Category: Zone BBS Suggestions and Feedback
Hello. We are considering some new features on this site and are actively seeking your opinions.
The Zone BBS as it stands will always remain a free site. We are grateful for the support that you have given us over the past year and especially since the site's return in April.
As you might expect, we receive a lot of requests for new features, many of which we are unable to implement due to time and space constraints.
To help with this, we are considering athe addition of a premium membership class to the site which would gain access to some of our future features.
Before you get worried, let me state once and for all that the features on the site that you know and love will remain free. Anagrams, Blingo, and Hangman will always be free games. The boards, Graffiti, and Quicknotes will always be available to all users.
But there are features that we would like to add to the site that take more time to program and use more of our server resources. Adding a premium membership will help us cover our costs for these features.
What I would like to hear from you is what features you think we should include in a premium membership. THe sky's the limit, and we are interested in any ideas that you may have. You may post them in this thread, send me a private note, or send me an Email from the link on my profile.
Thank you again for your support of the Zone BBS.
Sincerely,
J.J.
Site Admin
What would you have to do to get premium membership?
It'd be a paid membeship.
Hey there. I would be willing to pay for the site. I enjoy the site. Voice profiles would be a nice option. I would love to hear what some of these cats sound like. LOL Keep me informed on your thoughts for the site's future. I like that everything currently in existence will remain free though, as membership would go down if everyone had to pay for QuickNotes etc. This site is a splendid procrastination tool for the workplace!
I think it's a good idea but it all depends on how much the membership will be and if the extra features are worth the money a member will be paying. Maybe do a survey and see how many of the current members would take such membersip for lets say $20 a year or whatever u want to charge and see if the idea is doable.
I think it is a good idea too. I think that the fee should be between 15 and 20 dollars. That's just my idea.
I think before we discuss a dollar amount, it is very important to discuss what we want features we would want implimented. As far as a suggestion goes, how about access to a ventrilo server that only premium members can use? I don't know how much a server costs per month to maintain, but maybe it is worth looking at.
A premium cost sounds good to me. Whether or not I would access new features, I'd be willing to pay a fee. I know that there is a great deal of work that goes into this site. So, premium charge is not bad. $20 isn't bad at all. I'd pay it, for sure.
Yes, we're most interested in feature requests at this point. Pricing will come later. Whether it be $25/year or $5/month or whatever it ends up, we want to have a lot of ideas to choose from so we can develop a set of features that are more than worth the money. I see a lot of sites who try to do premium memberships and don't offer much for the money,i.e. a premium icon and customizable site layout. Those may be pretty, but they don't add any functionality. That's why we're after ideas for concrete features to add, such as Ventrilo, or voice profiles, or some others which we have in the works as possibilites. Keep those comments coming.
Hi,
I hope that if you do set something like this up, that you accept Pay Pal. I'd much rather pay with that than anything else.
Hey. I have a feature suggestion. It would be nie if I could send quicknotes to two ppl at the same time, or another group of people, without sending them to all users who are logged in. If three friends and myself were logged in, we could open a conversation or something. That is just a thought.
How about the blind joke of the day? I guess pay pal could be an option, but please do not make it the only one. With the system they have in place for creating accounts over there, it's impossible for a lbind person to create a pay pal account on their own. Unless things have changed since last year when I tried to create an account.
They have one of those audio cues for accounts, at last check. How would the quicknote to multiple people feature work? I mean, how would you suggest it be implemented?
Now, I'm not well versed in computer knowledge, so this may be impossible to do, but here is a way that might be done. By adding a feature that would allow users to create lists of friends sort of like what happens on msn or AIM. After those users you want are added to the spacific group you want hthem to be added in, you could just have that option on the pulldown combo box to send to ths group or that one. Again, I know vertually nothing about php, so maybe this isn't possible? And, to be honest, I'm not so sure I really like the idea myself because people will get in to their groups, and it'll be harder for new commers to meet other members of the zone. But if that's what people want, then that's what people want.
To be honest, I don't like that suggestion about posting to certain groups either. I do have some other suggestionts though. Aside from the voice profiles which definitely occurred to me as soon as I read this, you could also include the opiton to add pictures to profiles. I know some people on this site are blind, but there are some people who can see some if not sited all together. This could be a good feature for them.
As for the premium thing, you should give options such as monthly, quarterly, or yearly. This will give new comers who want to try it out an opportunity to unsubscribe from it without giving too much money. Then again, the price of $20 per year is pretty good. I'd definitely pay it if the features were worth while.
I think that there should be some games that are larger on this server. YOu would could make a group game like chesse or checkers. That could be cool.
If we want voice profiles, why not use the windows record funtion, make a sound clip and find a way to uplode it to the server or just do a memborship to ftp.
That's how it'd work. We don't allow audio clips in profiles as it stands now because of bandwidth issues. We have to pay for the bandwidth that we push out, and audio is a nice hog of that. Premium membership would definitely give you this.
I really think it would work, and it's such a good idea. As for the group games thing, that sounds awesome too! Maybe someone can finally get around to making an accessible version of monopoly playible online! lol
Anyways, with the voice profiles thing, also remember my suggestion about pictures. I think that may be done the same way as well just like the voice profiles, and premium memberships would definitely be a big help in that area, cause it would give you guys the funds to work on this.
I have a couple things I'd like to say. The picture thing may or may not be a good thing. If there's going to be a membership cost, I think you should give newcomers a month free, or something. Then, they can decide if they'd like to become a member. I wouldn't mind paying $20 a year.
How could the pictures be a bad thing? It's only an option, and the audi profiles would supplement that. YOu could do one, both, or neither.
