A reliable SDMB is worth paying for!

[Lobsang]

I KNEW that would happen! (the 'hamsters' ate my post)

so...

[paste]

Having nothing else to do (at work) I am getting fed up waiting for anything at all to happen on the SDMB. It is particularly bad tonight.

I for one am willing to pay for access if it means a more responsive board.

Making it a pay service will a) provide the money to upgrade it, and b) reduce the load by elimination those who do not think it is worth paying for.

I think £5 a month is a decent figure considering the number of users (although I personaly would pay up to £15)

[/paste]

[Slacker]

As tradition dictates, all posts about the board itself are eaten immediately.

[Muad'Dib]

Yes, but there is still the terrible problem of killing off the traffic to the site.

The truly great part about SDMB is that there are so many people on it. Wait 2-3 minutes and you will have a response to almost any thread.

I suggest that if they do start charging, that they only charge for starting threads. Or, that people who are not members can only post, a certain amount of times per week. The point is to give people who do not own accounts some reason to stay. The content that they provide is invaluable.

[Sam Stone]

They should just offer to take donations. Find a legal way to do it. Call it a 'club membership' and send us each a button, for all I care. But if they could set up a way to take donations I'd give them $100 in a heartbeat, and I'll betcha there's a LOT of other people who feel the same way.

Just leave it public, and use the money to upgrade the servers, software, internet connection, or whatever else it takes to make this place a fast, secure site.

And I hope they make good backups and have a good disaster recovery plan, because the contents of the database of the SDMB is extremely valuable. Not just for the collective knowledge it contains, but for all of us it's our only record of the time spent here. After 3500 odd messages, I'd be quite upset to lose it all. I'm certainly willing to pay to help keep it alive.

[Enderw24]

They were toying with the idea last year. I. for one, was in favor of spending the (hypothetical) $15-$20 per year. A LOT of people were not and they let their voices be heard.
I can guarantee you that if we increased it to your proposed...what? $7.50-$22.50 per month this place would be an absolute ghost town.
Even if 50% of the people stayed, which is truly a pipe dream's pipe dream, it would not be worth that kind of money to me.

$20 (£13) a year, though? Yeah. Definitely.

[Skeezix]

There was a recent thread in ATMB (which is where this'd belong, I think) discussing the very matter. Last statement I saw on the matter was that the Reader was indeed working on/finalizing/plotting out some type of solution, but no information was available at the time.

Ah. Here it is.

Possibly, something like Sam Stone's Cecil FanClub Membership, is in the works. (See ColdFire's first post in the thread.)

_{That's just me own speculation, o' course.}

[Lobsang]

Originally posted by Enderw24
They were toying with the idea last year. I. for one, was in favor of spending the (hypothetical) $15-$20 per year. A LOT of people were not and they let their voices be heard.
I can guarantee you that if we increased it to your proposed...what? $7.50-$22.50 per month this place would be an absolute ghost town.
Even if 50% of the people stayed, which is truly a pipe dream's pipe dream, it would not be worth that kind of money to me.

$20 (£13) a year, though? Yeah. Definitely.

I got the figure from an average of online pay services. I think it is reasonable, it's, what 1% of the average person's monthly salary. Your not prepared to pay 1%?

Anyway, even $20 a year would be a lot considering the amount of people who would pay.

[zweisamkeit]

You're talking to a college student here, Lobsang (uh, well, you are now that I've butted into this thread. :cough: ), and I can assure you that I cannot afford even $10 a month. As it is, I can barely afford gas and car insurance (and there are some times I need to dip into my savings account just to pay that insurance) because I only work part-time while going to school full-time.

If they had a voluntary donation, though, or maybe $25 a year for a "plus" membership (while still having free ones, like livejournal.com does), I would like that. That's what Christmas presents are for.

[Lobsang]

Well £5-£15 (curse this American keyboard, I have to go and get a pound sign from charmap every time) was a stab in the dark. (I still think it's reasonable for something as unique as the sdmb) That is a minor point. the major point is that the sdmb deserves to be paid for, and we do not deserve to complain about it until we start paying for it.

But if making the sdmb a pay-service means drastically lowering the trafic then it probably isn't a good idea. My main source of gratification is recieving replies to my posts.

[Tuco]

Well at the moment there are 26,057 members. If the SDMB charged $1 a month to post and if 20% of the current members paid, that's about $5000 per month. Now I'm no expert, but won't that get some SERIOUS hardware?

[Cubsfan]

I may be wrong but here at work we have one T1 dedicated to internet traffic and remote working and I think we pay around $8000 a month for that. Yes. $8K.

[dantheman]

Money's not the issue. They've steadfastly refused all donations. Why would they go to pay if they're not even accepting money now?

