Basically, the store is meant as a mineral sink in SEN's economy. In v4, minerals were useless. The store is the front lines for economy.
While you can complain about "basic forum stuff" costing minerals, without a reason to spend minerals, there's no reason to have them. Which is why such items exist. For purpose. Because I think minerals is fun.
It also has the *side* purpose of limiting crap on sen's servers. People who sign up and post once won't have a massive avatar stored on the servers (the idea was the wouldn't have any avatar, but... ). It is another positive to the store items.
Now, this topic is for ideas for more sinks. More realistic reasons people will spend their minerals. More spending = more value for minerals = a reason to be happy about your mineral count ;o

Now, current items:
Increase PM space (for those too lazy to delete or pack rats like me)
Increase global space
Increase avatar space
Title enabler
Signature enabler
DLDB / Portal advertising (for extra attention for your files)

Soon to be items:
Enable shoutbox default color

Semi-likely to be added items:
SEN name color
Clan tag color
Extra "cool" topic icons, animated to give extra attention to your topic
Post backgrounds (it was a nice idea, but people just didn't "get" it)

Possible items, though really unsure:
+ various icons in front of your name

Definitely not
Name glows ;o

Default color for shoutbox is good... dunno if that should cost anything though. A custom shoutbox color would be a good item.

I am very scared of excessive color items... the site could turn into a rainbow. Given that we have multiple skins now, it is very possible that post backgrounds and such will clash with one or more of the skins.

Well, we'll have more moderators eventually. Maybe not as many as SENv4, but a few moderators and somewhat strict rules to keep background image (a dark image in the top-right part of the post was the trend, anyway) not obstructive. Not to mention that you have options to turn off the background images, and you can make it so that guests don't see them either. Not everyone will have them, because as a non-base feature, I think they should cost about one thousand minerals, maybe more.

You can also kind of regulate the shoutbox text colors, via all-purpose moderators, or either limits on the color (can't be too hard to make that) or a pre-set palette.

Well, I hate to rip off Maplantis, but we can force custom text colors to be entered and hexadecimal and check if they are "bright enough" via a script.

Yeah, that. Maybe some hue controlling as well, to keep it from contrasting too much with anything (or... different items to make it display on different skins, and so for different people?). Maplantis has that? I never noticed.

Perhaps purchasable skins? Such as the Falkoner skin?

lol

We need moar games.

Also: Higher avatar size? 10kb is painful.

I vote for making SEN less mineral-oriented, as was intended by giving people the option to turn them off

You're just saying that because you came to the game late .

Part of the reason I suggested that we should just be able to hide minerals instead of being able to turn them off completely. ;o

Ooh... purchasable skins, and a % of the profit goes to the creator!

So make that happen. *rollseyes*

I agree moneylover it'd be great to have some more games.

One game could be StarCraft orientated where you pick a race (your alliance) and you buy units e.g zerg or zealots or marines and then you can attack people.
Another game would be SEN Mafia but a real hardcoded version.

As for my suggestions aside from games; skins, clan features (clan shoutbox, clan PM, clan splash page etc...) or something like that...
You could also make certain forums cost money to either post in or to have the right to post in, that way you wont get people jumping in on topics completely un-aware of what's going on and starting fights, because they'll be much too concerned that they're losing minerals to argue...
Minerals for a bank so you could invest and save money....

Well that's all my ideas i can be bothered to think of / write that I think would be good...

A Bank? NEVER!

I was just looking at falkoners profile and I kept clicking the "Staredit Network" link in the top left (ish) to get back to the main forums, and it just refreshed is that a bug or is that just a scam to make me look at falkoner ?

Here, IP, link me to a tutorial on how I can make my own skin for this website, and I'll get to work on one, or at least a link to help me with the basics.

falkoner link to your site please

http://Falkoner.CoW.GooglePages.com/Programs.html

god that site is ugly xD