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FAQ'S

Stories for Life is a free service and always will be, but if you plan to record lots of video stories, and want to benefit from additional features including 'Personal Messages' that can shared with specific family & friends, then SFL Premium gives you additional storage and also enables you to share longer video stories (4 minutes per story Vs 3 minutes for free members). Premium Members also get priority support responses from our team.
Facebook is an excellent platform for connecting you with friends and family, and sharing photos, videos and ... pretty much anything! And YouTube is the biggest video sharing platform on the net, but neither of them are designed to help you compile an engaging autobiography of your life. Stories for Life is specifically designed to help you curate and share the story of your life with rich, engaging stories about your life and the experiences that have shaped it along the way - all told by the best qualified person to record your stories, you. And whilst you might not want your great grandkids browsing Facebook to understand what you were like when you were their age, your social channels should form part of your digital legacy, so we've made it easy to add your social channels to your SFL profile page. Once you've added them, visitors to your page can easily access your profile on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or any of the social channels you use.
If you have a decent Internet connection, then it should between 3 and 5 minutes to save and upload each of your video stories. However, there's a few reasons why it might take up to an hour per video story. If you're using your computer or smart phone at a particularly busy time of day then others will be sharing your connection, so it will run slower than usual. Also, if you've recorded a longer video story then it will be a bigger video file, and will take longer to process and upload to our secure servers. If it's running slow use the time to think about your next story, or return to your SFL page at a less busy time of day when the Internet is running faster.
Only Premium members have access to create Personal Messages, whereas all members can create Stories. The main difference is that Personal Messages have additional privacy settings and allow you to save them for specific people, whereas your Stories will be available for everyone to view (once your SFL page is live, you can keep you entire SFL page hidden if you want to).
This can happen if you upload a video file instead of recording your story directly through our site. When you record directly to SFL, you have up to 3 minutes recording time per story (Premium and Concierge members can record for up to 5 minutes per story). When you upload a pre-recorded video file, it should also be 3 minutes or less (5 minutes for Premium & Concierge members), otherwise it will automatically trimmed by our site during the upload process. So if you upload a 10 minute pre-recorded video story, only the first 3 minutes will appear in your list of SFL stories. We suggest you use a simple video editing tool to chop your videos into parts if they're longer than 3 minutes, or consider upgrading to our Premium service for additional storage space.
We use an industry leading SSL secure certificate from Digicert to protect your experience when using our site, and your stories are stored on Amazon's cloud, the same environment trusted by millions of companies across the world. However, despite our combined efforts to protect your data, any information you share via the Internet may end up in the public domain, so please keep that in mind when recording your stories.
Try the password recovery option on the login page, and if that's still not working, get in touch with us via email: support@storiesforlife.me and we'll do our best to help out.
Locked profiles have been locked by the profile owner, so there are only two circumstances that will enable their profile to go live. 1) If the profile owner changes their profile status to 'live', or 2) If the profile owner has passed away, in which case we will require proof in the form of a death certificate before we make their page live. We will also attempt to contact the page owner before changing their profile status to 'live'.
Get in touch with us using our contact form, or send an email directly to accounts@storiesforlife.me and we'll look forward to helping you out.
Get in touch with us using our contact form, or send an email directly to support@storiesforlife.me and we'll look forward to helping you out.
If you've paid for a Premium or Concierge membership, then it's a one-off payment so there's no need to downgrade as you've already paid for the extra features. If you're looking for a refund for any reason, then get in touch via our Contact Form, or email us directly: accounts@storiesforlife.me
You can delete your account within 'Your Account' > 'Manage Membership'. Scroll to the end of the page and click on the big red 'Delete Account' button. This can't be undone, so proceed carefully!
You can create Remembrance pages on behalf of deceased family and friends. Login to your SFL profile, click on 'Remembrance Pages' within the main menu, and then follow the instructions to create new Remembrance pages. They'll look very similar to a SFL profile page, but with fewer options. Free members can create and manage up to 10 Remembrance pages, but if you exceed your data allowance you won't be able to create more Remembrance pages so go easy on the video content, or upgrade to a Premium Membership for 10GB data.
You can, but you'll need to use their email address, as each SFL profile is associated with a single email address. We plan to add a group account allowing members to manage multiple pages on behalf of others, but for now you simply need to create a new profile for each person using different email addresses. However, you can set up almost unlimited 'Remembrance pages' for deceased friends and family. Simply login to your account and select 'Remembrance pages' from the main menu, then follow the prompts to create Remembrance pages.
As often as you like! But at a minimum, we suggest every year as both you and your relatives will be fascinated watching how your thoughts change over time. Imagine being able to see your Grandparents talk about their dreams for the future as 21 year olds, and then again at 40 ... 60 ... 90.