[Ferret Herder]

The refusal of donations has been due to legal/tax issues associated with receiving money, if I recall correctly. Perhaps they're finding a way to deal with it if that ATMB link is still correct.

[Eleusis]

Stinkpalm-

Your office must be way far away from the central station, or you guys are getting seriously ripped off. T1's in Chicago can be had for $1K.

That said, there is no need for any dedicated line for the SDMB. The server can be located in the datacenter of the hosting company.

As I just posted in the rant thread, I pay only $400/month to rent a dual P4 2ghz with 1gig of RAM, which includes 100 gigs of transfer. Extra bandwidth is $1.50 a gig. I doubt this board uses more than 100 gigs/month, as it's very light graphically.

So, no. Not $8K.

[Tansu]

I don't find it that bad, to be honest.

[Dewey Cheatem Undhow]

One model to look at might be Fark.com. They have a thing called "TotalFark," which for $5/month, allows people to see articles ahead of time, including articles that never get posted to the main board.

Now the SDMB doesn't work that way, but my point is that maybe the SDMB could charge a small fee for certain "perks." For example, perhaps the SDMB could allow avatars and private messaging for users who pay $1 per month.

Just something to chew on.

[RTFirefly]

I've got a post in the linked thread on about 9/26/02 that reprints a list of easily chargeable vB options that Anthracite listed over on Fathom. Private messaging would work as part of such a package; avatars wouldn't. Others that would are posting polls, editing posts (which wouldn't be a problem if the window for editing were restricted to, say, 5 minutes), and posting to a SDMB calendar. Existing services that could be made part of such a package include viewing profiles and searching.

Ed Zotti has in the past argued against any solution that wouldn't allow some level of free posting. (I'm in his corner on that one.) From all accounts, a fix that would allow some free posting, but would charge for frequent posting, wouldn't be trivial.

But there are a few non-intrusive things that could be tried, that haven't:

1) The aforementioned suggestion that the SDMB charge for some sort of 'perks' package. If 500 users (of the estimated 2000 active users) were willing to pay $30 a year for such a package, that would be $15K.

2) Selling banner ads. www.baseball-reference.com does something like this in the way of allowing donors to sponsor pages in return for donations. (I've got fifty bucks' worth of page sponsorships over there right now; I'd love to do the same here, where I spend much more of my time.) Their situation is far from directly analogous to the SDMB's, but there are ways to modify their system to our situation.

At any rate (see my earlier link in this post), the CR's off-the-top-of-the-head guesstimate is that ads might bring in $9K/year.

3) Merchandise. I'm not the only one who's less than crazy about owning Slug's artwork. Why not have a contest to design SDMB merchandise (T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads), as distinct from Straight Dope merchandise? Then take orders.

These are things that the CR could do with minimal upfront investment, that would (a) start bringing in some money directly attributable to the SDMB, (b) give us a chance to finally turn our enthusiasm for this board into financial support, and (c) finally get them (and us, if they're kind enough to share the info) some hard-and-fast numbers on how much revenue this place can bring in to offset its costs.

At the same link from above, Ed estimates the costs of the entire website (the column and the MB combined) as running between $35K and $45K annually. While I'm hesitant to endorse that figure without a more specific breakdown, it's a starting point. Ed says that, as of a year or so ago, about 63% of the page loads were at the MB, and the remaining 37% were at the column's part of the site. If we take the $40K midpoint, 63% of that is $25K attributable to the MB itself.

I don't know if this place can raise $25K a year between first-class memberships, banner ads, and merchandise sales. Maybe it can, probably it can't. (I'd bet that it wouldn't pull in that much, but I'd also bet they'd bring in $15K or better.) But whatever it can bring in has to be a whole lot better than the $0 it's bringing in now.

On the expenses side, a more reliable server would surely reduce the portion of Jerry the Tech God's time attributable to the SDMB, cutting that expense somewhat. And the existence of a steady stream of revenue would surely reduce the time Ed would have to spend trying to figure out how to make this place viable. (Ed says he's the main labor expense of the website, but whether that's a real expense* or a bookkeeping convenience, I don't know, nor do I know the split of his time between the Straight Dope column website and the MB website.)


Main thing is, I hope that the CR tries some of these ideas, or variations on them, soon. Unlike solutions that involve paying to post, there's no real need to be cautious in trying these out. And there's two bad things that happen every month they don't move on these ideas: (1) money that they could have collected from the SDMB membership gets left on the table, and (2) we continue to not find out just how much money this site can raise, which means we're no closer to solving the board's problems.


