I've been using Enjin for my gaming community (we have guilds here and in rift) for the last 3½ ish years and I am pretty happy with it - we're currently on the advanced plan but have been on ultimate as well. I would say that advanced should cover for most guilds needs, ultimate only really gets good if you have a minecraft server and are -very- into that.Â
Our plan is pretty much funded by donations from our guildees, they have two ways you can do it, one that adds funds to a paypal account and one that adds days directly to the site - I recommend the latter, because then you don't have to account for what you do with the paypal money (since people can't see that)
Enjin is also very friendly towards new-to-site-management people, I learned everything by just clicking around and these days most functions has a guide on their wiki. There's also a good selection of free themes, and if you're artsy yourself you can upload your own design.Â
I would not recommend using Enjin on their free plan. Shivtr is probably better for that, but I also find that shivtr is very limited in it's features and management of your users is a bit derpy. I haven't touched guild launch for years, but I know they once had a limit on how many posts you could have on a forum. You want to be looking out for those sorts of limitations. Enjin's free plan doesn't have a limit, but it lacks other essential features like a calendar.Â
With enjin you can make entire sections of the website invisible until you allow a user to see it. We use this extensively, to protect journals and stories from being abused by strangers, for example. You can even change the front page to be different for people who have signed up, so they don't have to read the description over and over.Â
As for levelling the FC, took us probably about 3 months? I've heard that you can speed it up if you do a lot of leves but it requires that you funnel a good chunk of money into it.Â
Our plan is pretty much funded by donations from our guildees, they have two ways you can do it, one that adds funds to a paypal account and one that adds days directly to the site - I recommend the latter, because then you don't have to account for what you do with the paypal money (since people can't see that)
Enjin is also very friendly towards new-to-site-management people, I learned everything by just clicking around and these days most functions has a guide on their wiki. There's also a good selection of free themes, and if you're artsy yourself you can upload your own design.Â
I would not recommend using Enjin on their free plan. Shivtr is probably better for that, but I also find that shivtr is very limited in it's features and management of your users is a bit derpy. I haven't touched guild launch for years, but I know they once had a limit on how many posts you could have on a forum. You want to be looking out for those sorts of limitations. Enjin's free plan doesn't have a limit, but it lacks other essential features like a calendar.Â
With enjin you can make entire sections of the website invisible until you allow a user to see it. We use this extensively, to protect journals and stories from being abused by strangers, for example. You can even change the front page to be different for people who have signed up, so they don't have to read the description over and over.Â
As for levelling the FC, took us probably about 3 months? I've heard that you can speed it up if you do a lot of leves but it requires that you funnel a good chunk of money into it.Â
