The Arcive of Official vBulletin Modifications Site.It is not a VB3 engine, just a parsed copy! |
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#111
01-11-2002, 08:43 PM
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by chrispadfield
I think a lot of us are feeling the strain of the cost of running out own servers with pathetic advertising revenue. I am quite keen on a subscriber/donation type system where users pay approximatly $5 per month. I am going to "market" this as somewhere between a donation and a subscription and it is the later i need to think about. My plan would be to have all the subscribers in a seperate user group. Now, the possible things i have thought about adding are:, importantly i am trying not to reduce any current features: POSSIBLE - very easy hack to add or a feature already NOT POSSIBLE - more significant hack i) a "badge" by their username saying that are a donator. POSSIBLE. ii) a different template set with no banners. I am not 100% sure how to do this. One way i am considering is just doing an if/elseif routine inside the phpinclude template which will not load the banners if usergroup = x. The problem with this is the ugly empty spaces left in the tables if i do. Other option is a seperate template set but i force templates on some forums. This is again the nature of the problem with having the header and footer part of a whole style! It should be independant!!!!!!! iii) Variable amount of pms based on usergroup. Currently NOT POSSIBLE iv) Avatar based on usergroup. Personally i do not want to limit avatars to subscribers but it is an option. I am pretty sure avatars are not based on usergroup so again NOT POSSIBLE v) variable limits on amount of pms sent to buddy POSSIBLE (not much of a feature!). vi) An extra forum just for subscribers POSSIBLE vii) Email account @domain.com, integrated into private message system and ability to collect through pop3 account! NOT POSSIBLE and requires a very significant hack, especially for pop3 account which would be server and email program (sendmail/qmail) dependant. viii) Searching on/off. On my forum this would not be much of a feature but on some it would be a very useful for feature to allow searching for a "paid" usergroup and not for another. Currently that is all i can think of. Anyone with any other suggestions? From that list the only one that is of any real value is the advertising one. What does everyone else think? 
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#112
01-26-2002, 09:02 AM
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Hi TigerLily,
Could you possibly post copies of the email and/or page text which you used to inform your visitors? I think that people's reaction would vary greatly depending on the tone used to request paid-for memberships, and it would be useful to see how you phrased things.
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#113
01-26-2002, 06:55 PM
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Hi all- wow, I haven't been over here in a couple of weeks or I would have answered your questions sooner! Sorry about that- the membership stuff is going great on my site, and keeping me incredibly busy!
Quote:
Here's how I have it set up: -Group permissions- Vbulletin's existing permissions make managing the groups easy enough, but it's still a lot of work initially to filter out who's staying and who's leaving. I chalk that up to growing pains. Once you've got everyone sorted out, it's much easier to maintain from then on- it's that initially sorting out that's the bugger! -Paid Members go into a "Members" group that I move people over to when they have paid (and that's when I enter in their info from Excel too.) I gave members until a certain date to get payments in (gave them plenty of time- 6 weeks until the changes, and another 6 weeks to view but not post after changes). -Nonpaying Members- they're all registered category, which will have viewing privileges for another 6 weeks, then they will be moved to an "inactive" category. If they want to pay, I can moved them to the Members group. If they don't, their account is deleted after it's been inactive to 12 months. -Free Trials- attracting new people is just as important as keeping old members, so I'm giving people a month of free viewing (not posting) so that they can see what our community is like. After their month is over, they are invited to join. If they decide to leave, their accounts are moved to inactive (I want their info on file so they can't sign up again and again.) -Member Payment information- I created hidden custom profilefields in the vbulletin database. They are easy to manage and I'm working on ways to pull information from them so that users can view their own payment info and verify everything is correct. (I'd also like to send members a receipt through the mass email function by using variables, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to call them the correct way for email functions.) -Coordinating Payment Info- I found that Excel spreadsheets were a good solution for me. Excel seemed to be the easiest, and cleanest way to view everything I needed to see at a glance, and it's compatible with so many other programs. I have several of spreadsheets in a workbook full of my masterlists (which is backed up regularly!) I have lists in that workbook for payments coming in through paypal and through my PO Box (I had to do checks for my community- my content and users aren't into credit cards, LOL). -Accounting: I use MS Money because it works well with my online banking and paypal as well as other online services. Quickbooks is a major pain and for me it was a waste of time. It's not compatible with much and you have to pay through the nose if you want any additional "features". -To keep everything up to date, I have to regularly check a few programs to make sure all of the data is correct. I sometimes wind up checking quite a few things- PayPal, my email inbox, my PM inbox, MS Money. But everything goes into Excel- that's where I coordinate all of the info, and THEN put it into vbulletin. - I DID try programs to handle the business end of things, such as Quickbooks, but it was a nightmare! That thing doesn't import or export to anything and really isn't set up for online business needs, especially online communities that sell memberships! I ditched that idea very quickly! For the accounting stuff, I use MS Money Home and Business- that does everything I need it do, and interfaces with tax stuff, etc. Quote:
