DISCUSSION - 2 tier membership system (paid members!).

A guy a know that coded a new PHP board (based off PHPBB) made a donation system.

1) Users who donated money were given one green star for every $20 they donated, the amount could be set to any amount of money to equal a star. This could easily be changed to any symbol.

2) Users who donated $20 got a pre-selected avatar (an image of a car that you could select from about 15 different colors) and users who donated $100 got to have their own customizable avatar (based on the URL of the image). You could set size limits or dimension limits on the image.

3) A member with 5 stars ($100) had access to a 5-Star section of the club, that is not viewable to any of the members except the 5-star guys. Only they had rights to post in there.

This is by far the best (and only) system I have seen and it resides here:

http://www.probetalk.com/

This WILL be gone very soon though as they are switching over to vBulletin but the Donation hack is being worked on.

Here is a basic posting:

http://64.60.145.228/forums/viewtopi...591&forum=1&37

You'll see there are quite a few members who have donated and you can easily distinguish them, either by number of stars, the default image, or a customized image.

Here is my profile on that board, notice it says how much money I have donated (it doesn't say it on the main section, it's only shown by green stars):

http://64.60.145.228/forums/bb_profi...view&user=4924

Originally posted by rebby
this sounds like a great hack... can't wait..

Hey Curt, I see you are part of this board too

PS: My above post, I said it was the only one I have seen personally, there may be others out there, and another thing, the hack that we use could use some work but all in all it was pretty nice.

[mkilty]

Originally posted by wluke
I am not ignoring the thread... I just haven't had much time to work on this lately...

With Family, 3 Jobs, a father recovering from double by-pass surgery and many other things interfering with my life, it leaves very little time for programming. Heck, I haven't even checked to see if my DNS change from two weeks ago has gone into effect on my own site which is still in development.

However even with all this... The majority of this hack has been running at SitePoint Forums for 2 weeks now in a testing phase. I should be releasing my version of it soon. It is just finding time to write up the documentation and creating an installation script now.

Hi wluke,

Any idea on when you are going to release your hack? Just give a date that you might release it so I can know what to do.

By the way my father just did a double bypass at Walter Reed Medical as well. He did very well and was lucky to have caught it in time. Glad to see your father is recovering good as well.

Michael

[Dark_Wizard]

Wayne, my best to your father and I know what it's like, my dad went through a triple bypass and a valve replacement 2 years ago...take your time as I'm sure everyone will understand.

[bargie]

ok i might started on this hack. if anyone has anythink allready e-mail it to me. but i just want every one to post what they in this hack as reading through the previous posts seems there are a lot of ideas.

i know how to git rid of the banner system for donated users thats the easy part, need the ideas all sumarised

[chrispadfield]

well your first decision is is the subscriber status going to be made by using a usergroup (in my opinion a bad plan because users can only be in 1 usergroup) or by an extra field in the user table (IMHO a good idea).

Benefits include:

1) Seperate header/footer/headinclude templates (to take away banners and pop-ups
2) Different pm storage limits
3) Different mass send to buddies limits
4) Avatars only for subscribers
5) Different post settings on custom avatars
6) Ability to post public events in calendar
7) A forum for subscribers only
8) Turn off limits such as 60 seconds between pm/searching etc.
9) Recognition icon.
10) A subscriber page
11) Automatic email notification of subscription expiration.

probably more....

[chrispadfield]

of course it is up to you but useing user groups destroys any previous use people have them for. As people can only be in one usergroup any past use is gone. I have moderators who subscribe and moderators who don't. Using your system it would not work

If you do the extra profile field, the only problems are that it is harder to have a permission system for a forum for only subscribers.

As for setting up a subscritpion, writing a script that does

UPDATE user SET name_of_field = 1 WHERE userid=form_input is not hard, it is exactly what i do and takes me 5 seconds when i get a subscription notification.

[bargie]

i will work on this over the weekend, should be ready by the end of next week

i will try it by adding a new table.

hope it works.

jamie

[Ashura]

I would recommend just using an extra field in the user table instead of a seperate table.

[mcncyo]

has anyone done this and makeing a money money off of it? What is your topic? How much are you charging? What are you offering?