Looking for ideas
 

When I first started my site about guitars I had a few forums up for sharing your own personal music, etc. One of the things that I had always found to be difficult was finding backing tracks to play guitar over, so I opened up a forum for it so people could post them. That section of my site took off like a rocket, it brought in tons of members and boosted the overall site by a ton.

I eventually created a forum for unlimited backing tracks where users got more space to upload and when they uploaded to this forum, it didn't count against their personal space. I had a mod for that at UBBT but since moving over to VB I haven't been able to get any help with that, not even from offering to pay for it but that's another story.

Since not being able to make this modification I really can't charge for that forum anymore because they can remove their attachments so I moved all of the posts out into a free forum for all to access. The problem I am now facing is that other people are creating sites just like mine and robbing our backing tracks, a lot of which are created custom by our members, and posting them on their forums.

Posting backing tracks to forums never happened before I started it and I am feeling robbed as are the creators of the backing tracks. So what I did to help prevent easy theft of backing tracks was add a promotion so that a user must have 10 posts and be registered for at least one day before being able to gain access. Of course, this is causing spam which I fully expected.

Basically, I feel like I can't win in this situation lol. I want to try to prevent the easy downloading of lurkers for their sites yet not have my board spammed up.

My best promotion system has been with the V3arcade. I added the arcade initially only for my members as a diversion. I don't run a gaming site and I generally don't have a lot of members that are into gaming. The arcade was simply a "while you're here, kill 2 minutes" thing. When I initially installed it I started to get flooded with members (usually younger than my member base) that simply sat in the arcade all day. Call me a grouchy old man, but I didn't install the arcade so people can sit and use bandwidth all day long and ignore the basic purpose of the site.

So I added a promotion system, 10 posts to play. Similar to your promotion system. What I found then was I still had the issue with registrations only to play games, then on top of that the issue of members spamming forums for access.

I felt much like you seem to be feeling.

Here's what I did.

I edited every template necessary (and forum permissions) and added a conditional based on usergroupid. The conditional hides the arcade completely from guests and from new members until the user has been promoted to the usergroupid with access. I set a forum for the arcade to the same permissions based on usergroupid. Essentially, guest sand new members don't even know the arcade is installed until they've been around a while.

Since instituting this, the arcade has become just as I wanted it to be initially -- a mere diversion. My forums aren't getting spammed and I'm not getting random registrations just to play games.

I'm not certain this will help you but I thought I'd share.

Good suggestions, Jolten. I want to avoid having to hide it from the general public as it defeats the purpose for that forum but I can totally see why you have to do it that way. I am still up in the air about what I want to do about it but I may utilize some of what you mentioned.