Premium version of the site

This is something that I have seen on another forum for industry professionals, and enthusiests, althogh it is a different industry than this is.

The forum had grown to the point where it needed ads to sustain it. Since many of the members did not want to see ads on the site, they introduced a premium version of the site for partners. I beleive the fee was a minimum of $20/year, although the top 20 donations were made public, and people started getting competitive, bit of a competition to see who would donate the most when their renewal time was here.

In return for the donation, the partners saw no ads, as well as having more profile options, an email address at the site, and access to a few more forums that others could not see.

Just wondering if something like that could work around here...

You're not on about expert-sexchange by any chance are you !?

I don't see the problem with a few ads to keep the site free for users. If they annoy you that much, I'm sure you can install ab-block so you don't see them as I'm sure many members do.

The admins do a great job on these boards and I see no reason to change them. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

No, expertSexChange make you buy points just to post a thread.

Which is of course infinitely worse.

No, I'm not on expert sex change.

It's for a different industry.

Do you have any idea how many people would quit?

Comon, how else will I be able to see my boss getting the [DELETE] key thrown at him? THERE ISN'T ANOTHER WAY I TELL YOU!

Ok, actually related to this post. I think that it's got to go through a lot more votes and polls before it can even be considered. Then you have to factor in the amount of work related for implementation and yowza that's a lot of time spanned across all their forums they own.

Good idea, just don't think it's practical.
Chad

I wouldn't be opposed to paying a small fee, but what I would like to see is a light version of the site. Not necessarily ad-free, but with only a couple text adds at the top/bottom of the page, and with most the fluff removed. Something like this:

OK this has come up many times and here is my take:

Information should be free, and open to all who want it - plain and simple. I will never charge a fee for access to my sites.

That is why we sell advertising, to keep the flow of information free.

j

Which is something I can agree with totally. I still think it might be nice to offer a lighter version of the site though, save people's time not having to download ads and extra fluff, and save you some bandwidth bills by serving up less. If a small fee was required, then that is fine by me. No need for special exclusive content or special boards or any crud like that, just a nice simple clean version of the site. A couple out of the way text-based ads would still be fine by me.

Of course, I understand that would take time and money to offer and probably isn't all that feasible, so I won't be holding my breath for it but it would be a nice offering.

I do agree with kicken.

Basically, if you believe in free service (which I at least do believe, and actually even free as GNU-free, not only free as cost free) you could simply make a paypal link saying 'donations'.

And could support donators with adverticement free site.

Ads do not really bother me. What bothers me is the fact that I cannot visit devshed with my mobile phones web browser :/ It always crashes (the browser) when I try to browse devshed. I do not know whether it is some script used here, or the size of loaded images/page. (Welcome back to the world where memory consumption is an issue :/ ) Although I doubt it is the sheer size, since usually when my mobile runs out of memory while browsing some websites, it does not crash completely but announces that memory is exhausted and advieces closing applications. However with devshed the whole web browser is just killed.

Anyways, I like the idea of light version of devshed.
(I acknowledge the amount of work it requires though. Maintaining dublicate templates may be a pain).

I don't speak up much, but here's my 2c worth.

If a site is useful, like this one is, then I don't mind ads - if my visiting this site helps to keep the site up and running through ad revenue, then I'm glad to help. I don't see it like that though, I'm usually coming here to get help.

What I don't like are sites that have minimal content, maximum advertising, which is not what this site does.

I used to love a site, cssplay, but lately (past year), the advertising on it has become rampant beyond acceptable levels (IMO) - even devious with the google ads blending 'nicely' with the actual content.

No . . . the devshed does a fair job. They provide significantly more content space than ad space - in the forums at least anyway. I don't read a lot of the articles.

My 2c all done!

Keep up the good work Devshed!!