I actually love an idea like this to acclerate feature development on Discourse.
Perhaps this is something the users can drive by identifying features like “advertising plugin” with a specification - and put it onto some sort of reverse crowdfunding site.
I don’t know if this exists - but what would be ideal is if one of us ( i.e. a forum manager) could put up a request/feature spec and say that they’d pay X$ for it. Then a developer could respond by saying he or she would do it for a total of $Y - and then when you get a critical number of user’s willing to pay each $X so that the total is $Y - the developer builds it.
For example - I’d pay $300 for this advertising spec: (and if you get a developer to bid on this project for say $10,000 - you’d need something like 30 people to get it moving.
So - what i’m imagining is a user-driven Kickstarter like site where we could request developers to “BID” on a new feature request and we say how much we’re willing to pay - then we recruit other forum managers here to help fund it. I would love this type of thing.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/advertising-specifications-list-plugin-request/11673