So in the saga of trying to figure out how to pay for my site I think I've decided to try out user donations. While we have a ton of traffic on our site and I'm pretty sure we would be able to get advertisers I've come to a couple conclusions about that.
First is that in general people hate advertising. Second is that for the time involved in finding and working with advertisers, and I'm not talking about going through a banner company I mean contacting companies that might be interested in advertising/sponsering, that it would have to generate a significant amount of money to make it worth our while.
There was a conversation on my site about this and it seemed people are willing to contribute. Unlike some sites a great number of our users interact with each other offiline, going as far as weekly pub club function with 50 people, so we have a close knit group. One of the best suggestions was finding a way to recognize the people who donate money. While we could use the avatar feature to do this it would be nice to let people have their own avatar as well as a donor avatar. Addionally it would be cool to put donors in bold letters or in a different color on who's online, similar to the who's online hack were mods and admins were italicized.
Has anyone else done something like this and are there hacks available. I'd image the hardest thing to do would be creating a way to check off which users who donated and have who's online query against that list.
