BAF Member feedback please, premium membership

[Fergal]

As you will have noticed Business Advice Forum has been growing extremely well recently and we rank very well in the major search engines. This is great and it enables our business forum to be even more helpful to our members.

One downside of this success is that we are increasingly targeted by people who do not wish to contribute to the community but who make low value, pointless posts just to get a link in their signature. The primary motivation of these people is getting back links, they are not interested in reading posts on the forum or interacting with other members. The fact that you are even reading this post means that you do not fall into that group. Dealing with these spammers takes a huge amount of staff time - time that we would prefer to be spending helping our members and building the forum.

One way that we could deal with this issue is, only allowing premium members to include links in their signatures. We would charge a small fee for premium membership, on the basis that spammers by their nature won't pay anything. Unfortunately if we implemented this, it would mean that genuine and active members would have to pay a small fee, in order to get their signature link. We would start off with a charge of something like $7-14 for 6 months.

Members who do not wish to upgrade to premium membership, would still be able to use their signature. The only difference to their signature would be, that they could not include a link in it.

The main objective behind this, is not to generate revenue (although that would obviously be a helpful contribution to the costs of running the site), but to help control spam and maintain the forum as a more helpful and enjoyable place for our members.

So what do you think of this idea? Please post back with your suggestions.

Thanks!

[Andi21]

Maybe a good idea for the premium memberships would be that all posts on Businessadviceforum will be paid ones.

[GekiDan]

Maybe a good idea for the premium memberships would be that all posts on Businessadviceforum will be paid ones.
What do you mean by that? Like Paid-to-Post?

[Vekseid]

I do think the low quality of some of the posts here is damaging the value of your forum. This is going to get especially problematic as your contests start racking up into 'holy crap' territory.

If you're not interested in revenue, though, something I would do instead is just promote valuable contributors into an appropriate group. While it's a bit harder to start after the fact, on Elliquiy I basically have a massive review process that runs through each member and determines whether or not they are acceptable - it generates a much better sense of community, in my opinion : )

My main issue with paying is mostly the idea of it being something you have to financially keep up, which is not a philosophy I generally like. I'm not opposed to paying, in principle, but you're going to get people who consider a few dollars to be worth it, and good people who can't afford that but are extremely helpful anyway.

[Fergal]

Thanks for your valued feedback and suggestions Vekseid.


I do think the low quality of some of the posts here is damaging the value of your forum. This is going to get especially problematic as your contests start racking up into 'holy crap' territory.
Any suggestions you have, as to how we can better manage that, would be greatly appreciated.


...just promote valuable contributors into an appropriate group..
Are you suggesting that we should not allow new members to have links in their signatures, until they have proved themselves to be valuable to the community, and that once they have made a certain level of contribution, they would be moved into a new group with the right to have a signature link?

Would you suggest that members would request to be moved into the group? Or would we set it up so that the forum staff spot these valuable members and move them to the new group? Or to put it another way, should the "promotion" be initiated by the forum member or the forum staff?


..My main issue with paying is mostly the idea of it being something you have to financially keep up, which is not a philosophy I generally like....
Perhaps a lifetime or at least a five year membership would be a better approach?


..you're going to get people who consider a few dollars to be worth it, and good people who can't afford that but are extremely helpful anyway.

The only thing that people who don't pay, will not have access to is links in their signatures. They could still have text in their signatures and they will have full posting rights. Does your opinion still apply to paying for the privilege of a link in their signature?

Thanks again for your helpful reply!

[Vekseid]

Any suggestions you have, as to how we can better manage that, would be greatly appreciated.


Well, I also use StopForumSpam integration on my forums. That would only assist this, though.



Are you suggesting that we should not allow new members to have links in their signatures, until they have proved themselves to be valuable to the community, and that once they have made a certain level of contribution, they would be moved into a new group with the right to have a signature link?


Correct.



Would you suggest that members would request to be moved into the group? Or would we set it up so that the forum staff spot these valuable members and move them to the new group? Or to put it another way, should the "promotion" be initiated by the forum member or the forum staff?


Initiate a review at a certain number of posts. Fifty looks like it's the cutoff of the long tail for you.



Perhaps a lifetime or at least a five year membership would be a better approach?

The only thing that people who don't pay, will not have access to is links in their signatures. They could still have text in their signatures and they will have full posting rights. Does your opinion still apply to paying for the privilege of a link in their signature?


If you look around Digital Point, you'll see a number of people who have a premium membership but pretty much just spam. Most of the people spamming are not broke. The sorts of people who are going to be giving good advice on a site like this aren't going to be much different in terms of what they can afford.

On the converse, if you consider a well-written piece of advice to be worth several dollars, that is the approximate value of a few good links from a PR6-PR7 site. It's a good trade for both sides of that equation.

Premium membership on a forum like this to me should more or less be a sign that the person in question is actually serious. Not enough traffic for that now, but it's just my opinion on what this place could be.

[ownedbox]

don't you think this is too early for this?
beside signatures, what other things shall these paid member get?
would it be worth to get premium membership as compare to go to another forum that allows these members to have 4 signature links doing nothing but writing "yes and no" replies?

aren't we just scaring them, instead of giving them free things online?