I also offered discounts for members who wanted to send their payments in together or buy 1 for themselves and give one to someone else. The result surprised me- my members were buying 1 for themself and then giving the other to another member who needed it or their spouse (very surprising, since my site is mainly women, but it's fun to have the husbands online with us too- we now have quite a few!) Quote:
I hope this is helpful! Let me see what other questions there were. This is a learning experience for me too! TigerLily 
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#114
01-26-2002, 07:37 PM
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Quote:
For me, that was the simplest way to do it, and most of the people paying didn't want the non-payers to be able to see the boards forever. That may sound a bit uncharitable, but the same people also bought gift memberships for quite a few of our members who couldn't afford to stay. So as far as I know, we helped all the ones who needed it- which was a lot of work, but really enhanced the spirit of our community! Quote:
I'd love to make everything automated, because this way of doing it is very labor intensive. I know over time I'll find a better way, and now that we're almost through the changeover, I've learned a lot about what I need and don't need! Short of cloning myself, I'm definitely going to have to automate more! Here's what I'd like to do: -Activation upon online payment- get the online payments to go directly to the database and then the system can activate the user's account. I know PayPal can send payment info to your server, but I haven't found a good way of getting that info in the database. One of the problems is the subscription pages don't have a username field, so unless a user has a paypal account and sends money directly from it, there is no way to match up the names. You could match by email address, but some members use different ones for PayPal and for their vbulletin account. -Automatic, emailed receipts- with variables that pull the info from the custom fields. I'm working on this, cant' get them to show up right. -Automated renewal reminders sent- or perhaps a function that could search the renewal dates, find the people who need to renew, and email them with a reminder- all with a click of a button/link in the admin panel. Quote:
One of the things I really tried hard to do over the past several weeks is to be very open with the members, give them updates on how signups were going, and answer all of their questions. That went a long way in helping reduce problems. I had a few members get uppity, but I took the time to explain publicly why we were doing things this way or that way, and that seemed to be all they really needed. They were just a bit confused. Many of them had no clue how expensive running a website can be, others wanted to make sure that we weren't going to take their money and shut down. I think you have to lead your members by the hand through the changeover to reassure them- even if they are tech-savvy. They need to know that things are going to be fine after the changed, if not better! The only flack I've received was from inactive users who registered a while abck and never posted. I sent out an email to all registered members about the change in policy, with a link the announcement and the mention of paid memberships. The inactive users freaked out a bit. I got about 200 "delete me now" requests, and about 10 nastygrams. But that's out of 8,000 registered members, so that's really not bad. Quote:
(See notes below it too) -$25 for a yearly membership -$15 for a 6 month membership -$10 for a quarterly membership -group discount for those who sign up together- 2 yearly memberships/$40 I would have loved to have charged double that, but my members would never pay that. Some balked at the idea of paying $25 a year- but that's only $2/month. That really is cheap! I broke down the costs per day too- it's about 7 cents a day. I used any illustration I could to put the cost into the perspective of other things they pay for and to demonstrate how cheap it was: the cost of two delivery pizzas, or taking your family to one movie at the theater, the code of 2 CDs, etc. That helped put the membership fees into perspective for many of my members. How I came up with the prices: I researched the rates before I made the announcement because I felt that I really needed to get the dollar amount just right. It couldn't be too high or too low, or the members wouldn't pay and the community would fall apart without their support. I needed to figure out how many people I thought were going to sign up. I purposely figured it very low, since memberships are still not all that common, and some people wouldn't want to pay. I also needed to figure out what I had to charge in order to cover operating costs. I figured that I needed about $10,000 for basic operating costs- server, any extra bandwidth, my internet connection. If I could get more than that amount, I could make improvements and pay myself for my work (what a concept!) So I needed a price that was reasonable to the members and was something I could operate the site on. $25 seemed to be the magic number. The overwhelming majority of the members have signed up for the yearly membership and have been very supportive. And this week, only 5 weeks after announcing changes, I hit my goal of $10,000! So I've got the operating expenses for the entire year, and we're not out of January! Anything else I make can go to making improvements or paying myself. Hope this answers some questions- this is a BIG learning experience, but I'm so glad I did it. It's a more practical business model, and a much better fit for my site than ad revenue ever was, and the focus is so much simpler: the members. No advertisers to please, no networks telling you what to do, just deal with the members. Keep them happy, have fun with them, and keep the site going. I like that much better! TigerLily
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#115
01-26-2002, 07:49 PM
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Quote:
