My Board

Now that everyone knows blog space won\'t last forever (500KB), I think we should try and come up with numbers for a premium package.

I think that the premium package should definatly offer no ads (not sure about the powered by line, tempted to remove that too, since they\'d still have the kb domain name). Do we add anything else in? A custom skin, maybe for a extra one-time fee? After the internal change to the system, it would prove quite hard to offer hotlinking to premium members and anti-hotlinking to those who are free.

Do we offer support for paying users? Dream account is probably our best bet here for maintaining the subscription (yay, another toy to install).

I guess support would be a good thing to offer; Another marketing thing we could do is (don\'t shoot me) offer a small discount to the subscribers at SCH and have a place in their profile for a blog link. I think that because so many bloggers are teens we should keep the paid accounts affordable. I haven\'t really looked around at what other places charge for premium accounts; definitely no ads, and I don\'t have a problem with removing the \"powered by\" link.

what about once they hit the 500kb mark? does it automatically delete the old post? does it archive it? etc...

us3rX <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... /ph34r.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':ph34r:\' />

When they reach the limit no new comments or posts can be made. The owner has to delete comments/posts to free up space or subscribe to remove the limit.

Good idea about the SCH link, will need to think about how it could work.

If they are going to have to delete their own post/comments and such, maybe make an \"purge\" button that will delete the last 100kb of posts and comments.

us3rX <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... /ph34r.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':ph34r:\' />

Yes, I agree. Also thinking of some way to archive the posts but remove the comments.

Is there an option for users to back up their blog? I think custom skins/more skins are a good idea to offer to subscription users - every skin that is made can also be showcased as a web design by kn.

Something to consider once V2 is up is possibly a blank blog that can switch styles (like those forums used to showcase skins). I have no idea if that's feasible, scott?

In terms of size, I think 5mb should be sufficient, and also provides us to advertise suscribers as having "10 times the space" or free users.

Backing up is a good point, definatly something which can be done. My only reservation is that it allows users to see the inner workings of KB. Not something I think we need to worry about with current users, but could be a problem in the future.

Not sure about what type of adverts were going to be on the free blogs, perhaps a mixture of google and our own sites? If so; state only small, perhaps either small images (like that wee \'yay\' firefox one people have) or text links for our network sites; Once i\'ve mangled with \"CSS PLESK\" <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... labove.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'(lol)\' /> i was going to redo my own blog, and give my current one for you to use (obviously making a somewhat-blank header, and making/re-adding the things i took out) I deffinatly dont think the price should be high, though, i think 5mb is alot..but it would be hell hard to use 5mb up fast, so then a cheap price for something that they can use

Ohh i also thought; i dont know if we could make it be done auto seeing how its plesk (perhaps CSS plesk could be intergrated, lmfao, i really need a life! *tear*) and give them, like other blogs, [url=\"http://username.kb.com;\"]http://username.kb.com;[/url] id be more then happy to add them manually, as would, im sure, other admins; we really need to give the paying users more of an edge to the unpaying bloggers; and i also think we needa spice up the front page (ada) with some big, fancy words making ours sound the best, ya know? Like \"we offer a smooth, seamless blog bursting with more options then a rubiks cube\" <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... >/blum.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':P\' />

Further more, perhaps below, above where ever, on the options page, have a textual Current Mood and Current Book and Current Song/Band input box, that would add it somewhere on the blog (even offering a link to the inputed data) The more we have for paying, the more we get paying! I also dont think staff (a select few come to mind) should be given a premium account; we have enough perks without needing this <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... igwink.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\';)\' /> Sorry, wouldnt let me merge my last 2 posts

The subdomain thing would be easy to set up with mod_rewrite in a htaccess file... so technically yes, a user could be given a subdomain instead of an extension, without the need to actually set them up.
Regarding the backup feature, I have to agree with Scott that you need to be careful not to release \"too much\" with the backup... So I thought about it a bit this afternoon.
What about a dynamically generated html or php page that would list off all their blog entries (of course, without the comments) in a thread-like system, much like the \"view printable version\" of many forums. The user would then have the option of saving this page to their drives, or copy-pasting it. As for the backing up of the actual blog, that should be left to the kg administrators... since there is no sure-fire way to offer blog backups without releasing the inner-workings, and a backup would be useless on any other blog system, since it\'s coded just for this one.
Perhaps for a small fee, a user can have their blog templates backed up, and restored on demand (like the feature offered on invisionfree, but more dependable and faster [I am sure Ada knows what I mean here]).

Note:
Here\'s the code for the mod_rewrite... it would be added either to htaccess (making it configurable by any staff member with access), or it can be added by one of the server admins into a vhost.conf file in the domain\'s root conf directory (I\'m including an explaination of line-by-line at the end for those who want to learn):

[code]<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?(([^\.]+)\.){1}domain\.com$
RewriteCond /home/httpd/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/%3 -d
RewriteRule ^/(.*) /%3/$1
</IfModule>[/code]

Here\'s what we\'re doing, line by line:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Checks to see if the mod_rewrite module is available. This prevents errors if for some reason it isn\'t.

RewriteEngine on
Enables the rewrite engine

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$
We don\'t want www.domain.com to map to domain.com/www, so if the HTTP_HOST is www.domain.com, we\'re not going to proceed.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?(([^\.]+)\.){1}domain\.com$
This says \"The domain can optionally have a \'www.\' in front of it. It should then have a string of characters without a period in them that can be any length. This should be followed by a period. This entire group (the string of characters followed by the period) should occur exactly once. It should be followed by \'domain.com\' with \'domain.com\' being at the end of the domain string.\" If these criteria are not met, we won\'t proceed.

RewriteCond /home/httpd/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/%3 -d
This takes the string of characters tested for in the above step and checks to make sure that a directory with that name exists as a subdirectory of this domain\'s httpdocs directory. If not, we won\'t perform the rewrite.

RewriteRule ^/(.*) /%3/$1
This now takes that directory name and appends it to the URL that the site visitor entered, following it by everything else after the initial slash (i.e. if we enter foo.domain.com/bar/narf.html we want it to map to domain.com/foo/bar/narf.html).

</IfModule>
Ends the <IfModule> block.

I never thought that mod_rewrite could be used to construct something like that. I\'ll definatly look into this. At the moment (well, for v2) I\'m using mod_rewrite to remove the need for a new dir to be created each new blog. So killablogs.com/test/ is actually going to killablogs.com/index.php?name=text which is going to save a [b]lot[/b] of problems. I really should have looked into this earlier, since it\'ll definatly clean things up.

I think your right about what \"backup\" feature we should off, Night. I\'d feel a lot more comfortable knowing they can\'t see whats in the db, and we could do something like the pretty easily.