SomethingAwful was (is?) good because of the membership fee, and because of the
viciously strict moderation.You could have your account deleted, with no warning, for:
* Persistent lack of punctuation or grammar
* Posting tired memes
* Persistent inability to cite sources for claims (in some subfora)
* Dozens of other things I can't remember
* Basically anything the mods decided to ban your for
The reason this worked is because the mods were drawn from the community. The admins would look at a subforum, see who was trusted on there, had good judgement and was there a lot. They would then make that person a mod, without asking them or
even telling them! That person would just log in next time to be confronted with lots of extra widgets on the UI.
Because the community was so cohesive across the site, that person would then know immediately it was their duty to post a thread saying "Hi, I'm XYZ, your new Moderator" and christen their new powers by stickying the thread.
Again, they were not told to do this, but they would immediately and without fail, because the criteria for being chosen as a mod means that anyone who is chosen would be aware of this tradition, and in fact every other aspect of their role, having learned by example.
The SA forums were operating lots of quite deep game mechanics stuff nigh on ten years ago. It's very interesting. Most of the measures wouldn't be appropriate for here though, a lot of them involved strategically fostering antagonism for the benefit of wider community cohesion. It really worked over there for a long time though.
EDIT: I seem to remember that for a long time they only took payment by actual credit cards, visa and so on, and not debit cards, paypal etc. This was deliberate to prevent kids from signing up.
