Paid Users Permitted To Buy Over 100 Userpics
Title
Paid Users Permitted To Buy Over 100 Userpics
Short, concise description of the idea
Paid users are now permitted to buy 100 userpics, billed annually. Permit us to buy additional increments of 100. During subscription reductions, allow us to review all active and inactive icons, and choose for ourselves which will be active at any given time.
Full description of the idea
The absolute maximum number of userpics a paid account can get is 135 (100 plus, in very small increments over a span of several years, up to 35 "loyalty pics" for renewing the paid LJ account). There are LJ communities dedicated to making userpics, and many people do it as a hobby on their own. Others are just addicted to the pics. These people would all happily pay more for additional increments of 100 over the 100 which can be purchased now. People who don't want more wouldn't buy more.
I'm not a programmer and don't know if this would have to be worked into the user's account space, or what, but if so, LJ could allow people to give up their gallery space or their voice posting space in order to have more space for icons. I admit I have no understanding of what a user's account space is, or what limits it may have, or how to check on that.
Finally, for this to provide the greatest satisfaction with the least hassle, it should be possible for someone who is NOT renewing one or more increments of 100 to review ALL their active and inactive userpics and select which will remain active at their new, lower, userpic allotment, instead of LJ choosing for them. They would do this review after LJ has inactivated the excess using whatever protocol LJ now uses, by going through whatever LJ has left and marking some "inactive" to create space to go into their inactive userpic archive and shifting the ones they can't bear to leave behind to "active" status. LJ could choose to limit this to one episode a year, if having users repeatedly revise their "active" list becomes a server burden.
There was an earlier thread on this idea in 2004, but the issue has changed. The earlier suggestion was about getting more than 50, and is out of date, and made no suggestions about permitting users to review the inactive icons to choose individual icons to reactivate within their lower limit, if the user has declined to renew their subscription to higher icon limits.
An ordered list of benefits
- More income for LJ
- Tremendous satisfaction for userpic addicts
- Greater convenience and happiness for people who have paid for large userpic collections, but who have decided to downscale their accounts, by letting them choose which icons will remain active at the new, lower level, instead of LJ choosing arbitrarily or randomly.
An ordered list of problems/issues involved
- Minimal programming time (I think)
- Minimal server burden, because allowing one person to buy 200 userpics would be no more of a burden than allowing two people to buy 100 each
- When someone chooses to renew only 100 pics instead of 200, LJ would have to have some way to put the others on inactive status, just as LJ does now when someone who has bought 100 decides not to renew. (This seems minor, since the programming already exists to deal with people who drop their 100 subscription down to the standard level for paid accounts.)
- With higher income, LJ would have higher corporate taxes?
An organized list, or a few short paragraphs detailing suggestions for implementation
- Add more options on the page which now permits us to buy 100 userpics to raise the number to 200, or 300.
- In paid accounts, allow us to choose from a menu, checking off which benefits we want, with a box for "give up gallery space for 100 free user pics" and "give up voice posting for 100 free user pics" but make clear that these aggregate with each other, and with the paid 100, so that a person could have all three: the 100 paid, the 100-in-lieu-of-voice, the 100-in-lieu-of-gallery.