Premium Member Template?

[GeorgeofCS]

I'm looking into giving something back to the users that support my site. I'm wondering if anyone has every done a hack for say a premium member template hack. I want to basically give them a site without banners, different links, etc.

[eva2000]

oooooooh yes! this is what i need as well

a reward for supporting members where they can be put into a usergroup with their own avatars, banner/ad free template set - maybe increased pm limits, increased mass pm to buddies limit and maybe even a supporting member hall of fame/acknowledgement page ?

[Castel]

I essentially asked the same thing not to long ago. Since the advertisements suck nowadays I was planning on starting voluntary membership support but of course I'd need an incentive for them to do so.

I didn't think of special templates without ads (great idea) but I did have custom avatars, custom titles and special Galaga shield in mind (I use the Galaga ranking instead of stars). So I need to have a usergroup that overrides the minimum post counts for avatars, titles etc..

This would be a very useful hack in these days of crappy ad rates so we can give visitors the motivation to support your site. We admins all know how much they love that silly stuff like custom avatars, ranks, titles etc etc...

[chrispadfield]

Castel, overriding the stars by usergroup would be easy. Just use freedies star's hack and do an extra conditional, if usergroup = "x" and create a different image. About the easiest mod to hack in the world!

[Castel]

chrispadfield, the galaga work totally different from the the stars hack and as I mentioned it would only be a small part of the whole package.

Friends of mine have already done something like it for the galaga hack (adding an extra custom shiled before the rest of the shields) but it was done using a hidden profile field only an admin can change.

In the complete package I would look for it to be automaticly added when changing a member to another group instead of changing it manually for each user.

The most important features for this type of hack would be an ad free browsing experience and a custom avatar (for admins that don't already offer them as default of course). I can tell from reactions of my users (only admins and mods have customs on my board) it would be one of the things that might urge them to sign up/donate to the site.