But the moment they demand your credit card number and expiration date in order to be seated at the table, the nature of that relationship changes. You’ve paid for their services; they can suffer your presence or give you a refund and ask you to leave, but they can’t pull the fork from your hand and eject you to the curb while submitting your credit card impression to Visa for payment at the same time.
I bet they have had these legal issues reviewed. I am not a lawyer, but I would imagine that if you accept certain conditions of membership, like don’t be a jerk, then if you violate those conditions, your membership can be legally voided without refund. For instance, if you were in a movie theater and making a big scene, the management can ask you to leave, or demand that you leave, without refunding your money. Same goes for a bar with a cover charge. It is not uncommon for businesses to require a standard of conduct and when this standard is violated, customers get tossed…without refund. Just because you have paid for something doesn’t mean you can screw it up for other folks who have also paid.
Will this be a “Buy-one-year-then-get-the-option-of-renewing” setups or one of those"Buy-one-year-and-you’re-put-on-automatic-renewal-and-you-haveta-figure-out-how-to-stop-renewing" setup?
'cause I can’t stand automatic renewals (but that’s probably just me)
I leave for a few days and look what’s happened… Why didn’t we get e-mail notification about this change?? I’m sure there are many temporarily inactive dopers who would like to take advantage of the $5 deal. And perhaps many who stopped using the board, but think that a subscription board would be an improvement worth coming back to. (Though a stronger incentive than “maybe we’ll upgrade the equipment” might help there.)
No, all payments must be made electronically. If you haven’t got a credit card, your options are:
[ul]
[li]Set up a PayPal account - see http://www.paypal.com/[/li][li]Work out an arrangement with one of the many Dopers who have volunteered to act as an intermediary. Basically you send them the money and your screen name and password. They log on as you and pay. Then you log on as you and change your password.[/li][li]I think you can buy a Visa gift debit card and use that, but am checking to be certain. See more at Meet Visa. A network working for everyone. . Visa gift cards can be purchased at many banks and retailers. [/li][*]If all else fails, and I emphasize that I am to be the last resort, you can send me a money order and I will sign you up. I am doing this on my own and am not in a position to handle a large volume of transactions, so please don’t go through me if you have other options and just don’t feel like using them. E-mail me for details. WARNING - going through me is not going to be fast, and I will only accept money orders in US dollars. [/ul]
I wish there were a thank-you thread for what y’all are doing here, Ed. You don’t know me from Adam most likely, but I’m a long-time poster here. I’ve made some contributions, I think, but I’ve been a pain in the ass from time to time as well. But your admins, Tuba, Lynn, Arnold, and Gaudere, all cared enough to tolerate me, chastise me, and give me a second chance. It is clear to me that you’ve all worked very hard to do this. When I consider that the alternative might have been shutting down the board, I’m even more grateful for what you’ve done. Anyway, thank you.
(sorry if this has been suggested. it’s a long thread)
Would it be possible to have a system like Livejournal has? That is, when someone pays for their membership they’re also given a limited number of codes which can be used by anyone to set up a functioning account for free. This would certainly help us keep the core Dopers around as well as allow Dopers to invite intelligent and productive people to the boards.
Another possibility would be to allow active Dopers to ‘sponsor’ new members at a discount.
These features are currently disabled for a variety of reasons, so there’s a variety of answers to your question. One of the arguments against avatars is stylistic: Many of our members feel that they would detract from the style of this board, unduly emphasizing appearance over content. So that one we’re not likely to add.
As Ed mentioned back at the beginning of this thread, there’s a possibility of multi-tiered subscriptions, where one might pay more for added features, and custom titles were mentioned as one of those possible features. So they have an incentive not to give those away for free, if they can sell them. But if they decide against that, I suppose it’s a possibility that they’d open them up for everyone.
We have, in the past, tried the dots on the envelope feature, before this latest change was brought to the table. It’s a useful feature and consistent with this Board, but unfortunately, it turned out to be a huge resource hog, to the point that the boards were completely unuseable while it was in effect. It’s conceivable that, with payed subscriptions, demand might decrease or supply might increase to the point that it becomes feasible again, but don’t hold your breath.
And even without malice aforethought (which we already have enough of), editing posts is just asking for chaos on a board which moves this fast. No window would be short enough to guarantee that nobody replies to your post before you edit it. And if it’s something to be changed immediately, then you should be catching it on preview, anyway.
Meanwhile, Tranquilis, I agree with you that there are other potentially better moneymaking methods which should have been tried first. My point is just that none of those methods is actually risk-free, so a real decision has to be made by the administration of the CR on which risk to take. Now, their decision might not be the same decision that you or I would have made, but we weren’t in a position to decide.
Please, please, PLEASE Google PayPal and doing some research on them if you’re considering signing up with them.
To say that their reputation is “not untarnished” understates the matter considerably. My own experience with them was not positive: they offered some options whan I used them and then did exactly the opposite of what I told them, including opening an account I didn’t want and RETAINING MY CREDIT CARD INFORMATION WHEN I TOLD THEM NOT TO!
Please be careful with PayPal. You’re giving them access to your money, they have almost all the abilities of a bank with none of the oversight or accountability.
Getting one of those VISA debit cards most places is as easy as opening a bank account with a few dollars, it works like a credit card but just taps the bank account. Depending on the bank they’re variously secure, but you can make your own security by limiting the amount of money in the account.
This is one hell of a thread. Is there a FAQ, or alternatively, ‘all your Subscription Questions answered here, please stop asking the same questions’ -type thing around. Make it a closed sticky, like the Pit Rules, and leave this open. That way this thread can be for quibbling over the details, and cut down on people posting the same questions. (Because let’s face it, at 10 pages, it’s a lot to trawl through)
And I’m sorry if this has already been suggested. To lazy to trawl, that’s me
Sorry if this has been addressed already, but I don’t have the patience to go through 11 pages looking for an answer.
When the board switches over tommorow morning will all post counts be reset to zero? Or will they remain as is till April 22?
I (and, no doubt, thousands of others) asked for this awhile back.
When I suggested MBSD charge a memnbership fee, one of the mods went to great lengths to explain to me that money wasn’t the answer to our problems.
Well, the truth has changed, apparently - as it seems to do every so often. And I have no criticism of the mod. If no one else makes mistakes, how come we have Bush in the White House?
Anyway, I hope this helps reduce the bottlenecks a little.
I just want to say I’ve been with PayPal for over a year, and I’ve had no trouble with them at all. In fact, I simply forego anything that doesn’t offer me a PayPal option.
Perhaps they’ve had problems, but I’ve never experienced any.
Well, you can count on my $5, and we’ll see if the board is still interesting enough to support next year. But if we’re paying for the board now, IMO we deserve…
A guarantee that there will never be ads on the site (or at least that subscribers will never see them). I pay for satellite radio so I can hear music without advertisements, I choose not to pay for digital cable because I don’t want advertisements on my menus, and if I’m paying for the SDMB, I don’t want to see any advertisements here either.
Some form of editing. Come on, just about every other message board has this feature, and it hasn’t killed anyone. Paying customers shouldn’t have to beg and wait to get their broken coding and incomplete/duplicate posts fixed like schoolchildren asking to use the bathroom.
Assuming that’s Central Time, you’ve still got an hour.
I don’t see why anyone’s post count would change. Why would it? All that’s going to happen is that there’ll be some code added that will keep track of which registered user has paid a subscription fee, and which one hasn’t (i.e. which registered users are 30-Day Guests, and which ones are Subscribers), the same way it keeps track of which registered users are “BANNED” and the occasional “Member N/A” or “Unregistered” from the old threads. Post count has nothing to do with it.