Supporting PAFOA through Paid Forum Subscriptions

**danp** · October 12th, 2008, 02:41 PM

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE A FORUM SUBSCRIPTION

Since the start of this forum and organization we've always been pretty passive about raising money for the organization. We've had a donor page hidden on the main website but never really linked to it, and we as an organization have only ever explicitly asked for donations once (when we were hiring a lawyer to help us incorporate as a non-profit) but other than that we've just sort of let the chips fall where they do as far as fund raising. I will say however that we've been pretty successful at this, the members of this forum have always been very generous with many of them dropping us $10, $20 every few months and every penny is appreciated. Because we have always had so few costs we could afford to just let things happen naturally, however it's starting to look like in the near future we might start to incur some costs so we're going to need to start raising a little more money.

At this point in time, PAFOA web traffic looks roughly like this:

~15,000 unique visitors a day
~100,000 page views a day
~400,000 unique visitors a month
~2,500,000 page views a month
~250 gigabytes of data transfer a month

Our current web setup is two massively powerful computers, one serving up the pages and one doing all the database queries necessary to retrieve and save the data. The problem is, that's not really enough anymore. We're doing OK for this exact moment in time (although we've had a rough couple of nights over the last month when we get a surge of traffic) and we need to start buying more hardware. We are also strongly considering moving out of doug's free hosting and onto our own as we're really starting to outgrow our fishbowl at this point. The current setup we're looking at will cost us around $5,000 in hardware and $250 a month in hosting.

Paid Forum Subscriptions

vBulletin has a great built-in featured called Paid Subscriptions which basically allows use to set up various subsciptions with various prices and various features which are automatically purchased and applied.

On the forum we have set up 6 levels of subscriptions:

Bronze Supporter
Silver Supporter
Gold Supporter
Platinum Supporter
Patron
Benefactor

These various levels each have a different icon that appears under your name if you purchase said subscription. Each one also has some other various minor features. For a full list and pricing please see our main informational page on forum subscriptions.

You do not (and never will) need a paid subscription to significantly use the discussion forum. Ultimately subscriptions should really be considered more of a donation than "buying" something right now, but as we move forward there may be some extra perks for members with varying levels of subscription.

The advantages of Paid Subscriptions over donations is:

I do not have to be involved, this removes a massive amount of time that I usually spend managing donor information. This time can now be put to better use.
Account upgrades are applied automatically, if you purchase a subscription, your account will be automatically upgraded almost instantaneously and include your supporter badge on your profile and all of your posts.

I would highly recommend that people purchase subscriptions rather than donate to PAFOA. The end result is the same, but this process is totally automated!

Purchasing a Forum Subscription

If you want to purchase a forum subscription, it's pretty easy. Under your User Control Panel (the User CP link in the forum navigation) there is a section called "Paid Subscriptions". From this section of your account you can see your current subscription(s), when they started and when they expired, and the list of all subscriptions available for purchase. To buy a subscription you simply have to choose which subscription you want and use the drop down menu to choose the length of the subscription, whether it is recurring (auto-renewed), and click "Order". From there you will be taken to the screen that asks you how you would like to pay. Once you do that your account should be automaticaly upgraded.

At the moment the only method of Payment is PayPal. You do not need to actually have an account with PayPal to purchase, you can use your credit card without actually signing up. We will be working to expand to other methods of payment than PayPal, but unfortunately it's the only option available that integrates with vBulletin and has accepted us into their program.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE A FORUM SUBSCRIPTION

Old Supporting Member Accounts

If you had a supporting member or major supporting member account in the past, one of two things has happened to it:

Your account has been transferred to the nearest subscription tier based on the amount of your donations within the last year (rounded up) until 1 year from the date of your most recent donation.
Your account has been downgraded back to a regular user account if you have not made a donation within the past year.

The second one, I sincerely hope doesn't upset people, but from the very beginning it was always stated that donations were only "good" for 1 year, we simply never enforced the rule. Now that we're moving to a completely automated system, the rule will have to be enforced.