I am sorry I really don't see why you need a two tier system and I don't see why you need to give tax information etc.

Or is it a way of stopping some people making money? By making restrictions and forming an elite?

What is needed and surely it is all that is needed is for someone to take responsibility for checking uploads and for the owners to tighten up security on the site. And that surely is what part of their income is for? You don't need a star system you don't need a comment system you just need better security. Maybe you need stronger rules on what can and cannot be posted.

Make it a rule that there must be so many textures in the zip file (or so many tubes etc). Make it a rule that you can only do one upload a day - that will stop a lot of people doing 50 or 60 uploads in a day. Checking on email addresses etc should stop people creating more than one account to circumvent that

 I can see the point of making people log in to download. But is everything here for download or is some of it not for download and if it isn't how do you score that for payment.

The one really really nice thing about this site is that it is easy to upload to and it is easy to download from and those are great benefits :) 

The two teired system would be better than what is here know. primarily because there is so much lower end items.

Also I don't think amount of downloads should have anything to do with it.  This should be a judgement call of the Moderator/ queue master.  Given any artist rather starting out or schooled doesn't matter as much as talent.  I wouldn't call it pro I would call them Admin Approved or spotlight items.  Pro is used to much most people don't give it as much weight as it used to get.

Limiting the amounts of uploads is counterproductive to the site. The way the site was designed for large data base. the more items the more page look ups.  The More the better.

Having the content broken up into the different sections: poser and model and stuff. Helps but that's a start. People look for the better rated items. We search on ratings and review.  On my writing sites spotlighted or admin approved items get 1000 time more hits than normal stories.

Edited by Arotech on 01/10/08 09:27 AM.

I am the same as you Matrixworks I either do a search here or somewhere like rendo to find what I am looking for here.

ratings have never come into whether I download something or not

Hello everyone.

     I thought of an interesting idea that would both reward quality content and make posting junk unprofitable, without any monitoring.  It won’t correct intellectual theft, but monitoring can work for that.  The idea is to base the payment on both downloads and views.  My idea is to square the number of downloads and then divide that by the number of views.  1000 views with 10 downloads would return one tenth of one hit.  1000 views with 100 downloads would return 10 hits.  1000 views with 500 downloads would return 250 hits.  You would have to protect the downloads from bots and cheaters, but you would discourage people posting items that don’t get a high rate of downloads.  It will also discourage people from creating misleading links to their content.  It’s not a perfect idea, but it has possibilities.  If this seems too extreme, you could always take the square root of this number. Calc(1000/10) = .316, Calc(1000/100) = 3.16, Calc(1000/100) = 31.6, and Calc(10000/1000) = 10.  This would actually be the total number of downloads divided by the square root of  the total number of views

              -David

Edited by DavidJHanna on 02/11/08 08:36 PM.

Yet another thought. (Wow two in one week! I hope I don’t make a habit of this.)

Two options we have been playing around with are password protection and having to type the text we see in a graphic image.  There is an older technology that we can modify, that just may add the security against bots, without creating any extra effort from our visitors. (I say we, because we are supposed to be a community, therefore the health of the site affects us all).Instead of having separate buttons for “donate with Paypal”, “Download” (or “View Larger” for art, or “Play Video” for animations), we simply have one large image.The image would be generated by the server, stamping the buttons in random locations.  When the visitor clicks on the image, only the location on the image is sent to the server.  If the visitor clicks on a valid area, the appropriate action takes place and the result is logged.  If the visitor clicks on a non-valid location, that is logged too.  Cheaters would be found out when the invalid outnumber the valid clicks.  The image would have to display large, but have a very small file size, to insure quick loading. 

What do you think?  I know this is possible, but do you think it would actually work to reduce bots without alienating visitors?