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- If they're banned, they get a pro-rata refund
- If they're coolered, they can still access the site, but without ads (I think, haven't tested it lately). If that's the case, there's no refund. If it's not the case (ie they can't see anything at all), then they get a pro-rata refund for that period.
There will certainly be no preferential treatment.
Here's the thing - on further analysis of the Analytics and the ad reports, I've come to the conclusion that Google's numbers assume lots and lots of different visitors, like a normal website. Forums confuse it, because we have fewer visitors with much longer engagement creating the page views compared to a normal site. Hence being out by a factor of 10
People only get coolered after warnings. If they don’t change their posting behaviour then that’s their risk. Similarly with bans. We would have to make clear in terms and conditions of membership that there are no refunds.
Thinking of T&Cs reminds me that we would have to set up a membership management team, blocking people who don’t pay. That will immediately reduce the number of active members, and discourage new members, which in turn will narrow the field of conversation. Having said that, putting Off Topic and Coronavirus behind a pay wall could have a positive impact.
There may be additional functionality benefits (eg image uploads, depending on how we go about that), but I really don't want to create a two-tier membership where parts of the forum are locked away behind a paywall. That's never really worked in the history of forums, and only ever serves to fracture the community.
Amen
The reality is that it's more about giving the people who want to give something back the means to contribute.
A special VIP area (for example) would be really dull.
The only feature I ever thought of that might really drive update is the one Preloved do where when you post a classified it goes live only for paid members for the first 24 hours. That's always struck me as a killer app for people who like to snap stuff up.
Access to image hosting with an easy way to embed is another of those ideas that might be better as a concept than in practice. It gives us the hassle of hosting, and images aren't compulsory anyway. Those who want to embed images in the ads generally manage to do so. Those who don't manage it, probably aren't going to pay to be able to. Generalisations, obviously.
If we manage to do decent deals with manufacturers/retailers, then that might be a useful "members only" benefit, but there'd need to be a decent spread and volume of deals to keep the appeal wide. And not sure many retailers have got the margin left to offer any deals better than they offer online anyway - except perhaps a guaranteed free pack of strings
The annual calendar / t-shirt and the raffles for donated prizes used to raise a fair bit, although they all took a fair bit of time to arrange and organise. But those initiatives did at least remind people that we existed thanks to donations, which prompted more donations. However, that sort of fund-raising isn't going to net Lee £100k/yr, nor even the more likely £10k/yr.
Lee - if you can make £10K a year from allowing that style of ad then I'm more annoyed you haven't been doing it for ages. Just do it.
1 - The guest ads are working well.
2 - I can't do the second experiment with three shorter ads on the left, because AdSense restricts the ads if they're not large enough in either dimension.
3 - The overwhelming opinion here seems to be that global ads are OK.
As such, I think the logical next step would be to go with the full ads-for-everyone experiment for a couple of weeks, as mentioned before, just to see if it has an effect or there's a full-on mutiny.
Trading feedback here
Strangely, I’ve not needed / used an adblocker on the iPad before. Presume you still get paid?
It's not a problem, though...I'm not going to sit here and whine about people using ad blockers
It's not beyond the bounds of possibility. I'll check it in the morning...
Ebay mark7777_1