[copper]

Originally Posted by KuraFire

Copper, that only works on boards that have a topic that draws a targetted audience that is 18+ years old. On the whole, anyway.
May I ask you, how many members do you have on the site?

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.