I tossed around some ideas... but in the end they ended up making things more confusing/complicated. To keep it simple, you need to be a premium member to start a thread in any of the "problematic" areas now.
Please do something with Design contest area to i saw many people create threads their and offer some good money but never pick any winner or member . And its really disapointing when you work hard
Maybe there should be a rule there, you start a competition you either a) deliver on the promise b) get a disciplinary action if you don't deliver - ratings maybe? or even a escrow type function, where the cash is deposited first & the user must chose a winner - again if they chose to withdraw the money, give them a negative rep.
Escrow on a $15 contest ? So if the Escrow gets 6% that is $0.90 ? Will that even cover paypal fees ? You guys will work for nothing, the rest of the world works for money. You are cheating yourselves no one cares.
Escrow type service, even if DP managed it & got the processing fees, which means more coin for DP... there's jobs in the $50 plus range - if they're legit or just offering a higher reward to gather more submissions I can't be sure. Some of us care because we want more activity on DP, and some of us are wanting to offer legit contests.
It's not my website so I have no idea what the owner wants. But just looking at basic math it looks like a completely ridiculous waste of time. I just grabbed the first 10 contest prices from the contest page, the average was $28. $10, $15, $35, $100, $11, $40, $25, $11, $20, $11 = $278/10=$28. To be an escrow for $28. ? to move the money you will have to pay some fees or set up your own secure platform. How much can you really charge for an escrow service ? Say 10% which is pretty high you might make $3 off of each transaction. Will $3 cover money transfer fees ? Maintaining a secure platform ? Disputes ? Scams ? Accusations of scams ? and what happens 27dyas down the road when the winner finds out it was stolen clip art ? How many contests a day ? 20 ? whaoo... $60. a day to run an escrow service ? (before over head). All for people that are doing free labor hoping to get paid ? Have they ever thought of getting a deposit and doing a legitimate job ?
You don't need to set up a full blown account or software to provide the service, all you need is an account on Paypal to deposit the funds, competition owner deposits the cash in to DP's Paypal, job's done, winner chosen, DP release the cash to winner. Maybe with a better service, the competitions could pick up, maybe the escrow service could apply to more "wanted" type services & problematic areas on the forum... But you're right about "Sort of like stealing clip art all day and hoping someone will buy it one day in a contest" - reminds me of Freelancers.
The problem I would see is PP taking the fees and nothing left along with charge backs. This makes me wonder how Fivver does their set up.
Yeah, Fiverr is like 20% isn't it. I use Envato, their marketplace is about %33 to the seller for non exclusive products & %50-%70 for exclusive (for those who don't know what that means, non-exclusive means the product is also sold else where & exclusive means only sold on their site) & their market place still thrives - because of the weight of possible sales. They have a minimum account deposit of $20, so you deposit a lump sum & use that for purchases... could use a similar format here. That way you have to have money in your account & avoids small deposits for single products. They also keep your cash if you leave it untouched for over 12 months.
what if premium members make these problematic areas spammy? lot of internet marketers who live from buying expired domains and selling it to third persons...it is very simple for them to pay for premium membership and continue with spamming through non sense and low quality offers
There isn't a way to stop the area from being spammy. Things like buying/selling links is spam in itself. The sections will simply be more manageable with less threads. The goal is to minimize or eliminate those areas. I suspect there will be far less threads if it's premium only.
^^ tbh that was one reason I like this forum; Prior to the change it was still nothing like the other SEO communities. For me, the problem isn't spam in the forums - I'm at least intelligent enough to weed out what's good and what's bad - so in my case, it just pushes me somewhere else. Where I've seen spam is in my Conversations inbox, which is much more direct and bothersome; I'm suspecting that will continue despite any premium membership - at least I wouldn't pay for a membership when it grants no privacy in other ways. Other places have had mandatory join dates or post limits before access is granted to certain places, and upon infringement then temporary bans are made. I'm not saying paying is a bad idea or that I won't at some future point change my mind and subscribe, it just might not be the best way to tackle spam. Temporary bans for spam. If someone tries to sell a domain claiming all kinds of stats and the domain is only a month old, yeah, spam. Bring up the awareness for reporting spam and reliable members will be more than happy to police things and contribute to keeping the community clean. Then again, if you don't have a large enough Mod crew running a large forum is a big hassle so drastic measures are necessary...
That is the underlying issue with the "problematic" areas... they cause spam in conversations that we then need to deal with... For us (as mods) it brings zero value to the forum, and all it causes is more work for us. The whole point of making those particular areas premium only is not to grow it or grow income... rather to slowly do away with those areas without doing it abruptly for those that rely on them. Personally, I'd prefer if people *didn't* get premium membership to post there.
Is there a way to charge a fee for each successful transaction? That is, I guess, without a big hassle setting it up. If the spam is coming from those forums, in this case, the BST section, how will that stop spam when non-paying members out for a quick buck (eg, the dirty spammers) can still read and start conversations? -not arguing, I'm genuinely curious about how it'll play out is all; if you have more tweaks in mind. I used to be mod at a medium sized Photoshop community, and the active members are the usually the ones you don't have to worry about as much; it's the fly by nighters than come in, read a few threads, have no plans on posting but still have access to features like certain forums or PMing, that can be trouble.
Yeah... there was a few other ideas, but they ended up making things more complicated. The idea I liked the best (but again... made things confusing on how things worked) had to do with non-premium members could start threads, but only premium members could see them.