Important forumite changes, Be warned! ?

Please read.
A few changes coming soon and why. These will be some of the last changes I make apart from a little touch of paint here and there. I have put a lot of hours into the forum area and I estimate that to be at least 500 hours so far so as you can imagine it is time to pick up my tools and move onto the rest of the site.
Forum Subscription.

Firstly the membership/subscription. I will be putting this in place on the 25th and as mentioned previously it will be £3.50 per month. One member mentioned to me I should also offer a yearly subscription at a discounted price and I will work on this as well. 12 Months at the price of 11 Months. It is not huge saving but it’s there if people want to choose that option.
The workings of the subscriptions are complicated and at the moment I have not come up with a reliable way to allow people to read the forum without being a member and although I am still working on it I doubt that I will have fixed it in time for the 25th. So in short what this means is if you are not a member you will not be able to access the forum.
When I first started the site the hope was to pay for the site through various other services I sell elsewhere. When I have finished working on the forum and other touches I will start bringing some of them services over here and hopefully over the next couple of years I will build up enough of a customer base to remove the subscription.
My last words on the subscription/membership is I appreciate all the donations received greatly. How ever I can only see the site staying alive by a subscription model. I have and we have seen obvious failings where the servers hardware as reached it’s limits “CPU” and the site as slowed to a crawl or failed all together and the time will come when an upgrade is needed at cost and my budget is well and truly stretched.
Lastly even though I am moving to a subscription model I will be doing improvements as usual and as and when I can and hopefully in time get it to a point where it can be classed as solid build but for now business as usual.
Forum Structure.
As above there are changes that need to be made to keep this place going for years to come. We do want new members to join and not just us MM members. I don’t want the place to become stale.

One big change I will be making very soon is the forum structure and tech forum idea it’s self. MM was a tech forum and there is no doubt about that considering the MM tech mag but the forum it’s self covered so much more than just tech talk. This has obviously carried over to here. The difference here is this site is tied to nothing and I don’t want passers by being put off by the emphasis on tech.

I will therefore be changing the forum structure to a broader range of topics with sub-forums. So for example Tech forums – Android, Apple, PC, Software etc… And for example Sports – Football, Snooker, Tennis etc… and so on and so on.

I know this will upset some people but it has to be done to spice things up a little hopefully.

Some other little things.
I am going to start feeding some topics to forumites facebook and twitter page and hopefully get a few new members that way. I have thought about the problem of attracting idiots but hopefully the idea of paying £3.50 a month to be an idiot here will put them off.

My next move is to get the hosting services all linked up here. This will include Shared hosting, VPS, Dedicated, Emaill only, WordPress only, ssl business class email and various other services I already sell.

I am over time going to improve the classifieds and put some time and effort into promoting that as well as the rest of the site. I will also be adding other services were people can get things done a little cheaper such as directly selling products, rent a store if you will. There are other ideas and there all in my head so far but it is all intended to grow forumite.

I am not going for world domination but I would like to build it up to a couple of thousand over the next couple of years if that is even possible.

Any how, for now I plug on and see what can be done with the tools I have.