Need advice on managing paid members

[websissy]

Originally Posted by amykhar

I THINK you can do it with promotions.

Start the registered users out in the registered group, that has full access. After 5 days, promote (demote) them to a group that doesn't. Use template conditionals to show your "pay up" message.

The only problem I see is that people can just register new accounts and get the free access for 3 to 5 days all over again.

Amy

You're probably right Amy... I had pretty much come to the same conclusion with the same obvious gotchas. Of course, I could do some things to make re-registration much harder... like block multiple registrations from those who arrive from an IP address that already belongs to an existing user in addition to the email address blocking vBulletin already does. I could also do such simple things as remove the logout button which would make it harder for the average user to figure out how to re-register.

My goal is not to design a solution that's impossible for a hardened hacker to break. It's only to make it hard enough to encourage the basically honest souls who might otherwise take the cheap-way-out to spend all of $1.50 a month to retain access privileges to a site they clearly enjoy.

I have actually thought about these things. A thief will always be a thief and there are folks who actually get their kicks out of successfully defeating any security measure I could ever put in place. The only way I know of to make a such a crook behave honestly is to make the penalties for NOT doing so far too high to even consider. In other words, until we get to the point where society decides theft of Internet services is a capital offense that also involves public humiliation of your family, burning of their home and possessions, neutering of all family members, perpetual removal of all Internet access privileges for their descendents, and no cracker jack prizes for the rest of eternity, we're never going to get rid of jokers who'll spend endless energy trying to figure out how to defeat our security systems. Even then, there'd be a few mental cases who'd do it just to GET EVEN with their family for forgetting their birthday!

The bottom line is, I'm not concerned about hardened hackers. I'm trying to handle the basically honest guy who given a choice between "go this way to pay" and "take what you can get for free" will invariably choose the cheap way out and offer a third choice which is something like "Buy all you can get as cheap as possible". I'm asking the guy who'll pay for the $2.00 afternoon matinee to spend $1.50 for a full month of access to my site. That seems like a pretty good deal to me. And my guess is it'll seem like a good deal to many of my visitors too.

Thanks for the advice, Amy. Unless someone comes up with a better idea, I guess I'll take a closer look at the usergroups, subscriptions and promotion features.