Pay to see the Pit? I have never ever paid a dime to participate in any forum on the internet.
While I totally understand that and I'm sure you speak for probably the current majority of web users, I think it is actually an important issue we need to discuss & try to change.
Nothing is "Free" when running a website there are a lot of costs and the more popular / busy / content driven the website gets, the more money & labour it takes to run the website. All that has to be paid for.
Too many people these days are all into the "free" stuff about everything. Which is fine and good, except it means that they are now the product and advertisers / corporations are the client. This is pretty much how all our modern data life is built up from the search engines you use, to the phones you carry, to the websites you visit to the social media and phone apps you depend on.
What this means however is that all this stuff is subject to the whims of "corporate free speech" as some like to call it when defending the SJW run multinational empires. They are happy to shut down anything that doesn't fit with their SJW beliefs at a moment's notice with no explanation or discussion. (As is now being made very clear by Google/Facebook/Apple/PayPal and many others).
The coming issue however is that the forces that hate actual real individual freedom and independent critical thought also hate our firearms hobby / rights. The corporate world, advertising world & banking / payment world are becoming more and more tightly controlled by a smaller, richer, more ideological group of Leftists/SJWs/Communists/Progressives. They are openly starting to put the screws to "right wing" thought and have started to put the screws to various "firearms" places. Nobody seems to be stopping them or even pushing back hard.
If our discussions places, forums & favourite methods of communicating with our friends/buddies/peers/fellow enthusiasts are predicated on advertising revenue, it puts us in a very unstable position long term.
As much as it is a pain for some, we need to have a discussion about coming up with direct financing methods for the online resources we wish to use, so that the SJW/Progressives can't easily just turn off the advertising tap or easy payments tap whenever they please.
Also it would be worth discussing paying for your privacy, I personally prefer to pay for sites that I find very useful rather than be a product.
(Which is why I'm a paying member here as well as on a couple other firearms related forums).
Another sideline issue is of course having a backup plan for the inevitable day when PayPal or credit card processors start cutting people off suddenly over as part of their SJW "virtue signalling" much like Intuit/Quickbooks started proudly doing. (I still remember the days of sending postal money orders for access to dial in resources listing your preferred username/password).