 500 channels. Do we watch them all? No. But we do love Uverse. It is the best tv service IMO.
We have AT&T Uverse. We have every channel known to man. Including all the movie channels, HBO, Showtime, Starz etc. We have all the sports channels all the kids channels. In all we have about 500 channels. Do we watch them all? No. But we do love Uverse. It is the best tv service IMO.
I will respond to my husband's questions when we are together in person, which is the way that I prefer to talk to people anyway. However, since by your own admission you have "every channel known to man," which of them do you think are worth it? Would you mind telling me why? The comments of other people here make me think that they might like to ask you the same question.
I sometimes go in and watch things on what Comcast calls "On Demand." Whether or not I find anything there that is "free" (meaning included in the monthly price) is always a toss up while I always found things that I liked while we were getting Netflicks movies for a monthly fee. Comcast is clearly spending nearly all of their resources promoting pay per view on On Demand. Why would I want to pay a monthly fee for the privilige of then paying a per movie rental fee when I can either make a list of movies with a montly fee service or pay a per movie fee at a video store without the montly fee?
The "premium channels" are something that I am not familiar with at all. Nor have I been able to get information about this from Comcast literature or employees. What is the content of these channels that make them worthy of a "premium" that is charged in addition to the monthly fee for the junk channels that rerun network shows that are already in syndication on the networks? There are a lot of categories not included on the "search feature" that is supposed to make things simple.
I am not saying that you are wrong to get all of the channels on the planet that you don't watch. I have spent money on things like dog magazines, and I don't even have a dog. So who am I to judge anybody? I am just asking, which channels would you get if you could buy only those of interest to you? I am going to try to debate my way into getting good value from a cable company notorious for not wanting to let anybody cancel their service. I am just not willing to pay usury rates for something that cost the cable company nothing to produce.
About This Page: 
Like
Thank
Pixie Dust
s tv. 
Linear Mode