*_{"Real" as in "They gave Ed a raise when the MB came into being" or "they'd cut his pay if they pulled the plug on the MB" or "they're paying someone else to do stuff Ed used to do before the MB came along," or something along those lines, any of which would indicate the extent to which the CR is actually out-of-pocket due to the time Ed spends overseeing the MB. (None of this questions Ed's value to the MB; I'm just pointing out that we have nothing to go on regarding whether Ed's attention to this MB represents an objective cost to the CR.)}

[dantheman]

The human factor shouldn't be overlooked, either. There are plenty of people on here who wouldn't mind helping create product, maybe just the ideas, maybe the actual implementation. There's a vast resource that's largely being left untouched.

[artemis]

One reason I like the idea of donations is because Dopers span such a broad economic spectrum. For some people who have to watch every penny, $1/month may be out of reach - and I'd hate to see those people forced off the site because they couldn't pay. As for me, I'd pay WAY more than that quite willingly if it would get the Dopers a more reliable server. And the only "perk" I'd want in return would be reliable hamster service for ALL the Dopers.

And I'd bet I'm not the only Doper who feels this way.

[Giraffe]

What we need is an NPR-style pledge drive. I voluntarily give NPR money, but only when my attention is called to it by the pledge drives. Here, we could have a pledge drive for a specific financial goal (e.g. $10,000), and a stated purpose (e.g. server upgrade, annual maintenance costs, etc.) People could give what they want, if anything. People who give certain amounts could get little gifts (e.g. SDMB coffee mugs, naked pictures of the moderators, etc.) and/or a separate member title. Even better, people who give a certain amount get to choose their own member title! (Except for reserved ones, like Administrator or BANNED, of course.)

I personally would pay $50 every year, if my posts had

Giraffe
Resident asshole

next to each one.

I think the key is 100% voluntary contributions, with no real difference in services, beyond little perks like different Member titles. If you add features (like chatting or editing) only available to paying customers, I think it would divide the board and discourage casual posters.

[FordPrefect]

I tried suggesting this the last time this topic came up (but the hamsters ate it), but why not fuck the Tribune, set up our own server (or rent our own space), have the 50 people who would pay for it anyway, pay for it and let everyone else come over for free... call it the www.fasterthanthedyinghamstersatsdmb.com and we could have a blast, and a faster, funner blast.

Hell, I hang out at the christian forums just for the response time. There are some smart atheists/agnostics there, so it's not all bad, but still... and coincidentally, that is the fee structure they use. Plus they have volunteer site supporters...

[Eleusis]

I think the "tax liability of donations" agrument is weak.

Just set aside 40% for Uncle Sam from the outset, right?

I'd probably drop a Grant* right off the bat, and I think every time I got really pissed off* waiting for the board or losing a post, I'd click the paypal link (at least their page will load) and drop another nickel*** in the bucket.


* $50 dollar bill, U.S.
** I don't get pissed off that easily. Read "impatient".
*** $5 dollars U.S.

[MrVisible]

Okay, let me try this idea again, now that the subject's come up...

The SDMB Classifieds

Just make another classified ads section, like the one for the Chicago Reader. Ads by posters, for things we can't advertise here. Stuff for sale, services, personals, help wanted, even big colorful Happy Birthday ads. It's a way to contribute, without it being a donation, by buying something that doesn't cost the reader much at all.

Allow links to the classifieds in threads, and there you go: a profit center for the boards, with minimal investment and maximum return.

[Gozu Tashoya]

I really like MrVisible's idea.

I also like Anandtech's solution. In short, as little as $2.50/month gets you access to a dedicated server. Worked well for me while I used it.

[Savaka]

RTFirefly, thank you for your thoughtful post.

It seems like the issue of CR being unable to collect donations is really a semantic problem. Couldn't we just not call them donations? If CR required that all posters become members in order to post, but then set the membership fee on a sliding scale (down to $0) and left the cost of membership up to each poster, it seems that this would have all the benefits of voluntary donations but still allow CR to get around whatever regulations are associated with accepting donations.

Are there reasons that this would not work?

[Geek Mecha]

I think an anonymous way of paying is best, without any cosmetic change in members' posts. I believe one of the concerns with having paying being an option is that some posters may get all their panties in a wad when they expect more from the board, disagree with an admin or mod's decision, get in a tussle with a nonpaying member, etc. They may use the "Well, I paid for the board, so I expect more for my money/you can't afford to argue with me/I'm more valuable to the board" argument.

While I think it's immature for anyone to play that card, I can see how it would cause a problem, and if we can avoid it, all the better.

I don't think that charging for participation-- starting threads or posting-- is a good idea. What keeps this board going are those contributions. Charge for them, and most posters will take their topic ideas and remarks elsewhere.

