Smileys

[Siam_Sam]

I saw a board once where one of the smileys was a little jihadist with a bomb. That would probably be out of the question.

[Jragon]

@Giraffe

For a board that is so desperate for revenue that they’ll tart the site up with all manner of low-rent, malware-laden ads, it’s a bit curious that they’ve never pursued the idea of monetizing people’s desire for avatars and/or new smilies. Smilies could be especially lucrative: last year, we let people donate money to charity to get points toward temporarily adding or removing smilies from my board. We raised $3000, on a board with less than a fifth of the active members of the SDMB. I can’t even imagine how much you could make pitting the pro- and anti-smiley forces against each other here. Do it once a year, starting from a blank smiley slate each year (so if an unpopular one squeaks through one year, you’re not stuck with it forever), then swim in your swimming pool full of money, Scrooge McDuck-style.

This is actually what SomethingAwful does. Want to register? 5 bucks, one-time. Get banned (as opposed to probated which is a short temporary suspension)? You can re-up for the same fee (there are perma-bans for extreme cases).

Want to change your (or someone else’s) avatar? Pay up (I think it’s 15 bucks). Yes, this means you can set someone else’s avatar to something stupid and they have to pay to change your avatar back – the rule about this on the forum is “no whining, no exceptions, pay up” (unless the picture is against forum rules). Hell, we could make it a small one-time fee to even SEE avatars, that would make it so whatever magical internet children who only come to boards to see pretty pictures that people are afraid of wouldn’t be attracted. Want to add a smiley to the board? Pay up (can’t recall, 15-20 bucks).

They also make you pay for PMs and to access archived threads, but I don’t think we would want to do that.

[Giraffe]

@Jragon

This is actually what SomethingAwful does. Want to register? 5 bucks, one-time. Get banned (as opposed to probated which is a short temporary suspension)? You can re-up for the same fee (there are perma-bans for extreme cases).

I’ve been a member at SA for years. IMO, they have been pretty brilliant about monetizing their board. Their strict moderation and tradition of inter-poster shame is something of a necessity given their traffic and membership, so they’ve integrated the pay walls accordingly so they mesh with the board culture.

Most of what they do wouldn’t work here, though. And their smiley system is very different than what I outlined, which is more of a tug of war game that the community would play periodically to raise money for the site than a simple fee-for-smileys option.