"Premium Members Only" forum isn't used

[Nick]

Do any of you offer a private forum for premium members that isn't used by them? Since I started offering premium memberships, I've had a private forum for donors, but it has hardly been used by anybody. We have 52 premium members and only 70+ posts in the private forum.

Anybody else in a similar situation?

[Brandon Sheley]

On vbsetup we had a forum like that and it didn't have a whole lot of post either.
I would try to post specials or ideas for quick marketing ideas in our donor forum.

[Desu]

My site offers a BETA section (Where members can get closed versions of the software we offer), and other than in the release topics, theres not much there.

We also use to offer a dedicated member section, to members who had over 100 posts, but it was barely ever used.

[Abomination]

Ours is not used much, but it definitely serves several purposes

• Get initial input on site decisions
• Some special offers on products
• The are listened to more than others when site changes are requested
• People can discuss things without them being indexed in search engines

Originally Posted by Desu

My site offers a BETA section (Where members can get closed versions of the software we offer), and other than in the release topics, theres not much there..

I did something like this, and people started sharing login information with their friends to go into the private forum. Any ideas how to deal with that?

[fattony69]

Put a thread where they can talk about everything without consequences (within reason of course). Because of it, we have 22,991 posts in it LOL.

[MordyT]

I have seen it both ways...

One, where no one but the members who are in it know about it
Two, where it was visible and announced.

The one where everyone knew about it made the forum more popular....also they allowed some rules to be broken in that forum...

[Desu]

Originally Posted by Abomination

Ours is not used much, but it definitely serves several purposes

• Get initial input on site decisions
• Some special offers on products
• The are listened to more than others when site changes are requested
• People can discuss things without them being indexed in search engines

I did something like this, and people started sharing login information with their friends to go into the private forum. Any ideas how to deal with that?

We have an auth system put in place (For the programs), and we allow members to have two keys, so that they can share with their friends if they choose to (Or use on two computers).

Its just a custom form, with the program connecting to a file, and sending the auth code, and checking to see if the member is in the proper usergroups or not, but it could probably be done better.

We also thought about using a customized chat server (Sovereign, which is done in house by one of our developers), and having it check the database directly, so that there is no way to use a localhost method to bypass the auth check, but than you have the possibility of people saying we use it maliciously.