Paid Membership - what's the best way...
 

I posted this on VB.com and was directed here, so I'll try here :D

I've done several searches on this topic here and at vb.org, and I see alot of good discussion on the righteousness of paid membership, lol... and ad-free status membership, etc, but here's what we're looking to do, and I guess what I'm looking for is a starting point from a technical aspect of how implementable (is that a word? it is now...;) ) this would be, does it require a hack, and is there any other sites doing the same type thing, we'd be interested in seeing your setup.

Our site is very active with about 7,000 members, and run a simple banner rotation which will remain regardless of membership.

The forums will remain free for browsing, but registered members will be subject to a flat fee of $12 a year to cover obvious operating costs (the entire site is turning close to 5GB of transfer a day)

How would we

1) re-direct the 'register' page to the sign-up payment page, then upon completion of payment back to the registration pages.

2) for all existing registered members would we have to re-set all their status to unregistered, or worse.. have everyone re-register? Is there an easy way around this?

Any input is welcome and appreciated :)
Thanks in advance.

#1. Edit the redirect-register page to look like a payment/register page. Ofcourse you need to know extra coding that involves payment stuff, like a shopping cart script, although your members aren't really buying anything.

#2. If all existing registered members are willing to pay the fee, I don't see any reason why you would have to reset them. You just have to add them to this "list" of members who will be fee'd yearly. Maybe you could create an extra column in the user table, and call it "paid membership", and have members with a paid membership will have this field set to true. Then again every member on your forum will be a payed member, so I guess this isn't needed.

Once again you need extra coding knowledge on ebusiness type stuff which isn't really given at all on VB.org, probably a site like Sitepoint.com you could learn some of it.

That's my input, I maybe wrong or right in someways, but there you have it :)

GayPal can do the e-com work for you :\

...yeah.. PAYpal would probably work best.. But she still needs to have all the yearly checking stuff to make sure the user is paid membership. Firefly would probably know, since this forum runs on a similar system. Where only paid-registered members can post in particular areas, etc....

Well PayPal has a area where you can manipluate the code of it so that once a transaction goes through out can make certain things happen like putting a user into a group that can view a certain forum.

Thanks guys! /taking notes :D

But I would really suggest using another service that offeres better features and doesnt have the right to do into your bank account and tak money out for no reason like Paypal likes to do.

Yeah, Im not sure Paypal would be ideal...and I think our business administrator is looking into that end. The site is an incorporated company so there may have different options... it's just putting it all together we'll have fun with, lol.

Thanks again, much appreciated :)

no problem. if you ever have any biz questions feel free to contact me..

I would like to suggest propay as a payment processor. http://www.propay.com. This is what I use.