WebSlave said:
Tanith, I do hear what you are saying, but the BOI has reached a crossroads. I have heard people say time and time again that the BOI is a "joke", "worthless", "good only for entertainment", etc., etc. I have had people taunt me privately that they can register as many times as they please and post whenever they want on the BOI no matter what I do about it. I have had people bypass the fines and suspensions at will. We have caught MANY people posting as someone else to give them an "attaboy" post or else as multiple people to post bad guy posts to help look like there is a large amount of support for their claim.
*nods* Okay, so the solution you implement has to effectively end people's ability to come back painlessly after being banned for abuse. Would it work to do the following?
1. Grandfather most of the current accounts. Yes, I know that this would mean we would still have some of the current problem users, at least until they were caught and thrown off. So this would mean some additional mod time to catch people abusing the system. It would also mean you would not have the precipitous and disastrous drop in the user base that I forsee happening if you make everyone pay to register. To help weed out the user base a little more, you could grandfather in only the accounts that had X number of posts to help verify that these were individual people.
2. Make the BOI read-accessible to registered but non paying memberships, but not writable. I suspect that making it completely inaccessible to the public would effectively be website suicide.
I believe you mentioned a 1 month trial period. What good would that do for what I am trying to do with the BOI? Not a thing. It would completely negate the purpose of the fee as being a toll gate for the abuses I am trying to eliminate.
You're right, so how about another way to hook'em? What we want to accomplish is to introduce people to Fauna with a sampling of the goods so that they are willing to pay to play. A read-only access would help.
If I came across a closed website that purported to offer what Fauna offered, except I had to pay $10 before I could even see it, I wouldn't pay the $10. I'd websearch for the information I wanted instead, because I would never have had the opportunity to see what I'd be getting for my $10. Most people won't buy a pig in a poke, or a snake in a sack, as it were.
Another possibility is to allow registered but non paying members the ability to buy a smaller increment of posting credits - say, $1 or $2 for a single post. Such posts would be clearly marked as such, leaving it obviously visible if too many posts of that nature turned up in certain people's threads. I see potential problems with this solution, including extra programming time, so it may not be a viable one.
So tell me, anyone, if you were faced with the task of trying to increase the credibility of the BOI, which implies the MEMBERS that are posting on there, how would YOU do it?
I might research the model that adult sites use for age verification, and require a credit card to sign up whether or not a fee was charged.
I might also try the cryptographic "network of trust" model used with PGP keys, which puts the burden on your userbase to verify which members score high on the trust scale because enough trusted users have personally contacted them. All you have to do as the admin is to sign off on which users on your site are personally known to you face to face or on the phone. In turn those users sign for others who are personally known to them in the same manner, and so on and so forth. Signing someone's key means that you are verifying that you have met and/or spoken to them. Only people in your personal "web of trust" can verify keys for your purposes. This can certainly be abused, but it's actually a lot more difficult to abuse than it sounds if it's set up using the PGP model. It works remarkably well in public key cryptography.
Another idea that has already been rejected is to have me refuse registrations from free email accounts. But several people have provided me with what I consider as genuinely good reasons why this is not a good idea. Not the least of which is that there is a HUGE membership base that uses AOL accounts that I would have to boot out of here. So that just is NOT feasible.
Combine the two ideas perhaps. The "pay as you go" or free registrations might require a real email account, whereas the regular memberships could stick with a free address.
I mean, sheesh, is $10 really that much of a killer to most people? I thought that if I kept the price low enough, it wouldn't really hurt anyone. But maybe I just overestimated the majority of the people coming to this site. But I do tend to do that. One of my biggest character flaws, I do believe.
Yes, it is going to be a killer to casual users who are not personally interested or committed to the board. The average browser is going to see the fee and run straight to Google to look for a free alternative.
Otherwise I would, but thanks to fauna sparking my interest, I have to build a few hundred dollar's worth of cage's and this isn't the time to donate.