[Castel]

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.