Why this membership thing

Why is access to the bootleg section restricted?

By that time, the popularity reached unbelievable regions, resulting in extremely high traffic.
Although I had long installed a mirror server to split traffic, I was to pay additional money for the traffic to my internet hosts.

Information from my site was being abused (in various ways). I had to put an end to this.
Material from my site was stolen and re-published on other sites. Restricted access would limit this theft.
People who came via search engines, and first-time visitors, could easily think my site was a catalog of a vendor, which it is not.
I have been putting my entire spare time into this site and the resulting e-mail traffic. We're talking about over 5000 hours here. Since I work fulltime in my professional job, and I have all the work and the costs in keeping up this site (internet in Germany is still paid by the minute!), some financial contribution from the members seems appropriate.

Since access was restricted to members

the general quality of the site has been largely improved
more additions have been made (why don't you check the What's New ? pages to get an idea?)
contributions by members have increased
quality of contributions has largely increased
My motivation to continue this site has risen (since I receive fewer stupid or annoying emails, and since I'm able to pay off my internet bills now)