The SFL Life Checker is a simple tool that allows you to keep your SFL profile hidden until you're no longer around. This feature is useful for members that want to record their stories, but keep them private until they've passed away. By default your SFL page will be publically available, but you can set your page to hidden and our Life Checker will contact you periodically via email to see if we should post your page live. However, even once your page is live, you can choose to keep your Private Messages hidden and only available to specific people.
You shouldn't really need more than one SFL profile, unless you want to set up profiles on behalf of friends and family members in which case you should create their profile using their email address, as each SFL profile is associated with a single email address. We plan to add a group account allowing members to manage multiple pages on behalf of others, but for now you simply need to create a new profile for each person using different email addresses. However, you can set up almost unlimited 'Remembrance pages' for deceased friends and family. Simply login to your account and select 'Remembrance pages' from the main menu, then follow the prompts to create Remembrance pages.
We suggest you (or they) set up a free SFL profile first of all, and then go to 'Your Account Details > Manage Membership' where you have the option to upgrade to a paid SFL Concierge service. Or you can get in touch using our contact form, and submit a request to discuss purchasing SFL Concierge for yourself or a family member.
It depends how you've set up your privacy settings. You can either set your profile to 'Go live now' which means anyone who visits storiesforlife.me can search for and view your profile (except for any 'Personal messages' that you have marked as private). Or you can set your page to 'Stay hidden until you're no longer around' which keeps your SFL page private until a later date. In this case it will appear as 'Locked' and only you will be able to access your profile and make updates once logged in.
It could be for a couple of different reasons. You might have set it to 'Go live when I'm no longer around' which means it will appear as a 'locked' profile to anyone who's searching for it, including you when you're not logged in. Or it could be because you haven't added a profile photo yet; only SFL profiles with a profile photo will be visible on the website so go ahead and login to upload a happy profile photo if you haven't already.
Every SFL profile has a 'Report' button in the bottom right of the profile photo. Click that button and tell us why you believe the profile is fake or in breach of our terms, and we'll sort it out.
Actually, Premium SFL members can record for up to 5 minutes per story, but we've found that 3 minutes per topic or story is a good amount of time. In fact, in can seem quite long when it's just you speaking, so give it a go and if you need more time for your stories you can simply save 'Part 1, 2, 3 etc' across several recordings, or consider upgrading to our paid membership with up to 5 minutes per story, the option to create Private Messages and more storage space to save even more stories.
Your package allows for 1hr (60 minutes) of interview time not including set up time to make sure your video and audio is set up properly. This typically allows for five to ten of your stories to be recorded, and is generally long enough for a single session. We do offer follow up interview packages so that more of your stories can be recorded and shared on your SFL page - in fact we recommend doing this at least once each year so that you create an amazing timeline of your life told through your own stories.
Of course! We encourage this and designed Stories for Life so that our members can film and record their own stories at any time. If you've purchased a Stories for Life package at any stage then we count you as a member, so get in touch with us and we'll show you how to film and record your own stories.
We'll be in touch with you in advance of your interview and share our interview questions to see which ones you'd like to answer and share stories about. And of course, you don't need to choose from our questions - this is all about you, so you can tell any stories that you choose to tell! Our interviewers are also skilled at digging into your stories to help you elaborate when there's possibly some more of the story to explore.
The end product if your own Stories for Life profile page where all of your video stories can be viewed by your friends, family and future generations. You also become a member of Stories for Life which means you can add new video stories (or simply write them) at any stage yourself, including photos and other information that helps to tell the story of your life. You choose who you want to share your profile page with, and you can also create private video messages to be viewed by only the people of your choice. Your video stories are also your own - you can download them and save them anywhere you choose to, but we'll make sure they're always available at storiesforlife.me (unless you ask us to remove your profile for any reason).
We do indeed. We want our customers to be 100% happy with the service and experience we provide. If for any reason you're not, then be sure to tell us about it so that we can make it right, and if we can't, then we'll happily refund you in full so long as it's within 3 months of your SFL profile page being completed by our team.
Good question! Hopefully soon, but it will only be once we can be 100% certain that the safety and health of our customers and our team are not at risk. In the meantime, we've been enjoying great results with our online interview package(s) so we recommend starting with one of those and adding an in-person interview experience at a later stage, as the best time to start sharing your stories is today!
This can be a problem sometimes. If you're concerned about the quality of your Internet connection, the best approach is to contact us before purchasing your SFL package so that we can do a quick test to make sure it will be OK for our online interview.
We generally use Zoom for online interviews, but we can also work with other conferencing tools including Google Hangouts and Skype. If you'd prefer to use a platform other than Zoom, just let us know in advance so we can test to make sure it meets our requirements for video resolution and audio quality.

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William, 2018.04.11

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