[theforum] idea

[Isaac Forman]

I'm having an afternoon of brainstorming.

And I wondered if a gateway to sustaining evolt.org through 
membership/finances would be charging for membership.

The next version of the site is likely to incorporate more 
features, require more customising, etc.

Imagine that you owned slashdot.org and hadn't come up 
with all their subscription crap. Then imagine that you can't 
personalise any of it (unless you are a paying subscriber, 
article contributor, etc). Once you've paid, you can set your 
comment limit (mine is 2) to avoid trolls. You can 
moderate. You can adapt the appearance, or have RSS 
sidebars. Or any number of other things. For free, you can 
get the raw information. With membership, you get the 
perks -- ability to enter competitions for books/software, 
and so on.

And perhaps other ways of gaining this access (as I 
alluded to) would be writing an article. Write an article, and 
you get 3 months membership or something like that. Or 
maybe for every 15 valid comments you make, you get a 
month, or based on tips on thelist, or article ratings.

And on member pages, it would have a box dealing their 
support for evolt.org. UserX has been a paid member for 9 
months, contributed 12 articles, 25 comments, rated 19 
articles, etc. Top contributors get promoted on the site. 
Nothing ridiculous, just a link somewhere to a page called 
"Our top supporters".

One thing I like about salon (though I don't know how 
successful it is) is there "watch 15 second ad, get access 
for a day" system. Probably irrelevant here, but I just 
thought I'd mention it.


isaac


-----------------------------------------------------
BigTrip.org | Isaac and Kate : World Tour 2003 - 2004
+61 414 758 000 | www.bigtrip.org | isaac at bigtrip.org