Range Day Pro

Paywall drill visibility

2 min read

Paywall Drill Visibility

Idea

Gate Public and Published drill visibility behind a paid subscription. Free users can only create Private drills. Paying users unlock the ability to make drills Public or Published.

  • Free users — Private drills only. Can create and use their own drills, but nothing is visible to anyone outside their rostered events.
  • Paid subscribers — can set drills to Public (browsable in org catalog) or Published (browsable + copyable by any shooter).

This uses the subscription paywall as a content moderation mechanism. Requiring a credit card on file dramatically reduces spam, inappropriate content, and low-effort abuse in the public drill catalog.

Motivation

  • Content moderation — allowing any new user to publish freely risks bad words, inappropriate content, and spam flooding the catalog. A paywall is the simplest, most effective first filter.
  • Subscription incentive — the people who want Public/Published visibility (instructors advertising their offerings, influencers building community presence with fun or challenging drills) are exactly the audience most willing to pay. The feature they want is the incentive.
  • Quality signal — if everything in the public catalog comes from paying users, the baseline quality is higher. Shooters browsing know someone invested in what they’re looking at.
  • LLM moderation cost coverage — public-facing drill names and descriptions can be automatically screened by an LLM for blatant offensive content and sneaky attempts (leetspeak, Unicode tricks, etc.). The cost per call is small, and paying subscribers absorb it naturally. Free users never trigger these calls because they can’t publish.

Open Questions

  • How does this interact with T.REX ARMS official drills? Presumably system/admin accounts bypass the gate.
  • Downgrade policy: if a subscriber lapses, do their Public/Published drills revert to Private or stay visible? Score Portability (embedded metadata) already protects shooters who copied a drill, but catalog visibility needs a decision.
  • Is there a distinction between the subscription tier needed for Public vs Published, or are they unlocked together?
  • Should there still be a report/flag mechanism for published drills even with the paywall? The paywall raises the bar but doesn’t eliminate bad actors entirely.

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