[2018-03-11 edit: Struck out/modified some of my suggestions; issued correction, q.v.]@theymosHas the potential been considered of allowing paid accounts to have avatars at low rank, via Copper Membership or otherwise?
It seems reasonable to expect that this would substantially enhance the draw of paid membership; I think it perhaps could even justify a
moderate huge bump in price. I speak from experience: When I was a Newbie Copper Member, I myself would have paid extra to sport an avatar—
say, the equivalent of $10 more. (Now, I wouldn’t; I’m only about a month away from Full Member.) Avatars are fairly basic forum self-styling functionality, and not really a good indicator of rank: As it stands, you only need to be active for a bit over four months to get an avatar; and there are no further enhancements to avatars at higher ranks.
I did enjoy Copper Membership’s allowance of links in my signature (as it did at the time). I used that to link to my PGP keys on keyservers, to my Bitcoin tip addresses, and later (as Jr. Member) to some open-source Bitcoin utilities I’ve written. Of course, most important to me was the principal practical feature of Copper Membership: The ability to post images, which improved the quality of many of my early posts.
I dislike the idea of possibly inviting more visual assaults from advertising, especially annoying ad APNGs. On the other hand, who would pay enough for rented avatar space to make it worthwhile to risk buying paid membership for a spammy account? I am not familiar with ad rates, but I do know: An avatar is much smaller than a signature, and most importantly, it’s not clickable. The avatar of a widely-respected Hero or Legendary might be worth something at market, if only for “branding”; but I doubt a newbie farmed/spammer account holder would find it worthwhile to pay a significant fee just for the avatar.
Apologies if this has already been discussed.
FYI, because I just ran into it: The 75% reduction does -sadly- not affect the hard limit of 4 seconds between certain actions (including posts and reports). No, its not an issue and I will not ask for a refund. ;)
Nuts. I was actually contemplating buying Copper Membership solely to be able to report more than one post every 4 seconds. Now how am I supposed to keep up with the shitposters? :-\
I’ve actually been bitten by that. Actually.
My qualifications for
whining humorously nitpicking: “You have reported 257 posts with 100% accuracy” (within a total amount of forum time which currently gives me an 84 activity level).
I tend to batch things methodically. If I find a clump of spam posts (as so oft occurs), I will open each one in a new tab, write my report texts in a text editor, then repeatedly iterate through the tabs clicking “Report to moderator”, copypasting, double-checking, and then sending the reports. Call it the reporting machine-gun method. By such means, it has occasionally happened that I tried to submit more than one report within 4 seconds.
(To be clear, I do not actually see this limit as a problem.)
