I took the time to read the whole thread. For once not proudly posting without having read the article!
Whichever way it turns out, I'm cool with. My favorite suggestion right now is banners with donors ($5/mon or $60/yr) not seeing the ads.
Regarding having a symbol next to your posting name for donors, I'm 50/50 on that. It would make filtering freeloaders easier (kinda like filtering out anonymous cowards on slashdot), But I'm concerned that it would adversely affect discussion. ("You don't even contribute, why should I care what you think.") I definitely do NOT like the idea of having it show more if you donate more. I kinda doubt you would either.
I trust your and John's ability to keep ads as unobnoxious as possible, to keep the site clean and uncluttered.
I think the stat you mentioned earlier of $1/year for all visitors is astounding.
Regarding all the bitching about your stance on MR, I for one, am absolutely cool with it. I don't see this particular primary season as being that much more contentious than previous ones. It always gets really hot around here during election season. This, after all, is a site for conservative folks who think politics is important. It is natural that we have strong disagreements.
FR is still the best political news site on the net. I like it's clean look and feel, even though I'd like to be able tag a post with a "{+1 insightful" or "-1000000 DUfus" sometimes.
If all that changed at FR was that a current contributor's name in a post was changed from black to green and indirectly got just another 10% of regular posters to contribute a dollar a month saving FR from bankruptcy could you deal with that?
Alternatively, why not acknowledge FReepers who keep the lights on and the site up for all the freeloaders?
My miserable but automatic, monthly contribution is small but with others it adds up to ~ $35,000 quarterly - 1000 people supporting 200,000 users for 1/3 of the costs? Check with Jim for actual numbers ... one thing I am certain - its a small number of FReepers paying a big percentage of the budget.
One other thing, aside from just keeping the lights on, apparently from reports we need some server upgrades to avoid downtimes - especially during FReepathons - kind of embarrassing. ;-)
I made up an example for Onyx here.
Consider just the first one. Unobtrusive, acknowledges the poster's level of support and as seems to make you uncomfortable, distinguishes the FReeper from the free riders.
I think it might even have been Onyx that noted that it takes $2 to process a contribution so a $5 per quarter would likely need to be the minimum to be acknowledged graphically as a contributor.
Given the VERY minor contributions necessary from a larger minority of FReepers to keep us up and running I'm not really worried about the freeloaders feelings.
For my part, if these miniscule changes could shame frequent FReepers into contributing, save FReeRepublic, unnecessary then I think its worth a try. FWIW. ;-)