:up:

I was just wondering. This is the only forum I frequent, so I didn't know. What ever keeps the revenue coming and allows the site to stay open, I'm all for.

count me in :up:
will i have to pay for corrie seperately? ;)

looking forward to this. I hope we get our own titles plus avatars :)

PM between members of the premium service would be nice also.

I personally do not care about having image hosting unless it is for a few small images so that someone could upload a desktop pic or a home theater pic :)

yea.. i think image hosting is probably a bit excessive
a large chunk of the regulars already have their own webnames and hosting services.. and the rest will eventually follow suit
i think this would possibly quickly defeat any gains that a premium service might have brought

I think we all agree that it would be a "Lakers" forum.

Just think -- if she doesn't get premium you'll be able to talk about her in a special forum instead of having to do it through e-mail like you do now. ;)

I'm honestly quite confused about this situation.

You are having an annual fee of $30, so we can have access to "exclusive" content. That's all well and good, but what will you guarantee? Maybe a great link to a sale? How can you guarantee it makes it "Only paid members"?

Antoehr thing. An ANNUAL fee? That's insane. At least at $30. I paid $9.95 to join Something Awful for a lifetime, or until I get banned. I paid another $9.95 for a platinum membership and another $5 to buy myself an avatar. That's $25 I feel is well deserved. I have no qualms as they were pretty much all "once and done" things unless someone , or myself decides to pay and change them. For the benefits of THAT forum, I feel my money is well spent.

You already provide a good forum for DVD Bargains and all that fun stuff. Unless you plan on moving all that stuff over to the "pay site".... in which case, I htink you're going to lose a lot of your loyal userbase.

You could disable the search feature for non paid members.

You could disable emailing a member features.

Have little prices to unlock them. That sort of stuff. That way we get what we want and you get the $$ you need.

an annual fee keeps the site going for a long time. a one time fee does not unless you constantly add new members who agree to pay.

I saved enough in one deal to pay my annual fee for awhile so i am ok with this :)

If we get an exclusive deal every now and then I bet it might not get leaked since you paid to get it and giving it away might cause you to lose it.

Like I said, it's a rough draft and $30 per year is not fixed, just proposed. I do think it will be some sort of flat annual fee, it'll be too complex to have one fee for membership, one for an additional benefit, etc.

I don't see the Premium member area being an adult one, the mature forum is fine the way it is and so I have no desire to mess with it.

If I was to move 1 thing from free to premium it would be the Exchange forum. But again it's not my first choice to move something from free to not free.

Other ideas I've had is under the Premium area have a general For Sale or Trade, which wouldallow people to post their ebay auctions and/or their non DVD items for sale.

But PLEASE KEEP those comments and suggestions coming. This is only something we're going to implement after careful consideration and thought.

You should really keep the idea of donations for stuff in mind

$5 for member title change small avatar or other things of the nature.

For the image hosting, you could make it so that it only works for the forum and that will kill off issues with bandwidth being used elsewere and limit it down to a certain size.

On the avatars...please, please limit them to a small size (say 10-20k) and definitely NON-ANIMATED! Browsing through forums with huge, animated avatars is totally annoying and the content of the posts is completely ovreshadowed by the cartoons playing along the left edge of the screen. Just my two cents.

so what are you imagining any "member's only" forum to be like?

I like this idea

Just to add another yes. My forum isn't all that big, but I offered a subscription to the members and have over 160 people sign up thus far. $10/year gets you no ads, custom titles, and more forum features along with a POP e-mail (or forwarding) address. Of course, that doesn't pay for hosting completely, so the ads make up for the rest of it (almost)...

Glad the premium subscription idea is almost here :) About damn_time...

Oh cool. So, I can finally get a name without DVD in the title? That would be worth the $30 all by itself. Also, would there be a limit on how many times you can change it or if you reach a certain number of posts. I always pick crappy names so you might want to make some rules for this. :D

Oh yeah, I also like the idea of being able to use an avatar if you are a paying member. Non-animated and one size.

can BANNED members buy their way back in? return of shaggy maybe? ;)

IMHO $30/year is too high. $10 or $12/year would make more sense. Somehow in my mind when you cross the $12 mark for online membership, you go from "yeah, it's worth it" to "it's expensive, should I spend the money?". My guess is that if you reduce the cost from $30 to $10, you would more than triple your membership, thus giving you higher total revenues. You could also create $50 lifetime memberships and $100 benefactor categories which would bring additional monies.

For membership benefits, I suggest you restrict non-members from posting without providing information. For example they cannot ask "What do you recommend for a 4 MP camera?" or post "My day at the DMV". They can only reply to posts, or start a thread if it is to provide information, for example "Best Buy sale 7/22". It might seem cumbersome at first, but I think if offending posts are deleted, after one week, people will get a hint.

Just my 2 cents.

<small></small>:lol: it certainly sounds a little cumbersome to someone who might be responsible for some of that postulated deleting!

Yes but why do you think we pay you those incredible moderator salaries? :)

This seems like a backwards step in securing the forum's general sanity. There are enough duplicated posts and over-answered questions as it is. Maybe instead, paid members could have a more powerful search that allows better results. Possibly with the ability to search with three-letter-words instead of four?

All good feedback, thanks.

Some clarifications:

1) By far the #1 benefit of premium membership, aside from the knowledge that you are helping support the site is being able to get an ad free version of the forum. I've tested this out and it loads much faster.

2) Paid members will most probably all get the same title. Something like 'Premium Member' NOT a custom title that they can select.

3) This premium membership program won't be rolled out until we move to the next major version of the forum which is still very much in beta. Proably not till the END of september

4) The rules of the forum will not change and will be applied to everyone paid or not. Paid members also aren't excempt from being suspended or banned for breaking the rules.

5) The premium member forums will most likely include: General For Sale or Trade; Coupon Trading/Begging; Shameless Self Promotion. Again it's early but I'm not sure if the premium forums will or won't be readable by all, but they will definately only be postable only by premium members. I had also mentioned that if I were to migrate any of the current forums to premium, it would be the exchange one.

6) Price has not been fixed. But the $30 yr is most likely the 'FULL Price'. Like everything online I'm sure there will be member specials and incentives (like a much lower introductory price the first few weeks). Also I like the idea of a lifetime membership option which I'll mull over.

To be clear as I can, the goal of adding a premium membership is to allow people to get some added benefit in the forum while helping support it. This isn't a huge shift of focus or a complete overhaul of what we do. Just a nice bonus for those who don't mind getting something a little extra for a reasonable price.

Sign me up. :up:

Just turn them off If you don't like them. Turn off sigs too if you don't like that either. I, however, need some sort of easily recognizable marker so I can find my last post, and both avatars and sigs are great for this.


I would like to see PMs enabled for premium members.

Maybe you can give us a few titles to choose from not an infinite supply but premium member seems kind of boring :o

I really like moving the exchange forum to the paid side- one it means at least the member has a real name and address and credit card so if they commit fraud people might be able to get some info to go after someone.

I also like opening up the things we can sell/exchange.

This sounds lame. Why can't paid members get to choose their own title? Premium Member is boring.