Disable User Upgrades - what practical uses are there?

Dean

in memoriam
http://xenforo.com/help/user-upgrades/
For each User Upgrade, it is possible to individually disable other upgrades. This is useful if you have multiple tiers of the same upgrade and only want users to be able to purchase one tier.

When would this be desirable?

All logged in members have access to all upgrade options, at least at this time. When would disabling the other User Upgrades be of use?

This is all I can think of:
  • Selecting one of many sports teams to select to 'win' for the season. Have the upgrade enabled for purchase up until the start of the season. Then at the end of the season reward the people that picked the winning team somehow. Football, soccer, baseball, F1 racing, those types of things...
  • Possibly a gaming Klan - though I know nothing about those, pick one, and only one, of many available.
I must be daft because I cannot think of other uses.

Input?
 
I suppose if a forum is a general sport forum there could be 10 different football teams to choose from, 10 different baseball teams to choose from, 10 different soccer teams to choose from, then each logged in member could buy one of each.
 
I think it is intended to not allow stacking of upgrades. Say you have a 1 week and a 1 month upgrade. From what I understand they cannot extend until the first has expired so a person buys 1 week and then decides to go for the 1 month, it doesn't extend the upgrade. So to avoid issues you can disallow members with current week upgrades from buying 1 month until the 1 week expires.
 
I think it is intended to not allow stacking of upgrades. Say you have a 1 week and a 1 month upgrade. From what I understand they cannot extend until the first has expired so a person buys 1 week and then decides to go for the 1 month, it doesn't extend the upgrade. So to avoid issues you can disallow members with current week upgrades from buying 1 month until the 1 week expires.
Right.. and I agree. But that is the opposite of what my members are asking for.

With regards to what they want, they want to be able to make a general donation when they are in the mood and have money. The best I've come up with so far is this:
  • General Upgrade - $25/year - few benefits
  • Donation $25 - $25/day - no benefits at all - so if they really feel strongly about sending money, they can donate that much every day
  • Donation $5 - $5/day - same as Donation $25, no benefits.
If anyone has a better idea on those types of things, I'd like to hear it.

Then I got to thinking how the selection of one-of-many upgrades could be put to entertaining use... So I thought of the 'selecting sports teams' for the season idea. I am quite interested if others can think of other ways to use that feature.
 
As long as you don't disallow them, what you have should work fine.
For the record, I've been involved in forums for a long time, and I really do not want people to have the ability to send as much as they want. Sometimes they get carried away trying to 'out do' each other. Once someone sent a total of $5,000 for a charity type thing, and they really could not afford it... but they did indeed win the prize for sending the most money.

But if they want to keep sending $25/day.. then that would be different. At least they would have a chance to come to their senses.

I keep thinking there must be other ways to use the ability to select one, and only one, upgrade. One way to view it is paid admission into a vb3.8 social groups. Not sure if that makes any sense, but in a way it does remind me of that.
 
I keep thinking there must be other ways to use the ability to select one, and only one, upgrade. One way to view it is paid admission into a vb3.8 social groups. Not sure if that makes any sense, but in a way it does remind me of that.
Being that upgrades add secondary usergroups, they could be used as a way to do join-able usergroups. Create an upgrade that doesn't cost anything and it gives the user access to the secondary usergroup.
 
Being that upgrades add secondary usergroups, they could be used as a way to do join-able usergroups. Create an upgrade that doesn't cost anything and it gives the user access to the secondary usergroup.
Upgrades require pay pal, and pay pal has a minimum amount of $1.

I just asked our membership if they wanted to pick one of several sports teams for the 2012 season. $1 / 8 months. Long enough to cover the season, yet short enough to allow a different selection for the 2013 season. The ability to pick a different team once a 'upgrade' to a team has been made would no longer exist (Disable User Upgrades for the other teams). The idea would be to remove the selection of those just before the start of the first contest.

I've no idea if they are interested. In theory, if a separate usergroup is not required for each selection (which be massive effort on my part), there could be several contests in several leagues, or in the case of my forum - racing divisions.

Maybe once the custom profile fields are available, I could have a 'who did you pick' field which would show up in the post bit that they could type into.

Prizes to be determined... :)
 
Didn't realize there was a minimum. If there was a way around that it would open many possibilities.
For our purposes, it makes no difference. People like to give.

I'm thinking of the prize being a General Upgrade for 2 or 3 months, people in the General Upgrade will be able to set custom user titles and a few other things. The General upgrade is normally $25 / year... so in theory it would be an entertaining way to change user titles for $1. If that makes any sense.

Then if long after that they want their custom user title changed, they could either win the prize again, or buy a General Upgrade for full price. The 2 or 3 month upgrade does not need to be available for purchase to the general public.
 
I'm thinking of doing some complementary upgrades. I have a feeling that a number of them would then buy an upgrade after the free one expired. So I'm hoping for some type of mass manual upgrade function eventually. I have too many members to upgrade each one manually.
 
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