@julian said:
Hey @carguy! Welcome to NodeBB
Our hosting platform takes the stress out of maintaining your own NodeBB (although personally, there's not all that much stress
). If you're not so hot with the technical side, we do it all for you for a monthly fee, and that sounds like something that'd fit with your forum. Feel free to register a new account on nodebb.org, contact me at [email protected], and I'll throw in a free month
Migration is extra, although we'll help you with that as well. It usually takes about an hour or two's work, can expand further in an email.
We don't have any advertisement plugins except adsense at the moment, although we're looking to integrate with another third-party advertiser, possibly. Which ad company do you use? We also don't have the facility to show widgets only to guests, which really ought to be a feature.
Preferences such as...? Groups right now are more of just a way to restrict permissions (some forums accessible to certain groups only, etc).
Hello Julian. Will be in touch soon via email. 
@a_5mith said:
Hey pal, do you use buddypress as your forum platform currently? (Only forum solution for Wordpress I can think of)
Their are currently no membership plugins available, however it's something I've also been thinking about, so will add it to the Plugin Request Topic
You can create groups for people, which as Julian mentioned, would allow for you to set permissions on those groups (access to certain categories, being able to post in certain categories (Sellers being able to create a topic on a for sale page, then anyone else just being able to reply to a topic, not start one for example).
We currently have both BBPress and Buddypress, but one of the main things we are being told by our members is notifications. Going by the plugins and features on the pricing page. that will interest our members and get the community growing and interacting again.
I'm not a fan of adding loads of plugins as I have found out that my current website takes 4 seconds to load, from what I believe is due to the plugins. Had a look around on a few node forums and they load in a fraction of a second, which in my books is much better lol
@psychobunny said:
We actually had a request to build a paid membership plugin a couple of months ago, although I'm not really sure what the progress is on that, the client may have decided that they didn't need it any longer
Currently they're handling paid memberships manually. So after they get paid (via paypal or whatever portal) they go into the ACP and upgrade the member by hand. It's not bad if you don't have too many paid customers
This would be more for our sponcers and advertisement, giving traders access to sell on our forum but also have some kind of banner (if this forum software allows something like this?)
Standard membership will not happen due to social media sadly. Seen many forums slowly get smaller and smaller due to p;aid memberships where the same questions can be asked on Facebook or Twitter. Hey ho, such as life.