Believe me, I understand. I struggle to find a few bucks to donate every Freepathon I can. My family's business has been hurt by Obamanomics like you wouldn't believe.
Let me expand a bit on the funding model I mentioned in my last post.
Delphi Forums has (or had) a three tiered membership plan:
A) Basic membership: basic posting privileges, plus visible advertising, and no digital bells and whistles. I think it was $20 a year (might even be every other year).
B) Intermediate membership: basic posting privileges, plus visible ads, with some digital bells and whistles included. I think it was $30 a year.
C) Premium membership: full posting privileges, NO visible ads, all the digital bells and whistles, plus admin level privileges (if assigned by a forum owner). I think it was $50 a year. Naturally, JR would have to figure out what pricing structure works best for FR memberships.
The beauty of this design, is that even a church mouse like me can afford a Basic membership so I can post, but if I can swing just $50, I can enjoy the full benefits of the site for a full year.
The other side of the funding model is, of course, the paid advertising. It's a dual stream income model, with built in incentives for members to donate more. Deserving, but destitute members could still be gifted with community supported memberships.
I didn't mention the lurker level. There's no cost for that, but one can't post.
Windy, there are people for whom $20 is a fortune right now. I know several. If they had it, they’d use it for food.
An idea that I’ve been working on (in the back of my head for several years) is a sister site completely separate from FR where we can have an all of the above approach. I signed up a year ago on two different “cloud” providers and have even built a prototype “conservative social networking system” using some AJAX programming techniques and some user defined page set up techniques of my own design. Each user can sign up at the membership level he or she desires and can control his/her own page(s) or forums and control who may or may not post to them or even access them, ie, each paying member is his own site owner/administrator/moderator and can even recruit others to assist. And it could be a for profit site where we could sell merchandise or advertising or whatever. The only basic restrictions are they would have to be pro-life, pro-family conservative pages.
And FR would just continue along as it is.