New monetisation feature proposition

feature
1

Hi All,

I have been thinking of a way of monetising the website and during the launching stage for us about 4 months old site it it a bit tricky.

There is different monetising ways :
1 - ads ( I don’t like it, it looks ugly, and is not worth the money unless you have crazy traffic )
2 - subscription like nomad list : Nomad List . It is tricky to do this in early stage because we want content

3 - our idea / solution ( Wallet type or credit kind )
is there a system / plugin that offers the opportunity to group2 level people to top up credits where 1 crédit would allow 1 post. Credits would go to stripe account.

So random customers can post but companies would have to buy credits.

Does this would make sense ? does it exist ? We would be happy to be beta testers.

Many thanks

2 Likes
2

I’ve implemented this as a Discourse plugin, and have been testing on my sites for a few weeks now.

There are one or two things I wanted to add (tests, documentation, full internationalisation) before announcing the new plugin on meta.discourse.org

However, if you’re willing to be beta testers, I’d be very grateful for your feedback.

My plugin is here: https://github.com/chrisbeach/discourse-paid-pinning

On my forums (example: https://se23.life), I allow businesses to create one new topic free of charge. If they want to create subsequent topics, they can pay a fee using a Stripe online payment. As a bonus, their paid-for topics are pinned for four days. Here are some screenshots:

Links to “Advertise” page

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“Advertise” page (non signed-up user)

Note that the text is customisable (js.discourse_paid_pinning.advertise_spiel)

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“Advertise” page (signed-in user with transactions)

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Payment Popup (Stripe Checkout)

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Button on User Admin Page

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Clicking this reveals the following:

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The following transaction indicator is also visible to staff members, and clicking on it shows the transaction list:

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17 Likes
3

Hi Chris,

what’s the status of this plugin? I’m considering using it to let users post commercial messages in a specific category - does the plugin support this?

4

The plugin has been used on my forums for a while now and taken a few payments successfully.

It’s also in use by @Jeremie_Leroy and he has encountered one or two issues which I haven’t yet managed to reproduce on my instances.

I’m only able to work on this project in my spare time and am currently very busy with other things.

I plan to write a proper test suite and would gladly accept pull requests and comments on the code.

The plugin does not support this, no. It sounds like a good feature to offer and I’d accept PRs at this stage.

1 Like
5

hi @bartv,

It works well for people to post a pin topic for the price and time you will setup.

6

That’s great to hear! I’m a beginner in plugin development, but I’ll gladly comment on the code if that helps - any areas in particular?

I’m afraid I won’t be able to contribute a PR for a category restriction though - is this something you’d be willing to add as a sponsored project?

1 Like
7

I’m afraid I cannot commit to sponsored work at the moment as I have a few other things on the go.

2 Likes
8

I am wondering how I can hide the Advertise Link in the Top Main Menu so it only shows in the drop down?

Thank you

9

Happy to merge in a pull request for this if anyone else would like to contribute. I’m not able to work on the plugin myself at the moment.

If anyone would like to fork the plugin and become the new maintainer, I can update the relevant posts in this forum to point them to your fork.

1 Like