Seems that the paid community model is not widley accepted thses days...but I have a good feeling it will. Expect some members to leave your communities in search for other FREE ones.

Once you take the step towards Paid subscriptions, there is no going back. Good Luck to all and wluke take your time and do a good job:D

Any more news on this hack! I'm eagerly awaiting it!

Desperation is setting in... is this being worked on at all, or has it been dropped?

I hear you AaronB, I check upon this thread daily awaiting the release but wluke seems to be ignoring it lately. It looks like he has it up and running on SitePoint, did you decide not to make it public after all?

Just let us know what's going on with this hack, if you have dropped the project maybe somebody else can take a swing at it.

Hey guys....why not just do it manually like I did:D Until we here from wluke..

I literally couldn't afford to wait much longer on this, so I put the little PHP knowledge I have to work on a "watered down" version of what has been discussed in this thread.

Everything worked fine in testing and of this morning I am using it on my live board, which earlier today had 100+ users on. So I think it's pretty solid.

I only worked on the features I was looking for to begin with in this hack. There is no such thing as the cron job wluke mentioned since that is beyond my knowledge at this point (if only I had the time to learn more about PHP and MySql) so if you plan on awarding perks on a yearly basis it will require some manual book keeping or your end.

This what I have working so far based on a newly created usergroup.

• Allowed to upload custom avatar
• Allowed to pick custom title
• An additional title such as "Site Supporter" title under the custom title
• A special supporter's graphic. In my case this is an additional unique Galaga Ranking shield, but it could be a row of stars (if you don't use the stars hack by default) or whatever else image you would like to use.
• Selectable style, for example an ad banner free style. I had this working in my test. The style is not selectable upon registration but supporters can select it from their CP after they have been moved to the new usergroup. However I ended up not using it because any user could just add the style ID in the browser address bar. Regardless of how little banners generate these days I cannot afford to lose that revenue because forums users will figure out this easy work around.

All of the above require very little and simple code changes. Now that you have this new usergroup you can also add a private forum for your supporters (I plan on pre-releasing new media and maybe even a couple of supporter exclusive downloads by means of this forum) ,give this group the use of forum search if it is not already in use now (taking it away from your current users might not be the best course of action :)) and increase the Mass Buddy PM limit for this new usergroup.

Like I said, a simple watered down version of what wluke had in the works or might still be development. If anybody is interested in it I'd be happy to document it properly and post it here.

hook us up!

Castel, that's exactly what I have done, but with no PHP...I just created a new group like you said. Bravo for going manual..

hehe i just started some part time work on this. What i have done is:

- add an extra field to user table for special member
- if special member then they display a specific icon beneath their username (ie subscriber icon)
- if special member then the header and footer are different. I use my styles for different forums so i could not have a banner free style, instead my header and footer (which are global) always have the banner in and i created one without the banner.

I didn't want to do this by usergroup because again i use that seperation for other things so a subscriber user group was not practical.

Anyway, that is it really. Just thought i would explain what i have done in case anyone in same cicrumstances. Over riding pm limits, custom avatars, etc is simple from here on.

It is going to be harder using my method to have a forum just for these members. Not sure the best way to do this yet really.

p.s. a cron job is not really anything to do with mysql and php it is simply a server command to make a certain program/script run at a set period.

Please please hook us up. I've been waiting for something like this for sometime.

Thanks,

Michael:)