UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? Threads based classifieds question

On my board (currently 6.2.3) I have a section dedicated to Cars and parts for sale & wanted, but within the last year the site has grown beyond my expectations. The core members I've had for several years now said that they wouldn't mind a flat fee to post a classified for sale ad, and that it would actually help pay for the site and keep the "passerbys" from posting stuff at random like they do now.

Is there any way to charge a fee before posting an ad, yet keep it threads based, or maybe just "look/feel" like threads? I've thought about manually doing by only allowing those that have paid the fee to post the allotted amount of ads, but then that's one more thing I have to keep an eye on.

Any ideas or suggestions?

JoshPet's PayPal addon automatically controls access for users that have paid to your PayPal account. Maybe it could be changed so that all users can read the forum, but only those that have paid can write to it?

Mmm...I like! Sounds like it's worth looking into...anyone else attempt anything as I described above? Anyone foresee any problems I may run into, software-wise or other-wise? I've put this off for a while now, but my members keep asking me for it.

Well, I followed your advice and looked into the PayPal addon (myPaymentPal), and so far I like what I see. Couple of quick questions, though:

- would it be possible to set it so each payment equals one post?

- would it be possible to set it up so if a person pays for multiple ads (say $40, or $10/ad) they get 4 posts in the ads section?

What I foresee some users doing is if they have mulitple items for sale throwing them all in 1 ad. Not necessarily a bad thing, but kind of negates the paying for the ad thing and clutters up the ad...but is that just part of it?

You'd have to direct those questions to JoshPet.

Probbaly would need to do some customized hacking to get that done.

The addon basically ads them to a group when they make payment for x amount of time. You probably could hack so that the group gets changed after x posts in that forum. But the integration would probably need to be pretty deep.

The paypal thing is really designed to add them to a group for x number of days, then removing them when they cancel or the time period has expired.

i'd be EXTREMELY intrested if you ever modified your code for this josh, it'd be a brilliant way to fund the hosting costs of my site!

Chevy454,

I am also working on a subscription based project. It is a little different than yours but, I have been doing my homework on this concept.

You should be able to do this right now with no hacks and very cheaply using Josh's myPaymentPal. First understand how it works. While it has a lot of features, at the core what it does is it will add a member to a specific group for a specific amount of time. So here's da plan...

1. Set up a forum, or multiple forums that will hold the classified ads.
2. Give "Read" privledges to these forums to the non-paying group. I would include "Guests" and "Users" (the group most visitors are assigned after basic registration) They will then be able to read the classified ads, but not post to them.
3. You then set up a group that has "Read & Write" privlidges to any classifed ad forums . So when a member is belongs of this group, they will be able to post to these forums.
4. You use myPaymentPal to sell subscriptions to the classified ad group. You could actually have multiple choices. Such as 1 day for $XX / 10 days for $XX / 1 month for $XX / 1 Year for $XX / etc
5. In summary... A member of your site would be given the option to purchase posting rights to the classified ads section for a set amount of time. He could choose from several plans. the longer he can post, the more it would cost.

This plan will not give you the pay per post ability, but that sounds like a bear to do, coding wise...

In my humble opinion, that might be an overkill. I think the trick here is to set a pay structure up that is fair to a serious visitor, yet will run off a cheapskate. You might have a few that will buy the cheapest posting package (least amount of posting time) and post a ton of ads, but I bet most of the members that plan to post a lot will buy more expensive plans so they can plst at their liesure and not be rushed.

Anyway you can start there and see how it works. If the system gets abused by a lot of people buying small access plans and posted gazillions of ads, you can look into custom coding then. It would really suprise me if this happens. In my experiences in life, anything that costs anything tends to run off cheapskates...

Good Luck...

Sill looking at doing a true "payed" classifieds section, and ironically my board members are the ones asking for it! Still not for sure how to work in the subscriptions, though, using the PayPal addon, as it looks like someone could easily take advantage of it by waiting until they had several items to post, and then doing them all at once.

Also, can it handle "multiple" groups at one time, or just a single group?

Anyone else in a similar boat as I?

Chevy,

Threads is one of the few (maybe the only?) bulliten boards that allows a member to belong to multiple groups. Each group can have different privliges on each forum.

For example you could have is set up to where a member could subscribe (have ability to post) to Car Classifeds for $10 for 30 days, and concurrently purchase a subscription to the Motorcyle Classifeds for 1 day or subscribe to all classified forums for say 30 days, or 60 days, or 6 months, etc...

I should have a site up for beta testing in about a week. I will try and let you know. It sells online automotive training through forums controlled by subscriptions.

Photopost Classifieds comes out real soon and integrates with Threads Groups real nice.

Chevy - couldn't you use Josh's paypal addon, and then set the classifieds forum to use real moderation? Then, you just approve their ad? Not perfect, but could work.

Actually that would be a good fit, MyPaymentPal works with anything group based.

[]allusivekudos said:
Chevy - couldn't you use Josh's paypal addon, and then set the classifieds forum to use real moderation? Then, you just approve their ad? Not perfect, but could work. [/]

That might be the way to do it.

Give me the lowdown on "real moderation"...ironically enough, one of our mods volunteered to do this anyway, but I wanted something more "automated" in case they were unavailable for a period of time. The less involved our mods have to be, the better...

I'd add a new user attribute to the users table.
It stores how many ads a users is allowed to post.
It shouldn't be difficult to tweak the paypal addon to increment this value by one when someone pays.
You just have to modify the addpost.php to check if the user wants to post to the ads-forum and if he has still credits left.

Edit the forum and turn on moderation. Then all posts made in that forum are only visible to admins and moderators in that forum. Then you can approve or delete them before they are visible to the masses.