What are Paid Subscriptions?
Building up and maintaining a successful community requires three different things: enthusiasm, time and money. Most forum owners rely entirely on advertisement to cover their expenses, but with an increasing number of ad blockers and the users' general aversion to banners, this doesn't work out that good anymore. Burning Board 4.1 ships with a paid subscription system, allowing users to be granted access to special features or entire sections of your page through one-time payments or subscriptions, opening up a completely different approach to monetize your site.
Payment Methods
Payments are currently processed through PayPal only, but the underlying payment processing system is flexible and can be extended with different providers either through an update or plugins.
For legal reasons you're able to point users to your Terms and Conditions which must be accept before making any purchase.
Managing Paid Subscriptions
Paid Subscriptions utilize the underlying user group system as already provided by the software, users will be automatically added to the selected user groups once their payment has been acknowledged. This is a powerful tool, granting you a fine-grained control over the exact benefits of the subscriptions, for example ad-free site access or access to restricted forum areas.
You can offer subscriptions both as a one-time payment or as a recurring subscription, users will be automatically removed from the specified user groups once the subscription expires or has been terminated by the user (recurring subscription only).
It is worth mentioning that subscriptions can exclude each other, enabling you to setup different subscriptions with varying length and discounts.
User Interaction
Users can access the list of available subscriptions directly within their settings, it allows to subscribe to offered plans and lists all currently active subscriptions.
Dashboard Boxes
We've added two additional dashboard boxes which can be freely placed on all supporting pages, enabling you to promote your subscriptions, e.g. on your start page.
