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Helios_Multi TPoxygen11final

[imaginif]

Imaginif is having a few changes - one of them is to turn our safety talk forum into a private peer supervision forum that workers in the child safety / child protection field will have to pay to join (The general parent, Safety Talk aspect of the existing forum has merged with All for Women).

What platforms can you recommend as a fee to join forum????

[Meg]

Hi Megan

Are you talking about how you should physically accept payments - like how to introduce e-commerce into the sign-up procedure?

[imaginif]

Sort of, yes, no.....I don't know. lol. Apparently there are some platforms that are already set up as pay to join - the ecommerce is built in or has capacity to build it in. vbulletin offers this service I believe (thanks Leigh at All for Women) so I'll check them out but thought you guys may know of some others.

The Imaginif forum has naturally attracted a mob of professionals in the child protection area. Desperate for peer supervision, they need privacy to discuss issues. Because of the legalities and best practice standards it will take up an enormous amount of my time as moderator...so, I'm going to charge a join fee. The more time I spend on my forum, the less income I am learning in my practice. I guess it's a way of meonetizing my forum.

[Snoskred]

I've been a member of forums where you could pay to be a premium member before. Megan that would probably be my recommendation rather than closing it off entirely. You want to have at least some forums open to the public and the search engines. The reason for that being it makes it easier for people to find you on the web, and then they can decide whether or not to pay for premium membership.

You can have private forums on any of these forum type applications, where a certain usergroup can only see the private forums.

For example, here on this forum we have the events and meets area, which cannot be seen until the member hits the usergroup "Fair Dinkum" which is 20 posts. We don't want that forum to be seen by the search engines anyway.

You can base these usergroups on post count, or you could base them on your manually putting people who have paid into the usergroup which can see the private forums, or a combination of both if you really know what you're doing.

You can keep the money stuff simple - make it that they pay to a paypal account, and once you receive the money you move them into the right usergroup.

[imaginif]

Thanks Snokky. When are you moving in with me to be my own private consultant? I make good coffee (only ethically grown and processed of course) and can supply copious amounts of chocolate, champagne and Robbie Williams songs (but often I sing them without the music playing so that's a bit sad).

I had actually intended to leave some of the boards open. That is a good idea though of simplifying it and just adding a paypal button and then do a manual move to the correct board. I could even keep the platform I currently have (I know that one inside out).

[Snoskred]

Yep keeping it simple is the trick.

What platform are you using? I agree it is MUCH easier to stick with what you know. I've worked with Vbulletin before and I have to say I greatly prefer SMF to it.