Premium members

Pikapower

Hello,

is it possible to add a premium members section ? Also i need the premium memebers to make a payment to access this section.

Thanks!

manticore789

I too would be interested in this. If there was another user level called premium, then it would be easy enough to configure the categories To line up with it.

donshakespeare

This is interesting as I am going to set one up soon.

I am thinking aloud now, so bear with me.

1, 2, 3...

1. User goes to my "store" (paypal etc, attached to forum or not) and purchases membership/subscription.
2. User gets a nice good specific token/id number. The token can be made to expire after x number of weeks....
3. User inputs the $$ token in user's profile extended field (only said user would be able to see it)
4. Forum code then always validates it against a list of valid codes.
5. If valid, user is bumped up automatically to new premium user role. If expired, user is stripped of said role (and gently scolded :))

THINGS FOR ME TO DO ASAP

1. visit here for ideas https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/premiumaccounts-plugin
2. visit here for more friendly thieving https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/purchasepremiumroles-plugin
3. search high and low for opensource and possibly free alternatives to https://memberful.com/ and https://www.memberspace.com/

hmm...!

donshakespeare

If using SSO from mother site (CMS), one could do all this there, and then map a user to the correct role in Vanilla Forums.

R_J

@donshakespeare sounds good! Here are some additional thoughts on that:

1. I wouldn't even consider making it a store (too much complexity). Simple additional profile page with a paypal button should be enough. That page could also hold the entry field for the code. Using a ProfileExtender field is not very flexible.
2. You could try paypals webhooks to directly promote a user after payment (if his paypal and forum mail address is identical, that should be no problem, otherwise the user name should be included). If using webhooks, there is no need for holding a bunch of tokens, you can directly save the subscription end date to the database
3. A notification for the user would be nice: either an automated conversation or an activity notification. That could also be used for a reminder when subscription is about to end ;-)
4. I wouldn't use external member pools of any sort. Why give away your data? If you want to have something like that, set up your own OAuth2 server and use OAuth2 plugins of the scripts you are using