Master Gunner wrote:Maybe a super-secret section of the forum for sponsors only? That way you get the best of both worlds!
Warseer.com* has that for it's forums: for about £2 a month (less if you pay for several months in advance) you get a custom title and access to the wastes (basically a spam forum for whatever ridiculous discussions anyone wants) and a forum for the discussion of political and religious issues (which isn't allowed in the normal off-topic forum. However, despite these bonuses I think many of the people that pay for that do it in order to keep the forum running: it's had to upgrade it's servers about twice in as many years as it's growing so quickly, so it needs the revenue. I'll be planning to sign up o that for a few months over the summer, partly because after 5700 posts there I think I owe them something, but mostly because I want to make my title 'LUDICROUS POSTCOUNT!' for a little while...
My personal view on paying for forums: a one-off payment, I'd have no problem with. A monthly subscription I'd be less sure about however, as I'd have to weigh up whether it's worthwhile spending that much (especially as I'll be a student this autumn, so I'm expecting monetary problems to be pretty much a fact of life
). As you were saying in the podcast, it would certainly lose you quite a few members of the forum, and I don't think that's something that's necessary: I haven't really seen any new members here (other than the spambots) who are the sort you'd want to stop joining by introducing a joining fee**, and having large numbers of people on the forums would only help increase the popularity of your videos.
That said, if some degree of charging for the forums is introduced, then I think it would be best if it were a voluntary thing, maybe with some benefits from it: a one off payment allowing you to post in the general discussion, rather than just comment on videos maybe...
Slightly more on topic: good podcast guys, and I would also like to proclaim myself as a banana bread fan, though without raisins or cinnamon (not a fan of raisins, but the cinnamon is an interesting idea)
*tabletop wargaming forum
** although I realise that I'm probably pretty close....