Need advice on managing paid members

[websissy]

I have a site that has been running vb3 and it's many beta versions for 18 months now and am thinking hard about my next major site upgrade. My current site has both a free area and a paid subscribers area and our forums have accumulated roughly 3,200 free-side registered vBulletin users in the past 18 months.

In the "free area" there are two classes of visitors ... "Limited access rights" are available to unregistered & unknown visitors. This lets causal visitors see some of our free-area stuff but denys them access to chat and several of our other features. We also offer "Unlimited access rights" to our free area to registered vBulletin members. Our subscribers-area on the other hand is only accessible to paid members and more than triples the admittedly large amount of content available to our free-area visitors.

Unfortunately, like many other webmasters my experience has shown that what happens in this paradigm is visitors are thrilled to take all the freebies they can get (and will even do their best to steal anything they can't get for free). Such users repeatedly come back to our free area without spending any money. But the majority of these freeloaders refuse to sign up for a monthly membership (which costs as little as $9.95) As a result the site suffers from lack of revenues adequate to cover its expenses.

So, one thing I'd like to change now is to modify the access rights on the free side so that "unlimited access" to our free area is only available for a few days on a trial basis -- something like 3 - 5 days. After that, I'd like for the unpaid registered user's account to revert to what amounts to the same status as an unregistered user and deny them access to our free area features unless they cough up a small annual user fee of something like $18. If they're unwilling to pay, I'd like to provide "friendly reminders" everytime they try to access any feature that is behind my "annual registered users fee" wall that in effect says:

Registered users get access to our public area for only $18 a year (paid annually) but freeloaders and deadbeats only get messages like this!

I'm thinking of this as similar to the way a trial period works with shareware. You get a short period of unlimited free access to see the product that is offered. After that you must either pay or be content with what amounts to "window shopping" from the outside.

As part of my planning for this next step with my site, I'm also planning to finally implement vbPortal and several other new features which I believe may help serve this end. And I have been wondering whether there are any hacks or enhancements to vBulletin that are already available that would help move me in this direction. Or alternatively, is there some way to achieve what I've described within vbulletin that I haven't managed to figure out yet?

In short, is anyone aware of any existing hacks, enhancements or features that would help me achieve my objectives? If not, can anyone here suggest a way to accomplish this?

Thanks!

[amykhar]

I THINK you can do it with promotions.

Start the registered users out in the registered group, that has full access. After 5 days, promote (demote) them to a group that doesn't. Use template conditionals to show your "pay up" message.

The only problem I see is that people can just register new accounts and get the free access for 3 to 5 days all over again.

Amy

[websissy]

I THINK you can do it with promotions.

Start the registered users out in the registered group, that has full access. After 5 days, promote (demote) them to a group that doesn't. Use template conditionals to show your "pay up" message.

The only problem I see is that people can just register new accounts and get the free access for 3 to 5 days all over again.

Amy

You're probably right Amy... I had pretty much come to the same conclusion with the same obvious gotchas. Of course, I could do some things to make re-registration much harder... like block multiple registrations from those who arrive from an IP address that already belongs to an existing user in addition to the email address blocking vBulletin already does. I could also do such simple things as remove the logout button which would make it harder for the average user to figure out how to re-register.

My goal is not to design a solution that's impossible for a hardened hacker to break. It's only to make it hard enough to encourage the basically honest souls who might otherwise take the cheap-way-out to spend all of $1.50 a month to retain access privileges to a site they clearly enjoy.

I have actually thought about these things. A thief will always be a thief and there are folks who actually get their kicks out of successfully defeating any security measure I could ever put in place. The only way I know of to make a such a crook behave honestly is to make the penalties for NOT doing so far too high to even consider. In other words, until we get to the point where society decides theft of Internet services is a capital offense that also involves public humiliation of your family, burning of their home and possessions, neutering of all family members, perpetual removal of all Internet access privileges for their descendents, and no cracker jack prizes for the rest of eternity, we're never going to get rid of jokers who'll spend endless energy trying to figure out how to defeat our security systems. Even then, there'd be a few mental cases who'd do it just to GET EVEN with their family for forgetting their birthday!

The bottom line is, I'm not concerned about hardened hackers. I'm trying to handle the basically honest guy who given a choice between "go this way to pay" and "take what you can get for free" will invariably choose the cheap way out and offer a third choice which is something like "Buy all you can get as cheap as possible". I'm asking the guy who'll pay for the $2.00 afternoon matinee to spend $1.50 for a full month of access to my site. That seems like a pretty good deal to me. And my guess is it'll seem like a good deal to many of my visitors too.

Thanks for the advice, Amy. Unless someone comes up with a better idea, I guess I'll take a closer look at the usergroups, subscriptions and promotion features.