After you recreate your old avatar, it goes into a queue to have its "data migrated". This is a process where we buy you new copies of all the old stuff the avatar owned, resurrect its faveplaces, buddy list, etc. This will occur within a few days of the avatar's recreation. While we are able to restore *most* of your avatar's state, there are some things we are unable to restore. ( For example, 'custom cars' will revert to their stock components).

All purchases of Therebucks and member program updates made between midnight Pacific Standard Time February 1, 2010 and 11:00 AM Pacific Standard Time on March 2, 2010 will be refunded in full.

Purchases made via PayPal or Credit Card will be refunded automatically by April 1, 2010.

If you purchased Therebucks or a Premium membership between February 1 and March 2 using an Ultimate Game Card, you can request a refund by sending an email to ugcrefunds@thereinc.com by April 1, 2010 at 11:59:59 PM PST. In the email, please provide:

- your avatar name
- the transaction number from the email confirmation you received at the time of the purchase
- your mailing address
- name of person the refund check should be payable to

In the Terms of Service (TOS), it states that all purchases made in the last month will be refunded on request. We have decided to forego the request process, and will be proactively making refunds for all purchases made in the last month.

The first round of checks have been cut and signed. They will be sent out via USPS on Monday, March 29th. We did find some bad actors in the bunch, and will be posting more about the requests which were disqualified next week. Where possible, we've given people the benefit of a doubt, and may be writing to some folks to ask for clarification.

No.

ThereIM, our lightweight chat client, doesn't require the same set of servers as the There world does. Many people asked us if we could leave ThereIM up for a while, so we've arranged to take the servers required for ThereIM down last to keep ThereIM up as long as possible. Since we're in the midst of taking up the thousands of servers which actually ran There, they may be interruptions from time to time.
We can't say how long we will be able to keep There running. It turns out the servers required to run it are the most expensive kind, and we of course have no source of revenue now.

We'll keep it going as long as we can.

Just click "Help" within There Central and then "Ask a Question" to send a ticket. You can also click the "Get Help" button in-world.

No. We will either stop the clock on PortaZones, or make refills free.

Will will attempt to continue this program. As a reminder, here are the procedures:

Welcome to There's Developer Buy Back Program. Please remember that your account must have the full amount of Therebucks you requesting to sell before you place your request. Please submit your request using ThereMail to the avatar, "ThereBanker". Requests received any other way will not make it into the queue. Initially we offered a PayPal option however due to PayPal policies we can no longer issue PayPal payments, but instead we will be issuing you a check, please include full name and a mailing address with any requests.

You must also meet the following criteria:
- You must be a developer who has submitted.
- You must be a member in good standing.
- You must not have been found guilty of texture theft.
- You must not have had any chargeback requests on Therebucks purchases.
- We will only accept one request at a time during a redemption session.
- Do not send duplicate requests. They will be deleted.
- When you have had your request fulfilled you can send in your next request.
- You can only redeem Therebucks you have made by selling developer items. Therebucks you have collected from Sparkles, Tips, or give trades from other members are not eligible.

Please do not attempt to game the system. It is not fair to There, and it is not fair to other members. Also, you will not be cheating There out of virtual currency, or virtual goods, you will be cheating us out of real money. Fraudulent transactions will not only put you at risk of permanent banning from There but may also qualify for escalation to law enforcement as well.

Once we get your request, we'll review your transaction history to ensure that the amount requested matches the amount of Therebucks you've made from sales of your developer items.

No. It is our view that there is too much risk for fraud at this time to allow this activity, so please do NOT buy or sell Therebucks using 3rd party resellers. We have monitors in place specifically to detect this activity, and will deal with it promptly and severely.

No. The reason There uses DX8 is to make sure that the most possible people can use it (DX8 is included with Windows XP). We were scheduled to start a DX9 beta in March, but even with a DX9 renderer, there would be a sizable population which couldn't run it (do to hardware requirements), and we'd have to re-do a lot of the artwork in world to take advantage of it. On the server side, we often attend conferences like GDC and the Austin GDC and go hear how other game sites have invented this cool new technology for handling such and such on the back end, which just happens to be the way There already does it.

Also, remember, we just revamped our UI (User Interface), Casual Games, and interactive object systems (to name a few). So, is all of There engineered the way we'd like to see it built today? Of course not. Is it behind the times? No.

Well, no. He did say that there were no plans to close There, and we all believed in There as a long term business. The truth is, we really believed that in our heart of hearts we could stave off the inflationary forces with new games, a better First User Experience, interactive objects, etc, etc. But, very sadly, we were wrong. We still believe in There, but we can't take belief to the bank, and it doesn't pay the bills.

Yes. We actually have some exciting educational projects in process, which we will continue to service.

If you wish recover the textures, catalog images and model files from your developer submissions, please send a request to recovermyassets@there.com. Please provide a list of Submission IDs of the material you wish to recover. Requests must be received by end-of-business on Monday, March 8th, 2010.

It will be destroyed in a secure fashion, and the disks it resided on taken to a facility which specializes in the secure destruction of physical disk drives.

We wish that was true. We're not going to go into the details of our finances, but let's say that 3000 members agreed to pay $10 / month, or $30,000.00 a month. That would cover a fraction of what we pay to house the servers for There. And that's not even considering the cost of staff, office space, computers, customer support, legal, marketing, etc, etc. We could keep upping the monthly charge, but then we'd lose members (many of those young people which There serves best), and it wouldn't total out.

We're really sorry that the monthly option wouldn't work out. Many of us have been with There since the early 2000's (before There even opened) and believe me, if there was a way to make it work financially, we would have gone for it.