WasagaWader

One needs to ask themselves what is the purpose of a paid section.  Raise money to help cover hosting fees?  Be the dividing line between casual members and regular members?

I belong to other forums non fishing related.  some offer a paid membership option.  I agree with you can not tie membership payment to content.  you will lose people and divide the forum. 

You can tie fees to features though. increased inbox size, badges, signatures, skins and the like.

There are ways to fund the forum through sponsorship.  The forum I ran generated about 10K a year through sponsorship.  Members never paid a dime though. Mods did not make money either.

As for raffles. There are tons of ways to manage this without fees.  One forum a mod/admin takes donations from members in the form of product and each month makes 2-3 starter kits from the donations and does a contest.  Another forum does a PIF type thing.  Going to try the PIF here to see if there is interest.

The site works, before I say what I think about paid memberships I would need to know why,

Oh I am all about humour!!

I am probably one of the most sarcastic sunsuvabitch you will ever meet.  I just try and save it for people who I think/know will get it. 

Okay I am new to this site.  I really enjoy some of the people here (not you Remyboy) and by in large most of the regular members are pretty respectful of each other.  But I can not help but notice in the past few days/week a trend of many threads escalating into a bit of a shitshow. 

I know we are all passionate about fishing, and some of us Like me are here to learn as we are new to the sport but are equally passionate.  We all need to work together to keep this forum and fun and friendly place where new people are encouraged to participate not sit back and lurk as they fear what may happen if/when they post something.  We can all be ambassadors of this site and our respective disciplines of fishing by asking our self how we would want it to be handled if we were the OP.

Again it seems like the frequency of this is increasing just now.  Maybe it is the time of year and there is more activity or maybe 1 or two threads started to run wild and people thought that was fun and continue it elsewhere.  I do not know.  I used to run a forum like this (not fishing) with 15k members most under 21.  I get the mob mentality, I have seen it.  I have also seen it ruin allot of good things too.

Just wanted to get it off my chest.

/rant

Welcome, I too am new but so far lots of friendly advice all around