The membership model..

Shortly after starting MLS, I started getting queries from people asking where they could send in money to support the site. The old site that closed its doors had a paid membership that gave people additional benefits beyond the basic free membership. After I started realizing the costs of running a busy site like MLS, I decided to offer a paid membership. Admittedly, the paid membership had very little in the way of value. You get some cute gold stars in the forums, less ads on the site, an email address on the server, 100mb of space on the server to store photos etc to share in the forum, and the warm fuzzies that you're helping keep the site you love online. There's very little content that I hide, mainly because the system I have in place makes it very difficult.

DNN provides the ability to show different content to different users by using groups. This is a great step forward from what I was using. The problem is, how to add people to that group easily. The built in DNN functionality doesn't work that well. Some of the shopping cart options aren't that great either. So I started looking around. I found the "Subscription Tools" module by Scott McCulloch pretty soon after I started looking. I actually paid the membership to his site long before I started my conversion because I knew how valuable his modules were. The subscription tools are great, and his other modules like Child Links and Private Messages are must haves. Give Scott a visit at Ventrian and join his site with the Gold membership!