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

I'm coming late to this, and I'm not sure what my view counts for seeing as I lurk rather than participating, and have only been a member for about ten minutes. Nonetheless ...

i) I don't think VB should be bound by the views expressed in the poll: informed, but not bound

ii) The site can be a business or a community, not both - and unless there's some form of constitution that makes it effectively a members' club, I think subscriptions tend to turn it into a business, which then carries expectations around service levels, content quality and the like

iii) It's legitimate for the owner of a business to take profits: I believe a community has no single owner, so no single person or small group should be taking profits - if they're being distributed as profits they should got to the community

iv) It's entirely proper for a community to pay for the skills and time used to maintain the infrastructure of that community, but there should be a degree of transparency in this, as there would be in a co-operative. One big danger is that it couldn't afford commercial rates, so continues to rely on goodwill which may be damaged by the assumption that it will continue

v) VB should not be financially out of pocket (and has a perfect right to charge for time and skills used)

vi) I'd probably have been put off lurking to the extent I have if there were tiers of paid-for membership - and I'm very glad I haven't been. I have benefited and do appreciate what is to be found here

vii) I quite like VB's solution as proposed above, though not sure I'd necessarily want the fact someone's donated to be too obvious

(And before anyone starts, I have read the rest of the thread, and I have used the wee donate button, which I just hadn't spotted before all this started, and probably wouldn't have clicked on were it not for the info provided about server costs and all the rest ...)