[Stefan71a]

Lee and Keith,

Thanks for bringing up our situation to the surface (say ours since I think we should share the continued existence of the Beoworld community and its sites) – I’ve been a member since 2010 and have not been a gold a member all the time. The gold membership I got to access the enhanced information in terms of manuals etc (this is a real gold mine in finding older B&O technical information).

The prize draw was a bonus I did not pay so much attention to at the time, but during the last years, I have been a lucky guy, and I am now the lucky owner of 2 B&O prices.

I stand behind the 1st option, reducing the amount of price drawn to 1-2 / year – a Christmas celebration/price draw would be the one to go if it will be one / year.

I´ve earlier been running nonprofit community web pages by myself for many years and know exactly Keith´s situation and how much TIME it takes to keep up with patches, hacking attempts, enhancements, etc…  For Lee, I see you have put your own heart/soul into this site and clearly earnings as well via your earlier business.

Some ideas for possible adjustments/enhancements.

1. Auto renew payment – I can only see to myself, I´ve missed renewing the membership every time. Would it be possible to have an auto-renew setup (not sure if your payment solution allows it – not all payment gateways allow this). 

2. Several payment alternatives for the subscription
Depending on the % fee for the payment handling. Due to many people’s financial situation right now and what I read between the lines members are not always willing to pay a possible increase in yearly fee…   Can an option be as it´s on other sites, that you have a slightly higher total yearly cost but you as a member have the option to split it out on a longer time / see it as a monthly subscription that doesn´t have the same impact at the time it occurs?

3. Try to reactivate older inactive users (many can be like me – missed renewing my account).

4. See if we can engage community users with deep knowledge in different areas to write special projects/articles (if we are willing to sponsor with our time to write on what you can achieve/enhance the usage with your B&O equipment).

These articles could then be available for paid members, but with a teasing ingress should be publicly available and could also be sent out via monthly e-mails to the registered members.

5. Also if we see users start to be active in other closed forums (Facebook etc) can you partially integrate the forum/sites with Facebook and other social sites and members’ possible Facebook profiles?  Know Kith this may be a fundamental change in the ground.

I used this way in the site I used to run, as soon a member logged in on the community site it was a notice showing this on Facebook. Also if we wrote something on the webpage it got a push with ingress to Facebook and we took back users’ activity to our site.  Then you got indirect advertising about the site to users. 

6. Make it easier to see different member levels, and push the customer for the member levels you wish they should take. Also as other have stated, make it easy to donate to our world’s existence..

When I today should renew my gold membership (again I missed it) I pressed renew my membership link and on the renew side I did not notice the default membership choice is the free membership plan… guess what happened. Realized after a second attempt that the Bronze level is the default re-new suggestion!

To finalize my thought, I feel a bit worried that so much of our site relies on Lee and Keith´s time and possibly own money. I´ve seen what may happen when one of two enthusiasts for some reason can´t keep up and I think we should have in mind how to secure and continue Lee´s and Keith’s creation in Beoworld.org and allow them to have some peace in mind.

Anyhow, I´ve greatfull for the energy and time you put into Beoworld and Stevens’s sponsoring/support of Beoworld.

Greetings from Stefan in Sweden

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