What would you do if the forum had a subscription fee (to post classifieds, etc)?

OK, So I've closed the poll (which I had to do as I was using an account on Zoomerang that related to a work investigation of survey technologies) and here are the results based on the views of 1,363 forum members.

Basically everything left of 5.5 is various degrees of "no thanks", and everything right of 5.5 represents various degrees of "yup, sure"... and the no thanks have 57% of the vote whilst the yay's only have 43%.

By and large, it seems that the bulk of people are more against than for... and it's just you addicted nutters who are totally enthusiastic about giving me your hard earned money.

On the question of which features people felt should be linked to a subscription fee:

Classifieds and storage seem to be the things that people felt most willing to pay for. I interpreted this (along with the many emails) as a general view that there is a willingness to pay for classifieds, but that no-one really knows how this would work.

Quite a few emails discussed per advert fees, but this is just not practical to implement as it really requires micro-payments and there's so many ways to get around it.

Finally... on the question of how much:

2 Beers a year was most favoured. But this is very subjective... what you want to pay is more closely aligned to what value you feel you get from the forum.

Which leads me onto the next bit... donations recently have been stunning. So stunning that 3 months worth of donations arrived within a week or so of this debate starting.

That wasn't the intent, but it does show that perhaps I hide the costs too well and whilst there is a willingness to donate there's just no info on the needs.

Anyhow... as for what I've decided to do, it's pretty much this:
1) Voluntary ad hoc donations and annual donations... this will use code, I'll build a form for it.
2) Indicators about whether someone has donated on their members page.
3) No perks or favouritism... you just get a warm glow, donations are just donations and not a service charge.
4) Merchandise to make up the rest.
5) Investigate sponsorship for the adverts for guests rather than Google AdSense which makes pathetically small amounts considering the number of page views.

Things I'll consider over time:
1) Whether the sponsorship for guests extend to non-donors so that the sponsors get greater value... i.e. if we take a load of money it's probably to reach our audience, which means you guys would have to see it.
2) Keep subscriptions off the table for at least a year but leave it open as a possibility in the future. If growth continues as it has done and we haven't yet jumped the shark, then there might still be a problem in the future with funding and this may not have been solved by donations... so it's very much a question of whether donations + merch + sponsorship works as to whether we can avoid subscriptions.

As for Classifieds. I still don't see a major problem with the Wild West system we have.

That said, I am considering having some kind of official badge/identifier for traders so that people who earn a living from trading can be identified and made official to some degree... this also means that representatives from shops can be easily identified... i.e. shop14 could have an official username and some mark that proves I verified that somehow. These people would be given a page listing them in some way so that it becomes a directory of traders. For this a donation would be expected, but it's up to the trader how much this is, as little or as much as they value the resource.

So...

No subscription.
Donations to be identifed.
Fully open and free to use for everyone with no perks for some (beyond being identified).
Merchandise to fund most of the forum (the T-shirt competition).
Possible sponsorship instead of Google ads, and if so possibly to all non-donors.

All sound good? (not that it's open to much debate now.)

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