The picture could even automatically be displayed when one goes to the members profile; instead of like the audio clip where you have to click on the link... I know I do pics in Web pages all the time. I don't see why groups is a bad idea... You could have member create their groups, an individual user or all users. See what I'm saying? Or do I need to explain my thought better?
It would be cool to have some sort of a server or ftp center for premium members where they could exchange files (be that music or pictures or whatever) also allowing them to create much bigger audio descriptions. The problem with this though is that those culd only be accessed by other premium members, because you pay for the bandwidith when those files are accessed so if a non-premium member wants to check out a premium member's profile you pay for the bandwidth and so you could get a lot of people who pay no membership fee checking out the profile of a premium member and thus streaming lots of stuff.
I think a picture would be nice, it doesn't take much bandwidth, it's pretty small and it really gives the person a face and even if some people can't see it they can ask others. :)
Also, I think (this may not be helpful but you could try it) to advertize a paypal email address where people can make donations if they want to.
I know I wouldn't mind pledging $10 or $20 for the site if I had an easy way of doing so.
cheers
-B
These are all good ideas. Other things that would be cool for a premium membership might be a buddylist, ignoring board posts or PM's, and one I'd really like is more searching options in the profile directory. But that's just me. I think the FTP Server is a good idea as well. I don't know if I already mentioned this somewhere else, I think I did? Oh well, sorry if I'm repeating myself from somewhere.
Caitlin
Depending on the additional features, I'd pay anything from $20 a year to $5 a month, which could always be discounted at $50 a year. I would like to see a way to save quicknote histories, similar to chat logs on messenger. I also want to be able to delete my sent private messages.
hmmm. I don't think we can do the save quick note history thing. that just can't be done. This is mainly because quick notes are not instant messages in the way you receive them on aim or msn. They odn't have their own window and you have to constantly refresh to see them. Unless J or Chris can think of a way, I doubt it could be done.
Hmm, actually, if each message could be fed to a file, and then retrieved later when all messages want to be viewed. To save on space have a delete all messages, and a program that would empty them automatically ever so often? I'm thinking of the file because I know that's possible with PHP...
The quick notes could be saved on the server in a flat file that you culd download, it could be done certainly. To do it on the user's computer it would take some very enginus Java scripting to do that and I don't think it would work actually, I wouldn't want that personally, I'd be fine with having my quick notes/conversations logged on the server side, that can be done using php, there will be some type of security concern though, making sure no one else gets access to the files, but it certainly could be done.
Sorry I wasn't clear. I was thinking server side, not user side. <smile> As far as protecting the files; how about putting the files in a protected directory, and only give read write to the individual files. If the directory is protected then not just anyone will be able to get to them... Does anyone know whether The Zone is running Unix or Windows server software? Just curious because I know personally it makes a difference...
It seems to be using Linux. For the quicknote history thing you could just have a little link that says history under the quicknotes heading, and when you click it have the PHP script parse the info from a file (quicknotes.txt or whatever) and display them to you, it can save the last five or ten or twenty or something. One problem could be that it would be hard to create a history for each individual user, you'd have to do one big huge history.
James
Cool ideas. A few things. Quicknote history is planned. Basically, once you see a quicknote it is marked so you won't see it again, but they are saved, and have been for a few weeks since we put in the new system.
The current plan is to make the entire set of public quicknotes viewable, regardless of whether or not you were online, and then any conversations between you and others privately.
As for cost, we're looking at $20-25 per year for year, at least as an introductory rate. It may go up later on, but only if significant features were added, i.e. multiplayer games. As for bandwidth and audio profiles, basically part of the premium member's fee would go to pay for their bandwidth to allow anyone to hear their profile. You are paying for the privilege of letting all users, premium or not, to listen to your profile. We are also probably going to extend the length of profiles to at least 90 seconds, maybe 2 minutes. FI'm not sold on an FTP server, as I don't want a reputation to be another illegal file sharing haven. If I missed the idea on this, let me know. Finally, we will still definitely be adding features to the free part of the site. I've seen some sites become segmented between the paying members and the free ones, and we are going to try and avoid this. This means we don't have plans for premium-only message boards or graffiti boards, but again, we're open to ideas. Aside from that, there will be only a couple of changes to the regular member accounts, such as a limit on the amount of private mail that is saved.
Finally, I am against free trials for one reason: people will just create more trial accounts. It happens anywhere that they are given. We may do a money-back guarantee for a week or two as an alternative. Watch this board and the site for more news on premium memberships as it develops.
This all sounds awesome. I will totally invest in this. It sounds awesome. I know I keep saying this over and over, but one thing I reeeeally want is more profile browsing options. I know someone, i think it was J, said this can be done? But I was wondering if this'll be in premium or regular, or not done at all? Sorry again to ask.
Caitlin
Hmm, yeah, that file sharing accusation thing is a valid call. I didn't think about that before. It would just be fun to share stuff, like your favorite song or an audio clip that you find cool or something, but I suppose that's really what MSN is for. If you were to avoid the legal aspects you'd have to give the user the ability to upload the song to his/her area on the site and then allow others to stream it without allowing them to download it. I got the feeling this would take tons of work and a lot of time and might not be sufficiently use d to justify all that. It's just frustrating if you're chatting with someone, e.g. about music and say "hey, you know this song by this artist etc" and the other person doesn't, it's so tempting to be able to get the song or part of that song to that person right away and sort of explain what you find great about it or whatever it is you're talking about, it's so "rea life" esque to be able to do that. :)
cheers
-B
Ya, definitely true. But we have Ventrilo and a direct Skype interface to help with that now, so I guess that's better than nothing.
Yup what we have works great, plus we've got MSN and AIM and all taht other stuff. So that's cool.
Caitlin
can you give us an estemate of when this premium membership will be available?
Pretty soon, at least as a trial. We'll say more soon.