We're completely open to suggestions. We do want to make sure that subscriptions remain good value, and if you guys let us know what you want we can always consider its viability.
Sigs are a little thing, so I'm with the "you need big items or many items" crowd.
Brainstorming here - please don't squash ideas too harshly!
... I used to work for pogo.com, basically a free-games-website which discovered that the "way forward" was subscription plus plus; for us, "plus plus" meant "microtransactions". What we discovered was that people would pay amounts of money which we thought were ridiculous for things that had no inherent value, being as they were things which added value only on this one website.
Avatars was a
huge moneymaker for us - in fact, I see it mentioned in your $3/mo trailer, but I don't see them on-forum, maybe I disabled them?
Anyway, the idea you might be missing is this: at pogo, we had a $5/mo base subscription .. but each avatar you picked up was a "microtransaction", a simple $0.75 or so one-time-fee, adding to your
collection so you could always display one you'd paid for .. you might have different avatars showing at different times (here: in different forums?) ... but only as long as you were current on your $5/mo subscription.
Alternately, you could keep one base set of avatars for the $3 subscriber, and introduce "premium avatars" for the platinum subscriber, something above and beyond.
Similarly, we did "badges", which were another collection you could get (or build) via cash or actions on site. Here, maybe XP would unlock badges .. but you could only display the badges if you're paid to X level?
We added additional smilies for the paid subscriber.
You might be able to do cool things for those who are "publishing" via enworld, e.g., "collections of my house rules", "here's links to my story hours", etc. That's kind of what people are using sigs for now; maybe you want to build features up around that? I mean, using piratecat as an example, as a reader I'd like to find every Story Hour he's ever written; why not have his "Subscriber's Profile" include a "Publications" link? When posting a new thread, he can hit a tick-box to "Add to My Publications"? He can always edit his My Publications page to put that link in the "right place" later.
I loved weem's idea of a "Publisher's Subscription", you might seriously be able to sell those as a nice package:
- X number of home page "spots" per month
- Y number of banners or skyscrapers per month
- Ability to publish in Z forum.
- Special indication in up to four accounts linking to your company
- Ability to upload "company logo" avatar, usable only by those 4 accounts.
- Image-based SIG
Trying to think what else might be good for a forum-ite, but coming up short at the moment. May need to spring for the $3 to see what you've got currently before I get further in this discussion.
). For obvious reasons, I would like to hold on to my sig. 
