[theforum] idea

[Peter-Paul Koch]

>I'm having an afternoon of brainstorming.

So it seems. Interesring ideas. Though I'm not too much involved in running 
Evolt, I thought I'd react anyway.

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

Don't call it like that. Whatever else happens, never use the Evil Words 
"charging for membership". Call it "extra features for faithful members" or 
"loyalty program" or "Serious membership" or something.

>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.

- Create your own Top 10 of articles?
- Filter out comments of certain members?
- Receive email updates when a new article is posted? (We should create that 
one, anyway, now that the announcements to thelist have gone)
- Use your own stylesheet? Wouldn't be a bad idea, anyway. Kind of 
CSS-Zen-like. Create your own Evolt style sheet, show it off to other 
Evolters and win eternal glory.
- Post job openings?
- Add links to your biography? (We'd have to remove the links from non-loyal 
members, I suppose, so maybe this is a tricky idea)

- "You can moderate". Moderate what?

>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.

Yes! I dunno about the 15 valid comments rule (who's going to say they're 
valid?) but I like the other ideas.

Committee membership should get you some credits, too.

>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".

Yes, good ideas. What would the monthly rate be? $10?

About the finances: would it be at all possible to open an Evolt bank 
account and post the account number on the site? I don't have a credit card 
(though I'll get one soon) so I can't donate. If I'd get an account number I 
could simply tell my bank to send some money there.

But the US system of banking is quite different from what I'm used to, so 
maybe there are some problems I'm overlooking.

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