Cruisers Forum Supporters

[Andy R]

We are please to announce the ability for members to show their support for our community by upgrading your account to a "Cruisers Forum Supporter". By upgrading you will benefit from more features such as:

- Ability to purchase branded merchandise (including burgees) at our cost
- Unlimited PM Space
- Larger Avatar: 125 x125
- More profile album photos allowed (1,000)
- Add a photo in your signature (600x100 pixels)
- More space for customized signatures (up to 5 lines)
- A warm fuzzy feeling for helping support our community and our sister sites such as the Open Source Cruisers Wiki.
- More features and reasons to upgrade will be announced in the future...

Keep in mind, our community will remain free for all members.
This is an optional upgrade and not required for participation.

As this program matures we are hoping to work deals with vendors to offer discounts to upgraded members as well. We hope that in the long run we will be able to create a significant amount of value that it will be a no brainer to go ahead and support our community by upgrading. For example if you can get 10% off your order at a certain vendor which will save you $100 it's more then worth it to spend the $14.95 to upgrade and get your personal coupon code. The program is still young so please be patient as we work to add new products and perks to this offering. If you don't see the value in upgrading at this time just wait and hopefully we will be able to create enough value that will entice you to upgrade as the program matures.

At this time the only branded merchandise we have are the beautiful high quality burgees that we had made. The cost to purchase a burgee will be $50.00 for regular members and $25.01 for supporting members (our cost) which includes shipping. Our plan is to also have t-shirts, Polos and other branded swag made from similarly high quality suppliers and offer those at cost to members who upgrade.

We plan to give-a-way a significant amount of account upgrades to members who make significant contributions to the forums, photo gallery, refer other sailors to our site and submit content to CruisersWiki.org. To launch the program we have upgraded a considerable amount of accounts based on tenure, post count, and some other undisclosed metrics used in an algorithm as a way of saying 'thank you' to these members for their significant contributions to the community to date.

I will post a more detailed overview of this program along with a comparison of the features & the e-commerce page where burgees can be ordered in the near future.

The upgrade is processed through PayPal and is setup as an annual subscription that recurs annually. If you do not want to continue to support our community for a 2nd year, all you have to do is cancel the subscription and our system will be notified by PayPal when the year is over and your account will be changed back.

The introductory cost of the Supporting Member upgrade is a modest $15.01/year. If you spend just 30 minutes a week on our community that equates to only $.58 per hour. Funds from this program help offset costs for new features such as our free Smart Phone apps and hosting of the Open Source CruisersWiki.org.

Keep in mind, our community will remain free for all members.
This is an optional upgrade and not required for participation.

I will update this post in the next week with links to upgrade your account, buy burgees and more details about the extra perks our Supporting Members get with their account upgrade.