I love to write (as you can see by the length of my posts! LOL), so writing an announcement didn't seem hard at first. I kept trying to write a formal "official" sounding announcement, and wound up scrapping it entirely- it was missing something important. I had been talking with my moderating team about how to do the memberships, how much to charge, what to tell them, and found the answer quite by accident. It was suggested that the price I wanted to charge was way too high, that something like $10 a year would be better. That price seemed like an insult to me. I got upset and spilled my guts to the moderators. I told them how much of a struggle last year was, and how I NEVER wanted to do that again- and I certainly wasn't going to do it for a measley $10! LOL! Even though I work with them closely and I tell them a lot, they really had no clue HOW bad it was, and how hard I hard been working to keep things going. That was an eye opener, because I'd posted about it before, but they hadn't put the entire picture together. Once they understood, they were incredibly supportive and said I should charge double the amount I was asking for. They told me that I needed to tell the members about the changes in the same way I'd just told them. It was the best advice I could have gotten! So I would up writing my announcement from the heart. I just let it all hang out, did a lot of editing, and polished it up a bit. The response to that announcement was incredible. It was probably the best Christmas I ever had because the support of the community was just amazing. You can see the announcement and the reactions from my members here: http://frugal-moms.com/boards/showth...threadid=70630 This is a VERY long announcement, but it needed to be- there was a lot to say! (Please note that I'm turning guest access off in about a week, but by then I'll have some static pages set up.) It's been quite an experience and I still have a lot to learn, but I've gotten so much from the vbulletin community and wanted to be able to give something back. I hope this is helpful to some of you! Good luck! Kim PS I hope my answers aren't too repetitive and make sense! I've worked some insane hours this month (and I have three kids!) I'm pretty tired and fried!
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#117
03-18-2002, 11:41 AM
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Hi this is what I would like to do to my board and I am willing to pay!
1 - Payment page, free trial or paid usage. - perl/php script will need to be written to deposit user info into database - will need to add field to the database for user type, in order to distinguish between paid users, trial users and admin and Perl interface to pull info from database to site - WorldPay or Cheque will need to be added to the payment page if not already defined - a perl script to email the users after their credit card has been verified for paid user with user name and password info - a Perl script to run a SQL query to run for trial users that searches the database for previous trial use. if they have not used the system before, email the user name and password to user, if they have roll page to next sign up page stating their free trial is up, please pay for service. - add an admin page to update prices for users/groups/surcharges so it will not have t! o be hand coded everytime there is an update 2 - VBulletin admin to check database for valid user name. 3 - Write script to email user name and password if they have forgotten this info. - there is already a portion of this created by the vbulletin board, would add to the verification process that if the account is expired that it sends an email stating the account is expired, if you would like to make a purchase click here 4- Database fields to be created - add expiration dates - add field for paid users - add field for paid groups - add field for trial users - add field for admin users with unlimited access - add user type and other fields as necessary - add index fields for each user type to reduce search time - add field for pricing for each user type (make adminable) - add field for discounts (make adminable) - add field for worldp! ay surcharge - add field for repeat monthly charges to be automatically debited by world pay 5. Automatic email to send to customers 30 days prior to their expiration date so they may make another purchase. - This will need a nightly chron job run to test for expiration dates, drop email addresses into a flat file and run a Perl script to email all addresses in the flat file asking them to renew their purchase. 6. Automatic emails to trial customers 4 or 5 days prior to expiration date so they may make a purchase. - This will be part of the nightly chron job that is running tests for expiration dates, however it will have an piece of code added to run on trial customers only. - Perl script to email addresses in a flat file asking them to make a purchase. 8. Pop up for users who's user name has already expired. - Perl script to run a SQL querey to check for expired passwords - when an ! expired user tries to login it should roll to a page stating their account is expired, if you would like to make a purchase this will be written as a validation in Perl. 9. Single login for individual users, which means that a person can only log into one session at a time, even on their own computer. - This is a simple verification process. login code modifed to query database to see if user/password combination is already logged in. This implies modification of code to 'logout' users when a certain amount of time has expired if they don't explicitly logoff the system. 10. Multiple user access for group access. - This will need to be added to the database and have a perl script check the database for single or multiple user status. Thanks,
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#118
05-07-2002, 01:53 PM
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Can anyone confirm these hacks will work with 2.2.5? we're trying to re-apply them but with no success...
And also would it be possible to have one style setting for normal registered users (IE a default) and just allow the site supporters to choose which style they want if we added 3 or 4?
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