Advanced Paid Forum Membership Questions

[bjarnee]

Hi!

I was sent here from this thread over at vbulletin.com:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=257354

My questions:

Sometime during this year, I plan to start paid membership forum. I know there are plugins/solutions for people to sign up and pay for access to the forum, but for reasons I won't go into here, I would like to take this one step further.

Here is what i want:

Paying members of the forum should each month (or whatever set period) receive acces to 1 or several additional forum categories.

Example:

People who sign up to my forum for free get access to a couple of forum categories, containing downloads, freebies, threads, ability to post questions and so on. Let's call it the basic package.

A person that pays for "month 1", immediately should get access to 1 or more private forum categories.

"Month 2" he's billed again via paypal, and gets additional acess to forum category 2.

Month 3 he's billed again via paypal, and gets additional acess to forum category 3.

Month 4 he's billed again via paypal, and gets additional acess to forum category 4.

And so on and so on, untill he or she cancels the membership.

The purpose of this is - amongst others - to achieve a maximum amount of interaction with the customers. All members would get access to a free discussion area, and some parts of the site,whereas only paying members get access to more and more forum categories, containing downloads, tutorials, videos, ebooks, ecourses and so on.

Is this possible? I would be willing to pay for such a mod, so don't let "is it possible" be limited to "does such a software exist today".

I guess it would have to be a combination of forum software + forum mod + paypal +?

Any ideas? All help is welcome!

Regards,
Bjarnee

[cheat-master30]

The first part, with basic membership for free and advanced membership with extra access for a price I think is easy to do simply with paid subscriptions and usergroup permissions. You'd set it so the basic group can access... say... forum 1, 2 and 3 while the paying group can access 1, 2, 3 as well as 4. Not sure about the rest though.

[SEOvB]

You can do it with user permissions and the paid subscriptions built into vBulletin.

Setup your supporter usergroups. A, B, C, D, etc.
Setup your forums and their permissions, A, B, C, D

Then after they are a member of usergroup A for X days(soon as they pay, they'll have access to forum A), they are automatically promoted to B, and given access to forum B

Then setup another usergroup promotion, after being in B for X days they are upgraded to C and given access to forum C

And just repeat for however long you want that to go for.

[bjarnee]

Hi, thanks for the answer! Just to be sure: This means that when they stop paying, they are automatically unsubscribed from this "chain of events"? :-)

Regards,
Bjarnee

[cheat-master30]

When they stop paying, I assume their premium membership goes away and they become non paying members again.

[SEOvB]

Yes, when they stop paying they should revert back to registered users.

Though i've never tested it but it usually works that way.