[GekiDan]

aren't we just scaring them, instead of giving them free things online?
I think you are right. Business Advice Forum has a tagline: Free business advice and support.
So i don't think asking for fees on certain advices seems not cool...

[DavidL]

Personally, I would not like to pay up, regardless of the cost.

I know $15 or so isn't that much, but I'd prefer to have a link in my signature and contribute to the forum genuinely, rather than have to pay for a link and then post to make my payment worthwhile.

So, it could have a negative effect on the forum as people want to just post to ensure their payment is worthwhile.

[Fergal]

Thanks everyone for your valued feedback. There is a lot to think about there and I will give all your comments serious consideration, before I make any decision on this.

Just to clarify, even if we did implement this, people could still get free advice here, the only difference would be, that they would have to pay if they wanted premium membership. One of the advantages of premium membership is that they would be able to add links to the text in their signature.

Thanks again!

[Kay]

Couldn't you just set the newbie usergroup permissions to disallow sigs in that group? Make it so you don't get to move up to the next group that does allow them until you've made say 50 posts. Then they can add their sig at their leisure.

That would be far simpler than managing a premium membership. In all honesty, I think that's a bad idea. Most people won't pay it when they can visit other business forums and add their sig link for free. They'll just move on. Which is great if they're a spammer and not great if they want to be an active member.

And what about those who already contributed valuable posts but don't want to pay? Would you take their sig links away even though they had already helped make the forum what it is today? I don't like the idea at all. I think there would be far more work in managing a premium membership than any spam.

[Vekseid]

Again, my main concern is that spammers who see it as valuable will pay anyway. It's not a solution, it's mitigation. Spammers happily pay DigitalPoint $120/year for a couple extra sig links now, if Fergal gets to PR 7-8 $15 will be a steal in comparison. I wouldn't want it to be autopromotion at 50 posts either - a person's contributions should actually be valuable.

Regarding the 'need' to drop a signature link, I think that's rather secondary - Fergal is using a succession of contests to promote his forum, which is a pretty effective strategy as a rule. As long as only links are restricted initially (and not the signature itself) promotion later is fine.

Premium membership can be for other things. I'd rather like a forum where I didn't have to see an "I won't pay you anything but you can have a share of the profits for my ripoff idea!" scam ever again >_>

[DavidL]

Spammers don't actually go onto the forum, it's their bots which is all done via software (eg. XRumer). DigitalPoint serves different purposes to BAF so its not a fair comparison when you look at the premium membership pricing.

One thing DP does to combat the signature link spam is by making users make (I think) 10 posts in the review section before allowing them to have links. Simple things like a user has to make an introduction before allowing signature links (makes it easier to moderate as its targeted), or having a certain amount of posts before allowing links would help.

If the premium membership included some other features, then I'd be glad to join. :)

[Vekseid]

I'm tossing people who post content-free crap to do nothing but add their sig to a thread in with the 'spammer' crowd, here. That sort of thing diminishes the value of an advice forum considerably.

[sigma]

That's good to implement a "premium member" system but the feature is too less, just link in signature seems are not attracted enough. Maybe shall make a premium member discussion room or add some other special thing

[Kay]

I wouldn't want it to be autopromotion at 50 posts either - a person's contributions should actually be valuable.



The reason I said 50 is because most spammers will hang around for lower thresholds like 10 or 20, but not 50. I assumed them being quality posts went without saying but obviously not. :) I'll rephrase that to 50 quality posts.

I'm a super mod at a webmaster forum that has over 37K members and half a million posts. Enforcing the quality posts rule is time consuming but you've got to do it if you don't want overrun with the type of posts Vekseid is talking about or you end up burying the quality stuff. Me, I'd be deleting everything that wasn't to make sure that by the time they got to 50, all were quality posts that added to the conversation. When you have a large forum though, it really eats into your time.

[ownedbox]

probably 25 posts and account must be 15 days old to be able to have signature. how does it sound?

[Vekseid]

The reason I said 50 is because most spammers will hang around for lower thresholds like 10 or 20, but not 50. I assumed them being quality posts went without saying but obviously not. :) I'll rephrase that to 50 quality posts.

I'm a super mod at a webmaster forum that has over 37K members and half a million posts. Enforcing the quality posts rule is time consuming but you've got to do it if you don't want overrun with the type of posts Vekseid is talking about or you end up burying the quality stuff. Me, I'd be deleting everything that wasn't to make sure that by the time they got to 50, all were quality posts that added to the conversation. When you have a large forum though, it really eats into your time.

You can make the work load a lot lighter if you delegate, and a quick script can semi-automate the process. We've manually reviewed some five thousand people on E, which seems like a lot, but the site is five years old, and even at the current rate it's only ten a day. : )

[sajjad.axe]

i too agree with the fact that premium membership will be a delight to the spammer's .

hey what the heck ? our cool forum gets revenues . so i am :" IN " :)

[EvanP]

I agree with what some members have said in here.

The staff should identify posters who have been here a while and contributed a lot to the forum, and move them to a special group who are allowed signature links. So new members have to prove themselves in order to be allowed to use a signature link.