As a long time Beyond3D'er and someone who runs their own forum as well (both XenForo), I was surprised I had to put up with ads here. I know a highly popular site like Anand needs some form of income obviously but there should be a subscriber offering to pay to remove ads. I vastly prefer sites that have an option to donate or subscribe in some fashion so I don't have to utilize adblocker (which I'm not here) and really want the site to be able to continue their content creation.
XenForo has great built-in payment gateways and subscription promotion systems already and [bd] plugins has extended payment options so there's no human interaction required apart from the initial setup and setting up the ad blocks on the forum to check for group memberships.
Outside of the forum is another question but XF is easy to hook into in code and check for sessions and group membership to also prevent ads for subscribers.
Patreon is also very popular and has an API that can be hooked into to achieve the group promotions in XF.
XenForo has great built-in payment gateways and subscription promotion systems already and [bd] plugins has extended payment options so there's no human interaction required apart from the initial setup and setting up the ad blocks on the forum to check for group memberships.
Outside of the forum is another question but XF is easy to hook into in code and check for sessions and group membership to also prevent ads for subscribers.
Patreon is also very popular and has an API that can be hooked into to achieve the group promotions in XF.
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