I was thinking about an idea similair to this a while ago. I noticed there were so many little forums that sprung and never survived and I wanted to solve this issue. What I proposed can be rougly explained in the following way:
propose a complex plugin that allows:
- Administrators to make certain forums or categories of their forum public. These would be available for sharing with other forums. Other Administrators could search for that forum and add them to their board.
- Administrators to search/browse for public forums or categories and add them to their board.
- Administrators to enable/disable the universal General Discusion forum.
This plugin would enable Forum Admins to keep their forums private yet boost them through the power of other communities! We are globalizing the content and user pool for the goodness of communities!
We would have a board ourselves that would allow users:
- To browse/search for all public forums and sections
- Mix and match these public forums to make their own personal ultimate discussion board
- be part of an ultimate registration pool where they would be registered to all the boards they wanted without having to be registered to more than one forum.
I soon came to realize this would never work. The main reason for this is because people create a forum because they want to own something that succeeds. If they are sharing ownership, that feeling of owning something dimities...There were also so many other problems with this.
(2011-05-11, 09:40 PM)Aries-Belgium Wrote: [ -> ]Then another problem will rise. The step for releasing paid plugins is much smaller so more and more people will start doing it. After a while the paid plugins will outnumber the free plugins and eventually take over the mod site. This is rewarding the wrong authors. MyBB should only promote and offer free plugins in my opinion.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we'll see a lot more good plugins at low prices (like 99 cents each, for example). If people won't pay, if the authors won't make money, they won't make paid plugins. I'm willing to spend a few bucks to get more polished plugins. I understand people who aren't, but I think the worry is overblown.
(2011-05-13, 01:45 PM)Uncontrol Wrote: [ -> ]Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we'll see a lot more good plugins at low prices (like 99 cents each, for example). If people won't pay, if the authors won't make money, they won't make paid plugins. I'm willing to spend a few bucks to get more polished plugins. I understand people who aren't, but I think the worry is overblown.
Well, I think the opposite will happen. That there are going to be more half-baked and useless plugins released just to make some money. The biggest problem is that you basically don't know if a plugin is any good before you pay for it. It could be a really good plugin but it could also be a plugin that adds farthing noises to your forum or something
I think introducing paid plugins on the official mod site is going to lower the overall quality of the plugins. Lets say someone requests a certain plugin, it will turn into a race to finish the plugin first to be the first to get the money. This will produce even more crappy and badly written plugins and that's something we need to avoid.
Make it like youtube. After so many downloads, time spent, and quality, let them apply to do so. Have a price cap of ten dollars, and plugins take longer to review, etc.
I think mybb.com should not host paid plugins. MyBB is free software, not pay software. So in keeping with that, it should only host free plugins. But I would like to see MyBB host a page for vendor listings. On this page could be a list of outside vendors that make pay and free plugins, themes, etc. -- but make it clear they can't vouch for these people.
Quote:I think mybb.com should not host paid plugins. MyBB is free software, not pay software. So in keeping with that, it should only host free plugins.
I don't see why people keep connecting these two things. It's not the same. The software is still free. But plugins/add-ons don't need to be and there shouldn't be an expectation that they will be.
MyBB is not "free". It is "Open source". Which means free and most stuff for it is free.
(2011-05-13, 07:49 PM)Darth Stabro Wrote: [ -> ]MyBB is not "free". It is "Open source". Which means free and most stuff for it is free.
Lets pretend Ubuntu doesn't have paid items in its repos then.
(2011-05-13, 02:12 PM)Aries-Belgium Wrote: [ -> ]It could be a really good plugin but it could also be a plugin that adds farthing noises to your forum or something
Not really, something like this would have to be moderated such as ShopMyBB does; a team of individuals who have time to go over each submission with a fine-tooth comb and either give it a suggested price or, what I think might be a better idea, give each submission an honest rating so users will be able to charge what they think is fair but there will still be a "professional" opinion readily available. This, imo, should be treated with organization rather than a free for all run by the community. There needs to be a dedicated team in charge, or it just won't work.
As an additional option, I think authors with external sites (such as myself, Audentio, Dynaxel, etc.) should be given the option to have a listing on the site for a fee (reasonable, though, such as $2/month per ad, or $10 per site, or both, etc.). At this stage MyBB wouldn't have as much control over the system but since the idea is to extend MyBB I don't think it would be a bad idea. I do think MyBB should be charging a small royalty (excluding external sites, due to obvious reasons and hence the listing fee) too, which would contribute to operating costs.
I guess what it all comes down to is a good team who can check out submissions, nothing more tbh.
Quote:Lets say someone requests a certain plugin, it will turn into a race to finish the plugin first to be the first to get the money.
That could already happen, but I don't recall seeing such a situation yet anyways. Really most of these are situations that can already occur here and I don't think a change to the mods site would increase that.
Maybe MyBB could have stuff for sale on the Mods site, and take a small cut of the sale price. It would definitely help with the operating costs, give users a central place to find more or less all of the plugins and whatnot, and give authors a high traffic market to sell their stuff. I would be thrilled to sell my stuff here if MyBB got a cut of it. Plus, if MyBB generated enough to "profit" off of the marketplace, they could put that money towards advertising.