you made an excelent post. I was about to post, but you said everything I was going to say. But, I'll add some words anyway.

I am puzzled by people like unacanta, with comments like

"Non paying pawns accomplish this, if you discourage people from coming to your site then the pool of new players disapates. "

and people like The Rat, who talk about how important the non paying members are.

I do not think people understand the economics of this situation veyr well. This site costs money to run. The pawns often mention how thye are essential to the site, which might be. But, at the same time, they are contributing NO money to the site.

Is this because they cannot afford a membership? that they so desperately want to become a member but just can't manage the minuscule membership fee? Unlikely. NO, more likely is that the brain pawns have no reason to buy a membership because they are satisfied with hwat they have.

I will address this directly to The RAt, since you spoke on behalf of the non paying members, but any pawn is welcome to answer this:

HOW do you suggest Fencer increase revenue? I am sure you realize that 250 memberships does NOT provide enough revenue to run this site. We all hope that Fencer will run the site forever as a hobby, getting almost no sleep, just because he is a fan of board games. But, that might be too much to ask. So, I repeat my question: How do you suggest increasing revenue? You oppose measures to restrict what pawns get, calling such measures "attempts to discourage pawns from coming to the site," so what do you suggest?

I'll help you out with this one: To increase revenue, there has to be either 1) more memberships or 2) a higher membership fee charged.

option 2 is not desirable, because with the number of members currently, a raise in the prices would not help much, and it would irritate the members because it owuld mean we are further financing the free loaders.

so that leaves option 1, getting more memberships. So, the question becomes one of "How do we increase memberships?"

one way is to add features. BUt, the suggestion that this site does not have enough features is preposterous. There are more than enough features, and anyone who says he is not becoming a member because "there are not enough games or features" is likely lying.

Another way is to keep the membership price the same BUT make it more important to have one by WIDENING the gap between what members have and what non members have.

OBVIOUSLY, if you have too small of a gap, people will have little incentive to become members.

But, people constantly reply with the tiresome remarks such as "But there is ALREADY a big gain from becoming a member. non members can only enter one tournamnet, canot join fellowships, BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH............"

WELL, CLEARLY this gap is not veyr wide at all, because 90% or more of the users are SATISFIED with what they have without a membership!