I don't think having a subscription is a terrible idea, but I'm bothered by the execution.

• Beta testing "perk" from a site that has a habit of pushing new features that are barely functional and haven't been tested.
• Supporter forum "perk" from a site that hasn't listened to user feedback in the past, or even bothered to ask for feedback.
• Ad-free "perk" on a site with extremely obtrusive ads that everyone who knows how to blocked the first day they appeared.

I and many others donated to the site when that was still an option. In my view you don't need to focus on "adding value" with a subscription service, you need to actually give people confidence in the future of the site. I'd more happily pay $1 or $2 a month for only the badge and name perks, assuming Staff acknowledged that the above are serious problems with the site that they're working on.

@Liv I don’t have them. Were you an original donor?

Any former site staff also received complimentary Supporter

Could we get a non-credit card payment option? They are pretty uncommon in Europe. Since I don't know anyone in person that has a credit card I can't even ask a friend to do that transaction.

@shenef you should be able to use your debit card :D

I used my debit card and it worked

It seems that on profiles that have made use of the supporter options, you can no longer get a preview of the runs' descriptions by scrolling the mouse over them.

@Meta tbh i never knew that debit and credit cards are different things. It seems those are equally uncommon here.

I can't enter the data of the bank card that i have cause it doesn't have an expiration month (only an expiration year), no "CVC" and the number on it is too long.

Original Donor applies to what percentage of the site's total userbase, exactly? A very small one I expect, and those are the users who have demonstrated the longest-standing support and investment in the site's development. Was it really deemed necessary to scrimp and scrape over not offering those people automatic lifelong supporter status as a gesture of goodwill? Those individuals' support of the site extends far beyond their financial contributions; those are the people who helped build the site up and encourage communities to adopt this site as a home. Not every community was on board with using SRC, and not every community still is.

This is just ridiculously tone-deaf to me and serves as another demonstration of how the site ownership is far-enough removed from the history of the site that they've lost sight of some important things.

This hurts. I get it. Sites cost money to run. But at the same time, this web site was relatively ad-free for a long time.

Until the acquisition.

Hope you all realize that "boost a community/game" is going to turn into a lot of e-begging. Because you've now introduced money into what is inherently somewhere it doesn't belong. Example:

Not that the tweet makes sense since "we need players with ad-free experiences" is an odd thing to beg for, but the Boost concept is just a big enigma to folks that see the rocket skate board on every page now, and just assume it's probably like Discord Nitro where the pages themselves get more features or something.

But back to the main point: Ads barely existed. Then they got worse and worse, where they proliferated more and more content, to the point of the site committing the atrocity of replacing the bulk of the page background with ad space.

And now that it's reached peak "and this is why you use an ad-blocker in 2022", out comes the "hey guys we're on your side! Rather than fix the problem, pay us repeatedly!" Yet another subscription service for yet another web site, for people that just want to play video games fast. And I know you have to spin it like a net positive, Meta, being community manager/front-facing and all... but come on.

Maybe it's time to re-think the whole ad-spam thing, rather than just going "let's squeeze money out of our community which three years ago was barely asked for a thing"? At best, this should be a small, one-time cost, without gamifying it by throwing "boost my community please!" ads all over the site. About the only way to justify otherwise is to be 100% transparent about the operation costs for this web site, broken down sensibly, to justify why you have gone the "fleece your user base" route.

P.S. How much (dev) time, money, and effort went into building this support/boost system, instead of doing things like fixing functionality that was broken in a recent user settings update?

P.P.S. it's been months and you're still doing the awful "let's add horizontal scrolling to tabs" thing. How long does it take to realize what a mistake that was and revert it?

@TheDoctorBlue I do think you've raised some interesting points, but as far as I can understand boosting just provides three active members with ad-free browsing and doesn't promote the game; if e-begging becomes a problem as anticipated it's probably for the wrong reasons.

@RaggedDan I addressed that in my post. Wrong reasons or otherwise, it's going to encourage it. And it's going to make the site worse, because now the site has intertwined money with speedrunning. Whether people beg for ego reasons or otherwise, that's a net negative.

So I do have to ask: Is there a way for communities to opt out of this? Because I guarantee you there will be those who would choose not to participate in this.

hmmmmm this is reminding me alot of discord nitro hopefully you can improve upon it and make it more unique

for the love of god, i didnt even bother to look at the payment options. add paypal seriosly.

I did look at the payment option. I realistically can't because I don't have a mastercard/visa, and getting one does cost me more money than I'd like. Outside of PayPal I can only pay with iDeal in the Netherlands, and I don't think you'd go for that since it's NL only.

Welp.

As for premium itself: It's not all bad of course. As @Daravae mentioned, the name is difficult to see, people who don't want ads do that client side (mostly because it got ridiculous). Access to beta is always fun, but I'd probably keep it chronological for now. Next to the forum, maybe a supporter-only channel on the discord (im not on, but soon).

Q: How long will the annual special go for, and will that stay on that price, or will it be 30 dollarbills now, 42 dollarbills next year?

@Riekelt & @survivalMichi Other payment methods are currently being discussed, I'm not entirely sure what we can do but at the very least we can look into supporting PayPal - I'll also bring up iDeal with the team. It's not something I've heard of, but it seems relatively common that Germany and the Netherlands have these payment issues so I don't necessarily see a problem with supporting proprietary payment systems for those countries that are having issues.

Also @Riekelt, as an OG Donor you should have some amount of complimentary Supporter in https://www.speedrun.com/user/Riekelt/settings/supporter_subscription if you want to claim it :D

A Supporter only section for the Discord is also a discussion worth having given the amount of requests we've had for it over the last day or so, for sure

As for annual special, I'm not entirely sure but I just asked so when I get an answer I'll come back here and let ya know :)

Can you seriously stop posting things saying that supporter is something really bad to get. Supporter is seriously not that bad especially since it’s only $4 a month. Everyone is getting annoyed by your spamming including people that don’t like the idea of supporter. So please stop spamming as we have already heard your opinion.

@bold you can express your opinions freely, but don't spam the forums with humongous images.

@Riekelt RE: the annual launch special price

Talked to the team and got confirmation we wont suddenly increase price at any point. If you buy with the annual launch price, you will lock in that price moving forward. As for how long this promotion will be running, I'm not sure but at least for the next week or two.