Can you give me your money for nothing?:):p

Satan

There are some forums out there where a subscription service could bring in loads of money.

Any administer who owns a forum that has more than 20,000 members, with a good percentage of those being active users, could benefit from a subscription service.

Such as sitepointforums.com. It's such a phenomenally resourceful site that, even if they started charging $5/month to use the site, I'd probably still give in. Although their reputation overall would go down some. (any site with a subscription service will initially go down in reputation, because they automatically become bias to those with money)

With any large forum comes people who are addicted posting, as a hobby to their social life. The problem of subscription services only comes in with competition, because if another forum of equal size and interest exists, people might migrate in swarms.

If you ever need to set up a subscription service, slip a message my way, because I have experience with Paypal IPN, etc. :p

with subscription, the secret is to set it up so that the members who don't pay want to but still like they aint missing out on anything, i.e. stay away from special forums and what not.

for nothing https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2003/10/3.gif nope, but for making my request https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2003/10/4.gif

Absolutely right. It certainly wouldn't work on a generic 'town square / anything goes' message board. You have to have a targeted topic/audience.
I currently have just over 7200 members on my board.

I'll partially agree with 'Velocd'. He wrote : " .. any site with a subscription service will initially go down in reputation, because they automatically become bias to those with money ."

I didn't have a reputation drop as such when I started charging for access. If anything, people seemed rather happy to pay. However, I did get (and still do get on a rare occasion) a few people emailing me to vent their anger over not being allowed free access any longer. (As if I 'owed' them free access since they had it before.) I'll reply to those emails in as nice a way as possibly & just tell them 'hey .. the message board software wasn't free. Maintaining it isn't free. Bandwidth isn't free. domain names aren't free. etc.. I don't feel bad asking for a little back after giving it away for free for so long.
Reputation wise though .. if you have a good board the reputation will likely stay good even after charging for access. I've never been to sitepointforums.com (mentioned in a previous post here) , but if they have over 20K members, they're doing something right. No way at least half or more wouldn't pay to keep their access. Sounds like there's a LOT of $$ waiting to be made there.

Sitepointforums will never charge, only because they make money through many other methods (such as advertising, and their books/scripts).

It's immensely resourceful, and many professionals post there.. so yeah, a measely $5/month for most registrants would be nothing.

Indeed, a site with no reputation (a starting site) could go well with starting on a subscription service.

I may even decide to convert when I get my new style up, and switch to vB3 RC.

I'm planning on implementing some form of making use of vB3's subscriptions system, to do something similar to what Erwin is doing - giving additional services to the people that pay.

Anyone have any tips on how I could best do this? I'm open to all ideas :)

I currently have a bit of a too young crowd, for the most of it, but I intend to draw on a more professionalistic crowd with the release of my new edition of the site (which will be running vB3, unlike I am now on my live site). I'm aiming for Graphics Artists, Writers and Programmers/Webdevelopers. I reckon a fair few of them have cash, no? ;)

This is EXACTLY what I was looking for. Thanks for sharing your work!