Rate Limiter ideas

[strawberries90]

one area of the etano script that I still haven´t exploited to it´s massive potential, is the Rate Limiter.

I was close to using it in recent months, when I kept finding spammers from Senegal signing up and posting the same messages to all my users.  But I banned three or four african countries entire IP ranges, two weeks ago (via the htaccess file) and boy that worked beautifully.  I haven´t had one spammer sign-up since then. 

Anyways, back to rate Limiter.  Any ideas how we could use this powerful tool?  It could be used as a marketing tool, I imagine....offer users so much and then they have to upgrade their membership, if they want unlimited access to our sites.  e.g. a free user is able, for example, to only post 5 messages per day.

Any ideas?  Anyone using their Rate Limiter?

[Johnboy]

Hi Strawbs

I have been using the rate limiter successfully for about 5 months, remembering my site is an ADULT social networking site.

Heres my settings
Free Member     flirt_send     3 in 60 mins     Membership Upgrade Options
Free Member    search_advanced    8 in 15 mins    Membership Upgrade Options
Free Member    view_photo    7 in 5 mins    Membership Upgrade Options (This makes perverts pay) lol
Free Member    message_write    2 in 2 mins    Membership Upgrade Options (This stops spammers)
Non Member    profile_view    3 in 3 mins    Sorry page
Free Member    profile_view    1 in 1 mins    Membership Upgrade Options
Free Member    saved_messages    1 in 1440 mins    Membership Upgrade Options
There are other ideas I haven't even explored YET!!

I feel these limits are just enough for them not to get peeved of and never comeback to the site, and enough for them to return, and my prices are very reasonable. For the small amount of active members I have, I do really well financially.   I just need to 10 times my members lol.

[admin2]

Offer something for members who invite X new members to your site. The guys I am working for did this and their cost was something like $1/new member. Totally worth it.

I can build a link that is unique to each member which they could use to invite others so you would know who invited whom.
Also, using a webmail import library like Octazen's address book importer so they could invite their contacts might be a good idea.
And an affiliate program might work.

[maverick]

Offering something to members that refer new members to join the site would make for a good mod or add-on. You could offer awards or incentives that's anything from cash, gifts, to free memberships. For example, 3 free months for every 10 new sign ups they refer.

In order for this to work efficiently, some sort of tracking system would have to built-in. This could be handled in a number of ways. One possibility is to include a special field on the Join page where the person could enter a either a special code or simply add the referring member's "username" (which I think would be the simplest and easiest method). If a username is included in the referrer field then a credit is added to that username's account. Then the member could redeem their credits for whatever value or offer you place on credits. This wouldn't have to be an automated system where the credits are automatically redeemed, the member can redeem their credits manually themselves by clicking a link and forwarding the number of credits they want to redeem which goes to the admin (or something along those lines).

Affiliate programs can work if you're already a pay site, but this also typically drives up the cost of memberships because if you don't offer 40%-60% commissions, especially on the sale of lower-priced ticket items, it can be difficult getting affiliates willing to promote your goods or services. If you're going to run an affiliate program you'll also need to have top-notch sophisticated  affiliate software for tracking sales and paying affiliates, the affiliates need to have an account they can log into to view their sales and payment history. There's also a few payment processors around that provide a built-in affiliate program where they handle everything, including paying your affiliates. But again, affiliate programs can really dig into your profit margins so you have to really sit down and carefully workout your bottom lines and price margins.

[maverick]

This kind of ties into my above thoughts about the idea for referring new members and credits.

If there was Virtual Gift Shop mod, the credits could also be used to purchase and send virtual gifts to other members. Now I've always sort of thought Virtual Gifts were kind of stupid and who would pay to send a gift that's nothing more than an icon representation of a gift. I did some research a little while ago for client that wanted me to create a bunch virtual gift icons for their Virtual Gift Shop.

Facebook for example charges $1 a piece for sending a virtual gift and in 2008 made over 30 million just selling virtual gifts. What I found rather surprising during my research is that many of the people who thought virtual gifts were stupid and silly also admitted to purchasing and sending them anyway.

There's a very popular Baby Boomer SN site that also has a virtual gift shop, however they technically don't sell them, you earn credits and redeem your credits to send virtual gifts. You earn credits for being active on the site, not sure exactly for what activities but in theory it could be for most anything such as referring members or writing blogs, etc., etc. I thought this was a clever strategy for creating activity on the site which they claim has been very successful for them.

Anyway, just tossing around some ideas in conjunction with Dan's ideas.

[admin2]

Hmm, the credits could be switched for the current scoring system. But then the search results should be ordered differently, not by score. Anyway, that's a minor thing.

[dwhs]

Offer something for members who invite X new members to your site. The guys I am working for did this and their cost was something like $1/new member. Totally worth it.

I can build a link that is unique to each member which they could use to invite others so you would know who invited whom.
Also, using a webmail import library like Octazen's address book importer so they could invite their contacts might be a good idea.
And an affiliate program might work.

I would buy both instantly! Great ideas, I really need to get a affiliate program going. I would rather have one entrigated by datemill then a third party.