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There are two kinds of restaurants: Restaurants where you pay after you eat, and restaurants where you pay before you eat.

In general, fancy restaurants where you sit down at a table and are served your food by a waiter or waitress usually expect you to pay after you've eaten.

Of course, these restaurants take on some risk that their diners will eat their food and then claim to have forgotten their money, have a credit card that is declined, or simply slip out the door when no one is looking ("dine-and-dash").

More casual restaurants expect you to pay for your food before you eat, at the time when you place your order.  Then the food is prepared for you and you usually need to pick it up yourself.

FlipScript started as a fancy restaurant, but ran into problems when the number of "dine-and-dash" customers got completely out of control.  People were showing up at the site with an all-you-can-eat attitude, creating thousands and thousands of ambigrams, and posting them on social media (as their own), or simply selling them outright, with no intention whatsoever of ever paying for anything.

At the same time, and for the same reason, FlipScript was going broke.

Many people don't realize this, but each ambigram preview that is created at FlipScript.com costs us real, hard-earned money.  FlipScript is charged for both compute cycles and for bandwidth by the cloud company who hosts our web site.  We pay for the compute cycles and for the bandwidth for every single ambigram preview that we create and deliver.

So, we had people coming to the site and creating thousands of ambigram previews, and building audiences of millions of followers or selling the designs for profit as their own, while FlipScript paid the bill to create them all.

Not only were we not making anything from our years and years of hard work that went into creating the ambigram generator, we were actually paying to have people dine-and-dash on us!

So, we had to change our restaurant style.

We didn't have a choice.

We didn't increase any of our prices.  However, we are now asking our customers to establish an account balance up-front if they are serious about wanting an ambigram design.  Once they have demonstrated that bare minimum level of commitment (and respecting the fact that each ambigram preview costs us real money), then we are more than happy to provide previews of the artwork!

The account balance can then be used toward the purchase of an ambigram.  In fact, having the account balance makes the check-out process for an ambigram super fast and easy!  The account balance can be used towards the purchase of anything on the site, and all we ask is that the balance be equal to the cost of the lowest priced item that we sell (the ambigram eBook).  Once you've taken care of that most basic requirement, we would be proud to show you the amazing artwork that will now be right at your fingertips.

So, we've changed our restaurant style, but everything else is as awesome as ever.  Thank you for your understanding.

We always take care of customers. FlipScript has just introduced several performance and security measures to ensure that our customers have the best possible experience on our site.

Although we have a very high completion rate for the words, names and phrases used to make ambigrams on the FlipScript.com web site, we are always looking to improve further.

You can now create thousands of new ambigrams on the site.  We have also updated the shape and kerning rules for some improbable edge cases, and even fixed some bugs with the artwork (if artwork can even have bugs!).  Some of you wrote to let us know that the site was down when you visited during a short window last week while we were installing the updates, and we're glad to report back to you that everything is back up and running smoothly with the new updates in place.

By the way, if you ever encounter anything unusual with how one of our ambigram designs come out, please continue to let us know so we can take care of it.  Also, please understand that from time-to-time, we need to install updates on the server to keep everything running smoothly, and usually this means that the site is unavailable for a short while.  It's not usually cause for alarm, but you can always email us to ask and we'd be happy to let you know what's going on.

Now, get out there and create those new ambigrams!

FlipScript is again offering ambigram products like mousepads, t-shirts, coasters, key chains and more!

However, the process for ordering the products has changed.

You will need to first license the ambigram design from FlipScript.com, and once you have licensed the design, you will be able to use it to personalize dozens of ambigram products from our friends at Zazzle.

This allows us to get your products to you much faster, minimizes any potential problems with your order, and helps us to meet deadlines like birthdays and Christmas much more effectively.  Plus, the products are higher quality than in the past.

We know you will love them!

 

Ordering speed at FlipScript.com was just improved by over 300%!

The FlipScript.com web site will continue to have short periods of down-time over the next week or so, to allow for site improvements to be installed.  Also, additional testing will likely mean that content, styles and site organization will need to be editted to fit a variety of target devices.

We thank you for your patience as we continue to work on the user experience of the site.

FlipScript has enabled SSL security for the entire web site, to ensure that your communications across the internet are secure.  The secure connection is not restricted to just ordering pages, but every page of the site.  We care about your right to privacy and security as much as you do, and we decided to take these extra steps to ensure that your actions are private any time you are on our web site.

Thank you for all of your patience.  The web site hack took the site down for longer than we expected, since the site could not be recovered.

However, we decided to rebuild the site even better than before!  As you can see, the model for the site has changed as well.  We are focused exclusively on the designs, and we will be partnering with other companies for the products.  We weren't able to get all of the features that we wanted into the site before launch, so there will be more coming in the future.

Please let us know what you think!

The FlipScript.com web site was hacked on March 3, 2015.  The site was taken off-line, and data was lost.  It does not appear that any customer information was compromised, and FlipScript does not store payment details or credit card numbers.

We have decided to rebuild the site better than it was before the hack, with support for mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers, a multi-lingual interface that can be viewed in seven languages and an ambigram creator that is better, faster, easier and more fun than ever before.

We hope to be able to launch in June.