Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

None of these planned changes are set in stone.

They are just rough ideas and plans that are subject to change.

I'll poll premium members to see which ones they want implemented versus not implemented and to see which ones they want implemented first.

Any of the below changes cost money to implement, especially considered my programmer is my highest-paid employee. Of course, there are many other expenses involved as well, since there is a per-SMS charge for SMS messages and all of the templates being voted on are not free and would need to bought to be used, just as a couple small examples.


-- Allow premium members to switch the website template with several new options being added, namely some of the ones being currently voted on in the Contributors' Forum

-- Create a""Featured Topic of the Week", selected by an editor. Only topics made by premium members will be considered. My own topics will be excluded. I will share the topic of the week on my social media channels (on which I have well over 100,000 total followers and get significant engagement, meaning the topic will be seen and replied to by a lot of people). If we don't have many active premium members, then we could do it as a Topic of the Month rather than a Topic of the Week.

-- Create our own quarterly Philosophy Journal to publish member's articles and papers. The Philosophy Journal will be published in both print and digital form.

-- Allow premium members to choose a custom order for the forum list on the Forum Index. (This would be analogous to the way all members can currently change the sort order of topics/posts via the Edit Display Options section of the User Control Panel (UCP).

-- Require all members to add a phone number and verify the phone number via a OTP SMS message (i.e. a text message with a secret code).

-- Require two-factor authentication for all members when logging in. For non-premium members, the OTP could be sent via email-only. For premium members, they would get the option to have the OTP sent via email or SMS (i.e. text message).

-- Require new members (and eventually all other non-premium members) to provide some information about how many books they read per year, and which books they read most recently.

-- Require new members (and eventually all other non-premium members) to verify their identity and humanity, to prevent bots, scammers, spammers, fakes, and fraudsters from creating fake accounts or duplicate accounts.

-- Enable premium members to add links to all their social media profiles that display next to their posts near their post count or in the signature section.

-- Add a very noticeable "This user may not be a real human" warning to posts made by non-verified users.

-- Make all posts except the OP only available to logged in users, especially to prevent bots and scrapers from stealing the content.

-- Add a "user rep" feature that lets users upvote other posts and give "rep points" for helpful, agreeable, or interesting posts.

-- Create our own LLM trained on the topics and posts in the forum, monetize it, and then distribute the earnings to premium members, either (1) giving each premium member an equal share, or (2) adjusting the share proportionally to member post counts (such that a member with 100 posts would get twice as much payment as a member with 50 posts).

-- Automatically include a copy of a disapproved post in the disapproval notice sent to the user. To make it easier for them to both (1) see why it was disapproved, and (2) edit and re-submit the post if desired

-- Make it so that a post still shows to the poster while pending moderation, but with a clear note and highlight showing that the post is still pending moderation. This will avoid the confusion members have in thinking their post was not submitted when it was, or thinking there post was deleted/disapproved when it wasn't.


If anyone has other suggestions for new features or changes, please do let me know.

If you are a premium member, you can post them in the Contributor's Forum.

Otherwise, you can either email them to me at Scott@OnlinePhilosophyClub.com


Looking forward to great things!