I’ve worked in and around support for a couple of decades, and if I had a pound for for every time I’d heard variations on “I’ve never spent any money, but I was about to and now I’m not” I could afford to buy out GoFar and rewrite the forum myself.
Pithy as always, Cougar, but I think I make a valid point. If you have current Premier subscribers stating that the experience is less than Premier it will deter some folks from signing up.
Put it this way, here’s some off the shelf forum software that a forum of mostly 18-25yo gamers managed to afford last week when our site crashed jsut from ewxisting donation funds:
Forum software is not that expensive, vBulletin is only a couple of 100 $s, and bigger forums like Overclockers have been running it untouched for years. I think the biggest reason STW is still on a hacky wordpress code, is moving the database. They committed to the wrong platform, and it’s just snowballed from there.