[RFC] VIP Paid Membership

[Master_Cylinder]

While phpBB can do the forums, groups and permissions, easily, there isn't a reliable/working way to accept payment and then manage that for paid membership access.

There are a couple of PayPal oriented mods, one is just a donate mod and the other is still in beta and not really what I was looking for. The question is whether or not this should/could be in the core?

While I know of several forums and other pay for special access websites that have this option, why not phpBB? Is there a licensing issue with including the ability to accept PayPal (or something else) payments or something?


Discuss...

[Alien_Time]

-1.

Although I am not against this idea but I think it will be hard to implement. For instance, PayPal payment doesn't work on all countries and this cannot be used by all users globally. secondly PayPal changes things from their end quite often and resulting in the payment process to fail if these are not updated. in which case, these features would need to updated frequently and can't wait for the next phpbb version to be released. These are the challenges I can think of for this. Again, if this added to the core it should be fine but extension should be more appropriate especially if it's needs to be updated prompty everytime PayPal changes things fom their end.

[Master_Cylinder]

True but *some* countries are more restrictive than others even as far as having discussion forums, at all, so I'm not sure that global PayPal support is required. Do we really have to support payments to DPRK or Iran to have it supported in places where it would be legal? PayPal would be more globally accepted than any other solution that I can think of.

The PayPal API upgrade thing could be a serious issue but maybe they make that part more "modular" so that API changes could be handled by admins rather than devs? With the new Extension system I think we'll be seeing updates far more often anyway but would it be fast enough? I don't know. I'd be open to an Extension for this too but we don't even have a decent MOD for this yet so maybe if it were more of an official Extension? *shrug*

All I know, for sure, is that there is a demand and it's not currently being filled by any working solutions that I've found. There is a 3rd party app that says they support phpBB too but I'd rather not pay $200.00 for it.

[Mess]

-1
Imo, this is to specific to be in the core.

[Pico88]

-1
I agree with Mess.

[Kamahl19]

You disagree with such a good RFC, which could help to 90% of boards and then, you propose something for 1% of boards.
-1

[bantu]

I agree with the previous poster. This should not be part of phpBB core.

[Master_Cylinder]

90% of the boards aren't going to be sending html spam/newsletters and more than 1% would have VIP sections if it was easier/possible to do so. Nice try though...

[Jessica.]

Does not need to be part of core. -1.

[keith10456]

-1