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Paid Subscription Question

Started by matritte, March 14, 2019, 05:42:57 PM

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matritte

Hey all.

I have a well-established forum, and I decided maybe I will try to monetize it.
I'd like to give registered users the ability to edit their posts, delete posts, upload images if they make a small donations for those privileges.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to do that. From what I read, it seems I have to make a new membergroup and then add all those people to it? That would literally take an eternity because my forums has thousands of members. What am I missing? If someone could lay out the steps that would be awesome.

Thanks.

Arantor

You make a new group, yes, and you give that group permissions.

You then configure it so paid subscriptions automatically move people into that group once they pay - a key feature of the paid subs system. It's all in the setup screen for subscriptions where you select a group to add users to.

matritte

Quote from: Arantor on March 14, 2019, 05:46:20 PM
You make a new group, yes, and you give that group permissions.

You then configure it so paid subscriptions automatically move people into that group once they pay - a key feature of the paid subs system. It's all in the setup screen for subscriptions where you select a group to add users to.

Okay, so would it be make a new membergroup called "subscriptions", select "free" for group type, and "inherit from regular members"?

Then for regular members I'd turn off the features I want people to pay for. And in the Subscription group I'd turn on all those permissions in addition to the regular member permissions? Is that right?




Arantor

Group type would be private (free would mean people could leave/join at any time without payment), and you wouldn't have it inherit from regular members because then you couldn't set permissions unique to it.

But you do have the right idea in general :)

matritte

Thanks, think I got it mostly setup right now. The regular group permissions are the same as the subscription except for the four features I want to be paid sub features.

The only issue I can't figure out: say I want to make features like deleting a post or uploading an image a paid sub feature. When I view the forum with a regular user account, those features are not even visible (I removed them from regular users because I only want subscribers to have them). What I really need is everyone to be able to see the "delete" and "upload" functions, but when they click on them, it takes them to the message saying that's a paid feature. How do I do that?


Arantor

That's really not how SMF works; it only shows you the things you have the power to do. The changes you want actually end up annoying people rather than incentivising them to pay for upgrades.

matritte

Okay, so that is impossible to do using paid subscriptions?

Arantor

It requires fairly significant changes across SMF to do, which is fundamentally designed around showing you what you can do, not bait-n-switch.

matritte

I don't view it that way since the forum provides a ton of service to people at my loss (free, so i pay hosting).

But anyway, that's a bummer I can't do that.

What is strange is when I deleted the Paid Subscription membergroup it deleted the Registered Users group. That group is entirely gone now.

Arantor

You might not view it that way, but that's how SMF's been designed for the last 15 years: show users things they can do, don't show them options they can't carry out.

You can't delete Registered Users since it's not a real group in the first place... unless you added one...

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