It's just hard to want to post here, when you get such a bigger memberbase if you post in the relevant section outside of the VIP Lounge. :(
The key to the success of the VIP forum is to play to its strengths instead of complaining about its drawbacks. Samurai carry two weapons. A katana and a wakizashi. The former is a longer reaching weapon than the latter but both have their purposes. The katana is the main attacking weapon and the wakizashi is used in extreme close quarters combat as well as fighting in narrow areas and such. It would be foolish to use a katana in a small room as you would end up hitting too many objects. Likewise it is not a good idea to use a wakizashi in the open battlefield as you will lose out against the longer reaching katana. But that's the point of view you are expressing. You fail to realize how best to utilize this forum to its maximum potential and instead try to use it as a weaker, inferior version of other PC forums (like a mini OVP for example). You are basically trying to use your wakizashi as a katana.
What you should be doing is understanding the key differences between this forum and the rest of the PC member based forums and how you can use those differences to your advantage. This forum is essentially accessible by only a subset of the total member base. This majority of the members in this subset is based on members who have donated money to Pokecommunity (some people may have had someone else donate on their behalf). Therefore it should be reasonable to assume that the majority of the PC Supporters have a general interest in the well being of PC.
So I propose the following.
1) Create a Supporter + Staff exclusive version of 'PokéCommunity Questions & Feedback'. But wait, didn't you say not to try and make this an inferior / mini version of other PC forums? Yes I did but be patient and hear me out. Usually when an issue is raised, the staff members usually exclusively discuss the issue in the staff forums and then once they have reached a decision, publically announce that decision in the raised issue thread. This may not always be a best practice though especially when considering a highly controversial issue (post comments spring to mind). The purpose of this suggestion would be for the staff to discuss solutions with the VIP members in a democratic fashion. The staff can still keep the same procedures for dealing with general issues but sometimes it may be reasonable to get the additional input of the members who have invested their time and money into PC. So to break it down.
Simple issue raised -> Staff discuss in staff forums and reach conclusion -> issue resolved.
Complex / controversial issue raised -> Staff discuss privately in staff forums but can also leak some of the discussion out into the VIP Q+F forum for additional input -> repeat previous step until conclusion is reached -> issue resolved.
The above is not strictly speaking of course but a generalization of the issue resolution process. The staff still has the final say and they have full control of what discussion gets filtered into the VIP Q+F but this gives VIP members a bit more influence over PC which I believe is reasonable.
2) VIP only events. But wait, didn't you say not to try and make this an inferior / mini version of other PC events? Well yeah, OK you got me on this one but hear me out anyway. As VIP members, we receive special treatment in the form of blogs and extended image sizes and so on. So it should be reasonable to extend this special treatment to VIP exclusive events with generous rewards (greater than rewards obtained from general events - there needs to be an incentive for members to enter a VIP only event as opposed to a generalized event). For example there could be a site wide prettiest profile competition and one for only VIP members - the reward for winning the VIP only member competition should be greater than the reward for the generalized contest.
Anyway this is all theoretical so I don't know how practically viable these suggestions are but yeah.
