They all do exactly what I'm suggesting you guys do, one link to encapsulate everything on one or two lines.
Vbulletin doesn't put five separate links in our footer that say stuff like:
Private messaging brought to you by
vBulletin
Social Groups courtesy of
vBulletin
Photo albums are a
vBulletin product
Friends lists made by
vBulletin
User Profiles created on the
vBulletin platform
Even PHPBB, which is FREE, only asks for 1 link. Asking for 10 links or 5 separate branding fees ON THE SAME SITE is absurd. I have never, ever, ever seen anything like that before in any aspect of business.
You're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying the coders should make less money, I'm saying they probably DO make less money because of this insane idea of separating out separate links and branding fees for each product on the same site.
How many people actually pay branding fee x5 if they have 5 mods installed on the same site? You have access to the data and I don't, but I can't imagine that it's very many. Anyone with enough business sense to run a successful forum likely has enough business sense to know that being asked to pay for the same thing 5 times or put a gajillion links in their footer is not something that you want to support.
I'll put it this way. There are two mods that you guys make that really drove me here. When looking through the site, I found 4 others that looked cool. If you were reasonable rather than abusive with your use of the footer I probably would have bought all or most of them. Instead, I'll buy the two, or maybe even just one of them, and pay the $75 branding fee on it.
So, with a reasonable use of the footer (either one link back to dragontech or one branding fee per site) I would have likely ended up paying:
$90 + $85 + $60 + 95 + $100 + $75 (single branding fee) = $505
Instead I'll pay $90 + $75 = $165
Even if I end up buying both of the original mods that's $90 + $85 + $75 +$75 = $325
So to make that extra $75 in double dipping on branding fees your coders lost out on over $250 in sales of additional products. And that's not even counting all the other sites that I would have considered running those things on that are now lost as potential future sales.
I can't imagine I'm the only one that feels this way and has decided against ordering multiple products from you guys to avoid the nightmare footer that you create.
I know this post probably comes off as belligerent but that isn't the intent. You guys run a good ship, other than this one bizarre thing. I really believe that it's something that ultimately affects you guys as much as it does me. I really feel like I'm in bizarro world right now. It just boggles my mind that this is set up this way. It never even crossed my mind that this is how things would be run until I happened across someone's thread that was complaining about the bevy of links in their footer. I just assumed that it would only be one link or one branding fee.
You would think that's how it works, since that's basically how every other company on the face of the planet operates. But that is in fact incorrect. If you use multiple mods you end up with the mess that
this guy has.