I think it's a good idea with two flaws.
Unfortunately they seem to be the same two flaws that killed the guild in the first place.
1) "Can recruit enough people to keep said RPG going"
If we could do that in the first place, we wouldn't need to think about selling subforums! This ties in to what Lestelle said about being picky who you RP with. Shure, we could probably find some people in the Barton Town forums who'd RP, but who else would want to RP with them? Most of the people who prefer higher-level RPing are already in a guild designed for that purpose, it seems (I used to be in 3 or 4, myself). Perhaps we could recruit in places like
The Literate RP Guild, or perhaps other small/new RP guilds like
the Demonic Vampire guild? I think that's how I wound up here.
2) Ummm... I actually forgot number two in writing number one. Guess it wasn't really as big as that one. Haha.
Anyway, I'm not trying to be pessimistic, just realistic (funny how those two seem so similar sometimes!).
PERHAPS, now this may seem a radical idea, we should totally restructure.
Heres what I had in mind.
Main Forum: Rules and Roleplaying of Any and All sorts. Have some sort of system of tags that indicate what genre or style. For example, my oft-tried never-used "Church of the Machine" RP would look sometime like this:
[SF O] The Church of the Machine.
SF for Sci-Fi, O for Open. The idea of tags eliminates the need for various in-use subforums. I would venture to guess that since all the RPing was spread so thin any activity wasn't apparent to everyone else that didn't go to those subforums and that contributed to our untimely demise.
Keep the Guild Council and Spam subforums, for what I would imagine are fairly obvious reasons for both.
We then have a subforum for General chat, basically a combination of the Main Forum and the closed In General forum.
From there, everything else except Archives is for rent.
As for who will rent and for what purposes? In order to widen your possible customer-base you might think about expanding your views on this. They should be allowed to rent for whatever purpose, as long as they've got the gold. Of course, keep it within reason. No TOS violations, nothing too disturbing, etc.
Or, we could restructure pretty much the same, except switch the location of the General forum and the RP forum. So the Main Forum is the general topic forum, whereas we have a single subforum for all RPs.
Now as far as actual renting of subforums, if we can get people to do it, that'd be great. The issue, however, that comes to mind now that I've thought about it more (might have been my missing number two) is this: Why rent a subforum for an RP project when you can just make a thread for free? I don't mean in Barton Town. I'd never want to open a thread there, myself. But that's why the Literate Roleplaying Guild is around.
Admittedly, the BIG roleplaying guilds are a little overwhelming. However, say someone finds us through advertising for subforum rental. They want to start an RP, but don't want to rent. So they just mosey on over to our RP forum (whether it be Main or in a sub) and start a thread.
Don't get me wrong, that isn't a bad thing! We're getting people here to RP, at that's what we want, isn't it? Maybe I'm just ranting at this point.
SO LETS ALL THINK ABOUT THAT!!
I'd like to contribute to any RPs but lately my time has been consumed. I am currently not at home and working on a documentary. Filming has actually gone better than expected, and I'm going home early (tomorrow instead of next week) but when I get home I've got to edit what we've filmed and continue editing this book I've got a deadline for (edit edit edit, that's all I ever do, haha).
The time I spend not working is spent on other things, for various reasons.
I just haven't had time for an RP lately, or even my other project with Lestelle.
So, that all said, good luck. I'd love to stick around and help as crew and share ideas and brainstorm on how to run things and advertisement and whatnot (as I do spend a lot of my free time on Gaia), but actual RP participation will probably be minimal to low at this time.