An analogy is that each forum is a conversation room, filled with people talking about a specific topic. Posters wander from person to person, listen to each discussion, and they add to the conversation when they have something to say. Imagine there are too many people going in and out of these rooms, so many that a larger room needs to be considered. A larger room is expensive, so you need money. If you started charging people to start and join in conversations, they won't all dutifully pay and start yapping; they'll find or return to a free room and start talking there. Others will decide it's not worth paying X amount and simply move on to another message board.

I think the best approach will be optional in terms of both contributing and dollar amount. I think anonymity is good-- I don't think it's important that anyone know who is a contributor and who isn't.

One last thought:
If people want custom titles or avatars or any other optional vBulletin feature, I think it should be put on hold until a pay system is instituted and an improvement in board performance is evident.

[RTFirefly]

Originally posted by FordPrefect
why not fuck the Tribune, set up our own server (or rent our own space), have the 50 people who would pay for it anyway, pay for it and let everyone else come over for free... call it the www.fasterthanthedyinghamstersatsdmb.com and we could have a blast, and a faster, funner blast.

There's absolutely nothing to stop us from doing this. As a matter of fact, at least two Dopers have already set up their own vBulletin message boards on their own servers. I refer to Anthracite's UnaBoard and OpalCat's Fabulous Forums of Fathom. The current server at Fathom was paid for by a fund drive we had a year and a half ago.

There's a couple of problems with this, if the goal is making a better SDMB. (That isn't what Opal or Una has in mind with their boards, FWIW.) One is that there's no unanimity about where to go, when we go away from here: some people go to Fathom or the UnaBoard, some hang out in the LiveJournal environment, and so forth. Things kinda splinter, away from here. I can't see this being remedied by yet one more board.

The other is the link from the online Straight Dope column. That's what makes this board the real deal. If we all moved to some other board, en masse, this place would be kinda quiet for awhile. But activity would pick up over time as new Cecil fans found their way here, and eventually it would be the vibrant community this place is now, only with entirely new faces.

Meanwhile, the new board would start off like gangbusters, but would gradually get into a rut due to the inevitable lack of new blood, IMHO.

[RTFirefly]

Originally posted by Savaka
RTFirefly, thank you for your thoughtful post.

::blush::

Thanks, Savaka.

It seems like the issue of CR being unable to collect donations is really a semantic problem. Couldn't we just not call them donations?

IANAL, but I think you'd have to be careful about how you called them something else.

But this is the beauty of MrVisible's SDMB-classifieds suggestion, and same for banner ads: it solves that problem in one easy step.

Ads of any sort are a real thing that anyone could buy, without any legal problems for the CR. Yet - just like charitable donations - nobody would have to buy an ad, and those who had the cash and the desire to do so could buy as many ads as they wanted.

And Audrey, one's ads could be as self-promoting or as anonymous as the purchaser of the ad desired. So if I wanted to buy an ad saying, "RTFirefly just spent $_____ to buy this ad and support the SDMB - isn't he great!" I could do that, or I could just fill the ads with obscure quotes from the Marx Brothers, Firesign Theatre, or Tom Lehrer, which is far more likely in my case.

[dantheman]

... plus you could have a banner that read, "Are you a troll? Click here!" Then whoever clicked it could be banned.

Heh. Heh. Heh.

[CarnalK]

I agree with RTfirfly that the thing that makes this truly the "SDMB" is the link from the SD column. Obviously the key in a plan to relocate to a user-supported forum would be to have the CR agree to change their link, effectivly giving up the forum.

We could let the Chicago Reader classified ads be our only allowed sponser to let them continue subsidizing the forum if they wish.

It appears to me that the CR does not really want to make the forum into a commercial venture so if we could find a stable new home for it then why not set it free?

[Mtgman]

I'd pay money for the SDMB on CD Archive. Decently organized by thread and spooled out to html files. I don't know if this would be available because of IP/copyright issues, but it would be neat to have. Still read the SDMB for current stuff, but the archive for all the classic threads like "Evil Nazi Groundhogs" or "Wally Tries Cybersex" on CD would be cool.

Enjoy,
Steven

[RTFirefly]

CarnalK - here's the deal, as I understand it:

1) The CR isn't particularly eager to relinquish any control over the MB.
2) They'd like it to generate some revenue, but its problems are kinda low on their priority list. So
3) There's been a lot of inaction.

This is certainly an oversimplification, but I think it's about as accurate as such a short summary can be.

[Geek Mecha]

Originally posted by RTFirefly
And Audrey, one's ads could be as self-promoting or as anonymous as the purchaser of the ad desired. So if I wanted to buy an ad saying, "RTFirefly just spent $_____ to buy this ad and support the SDMB - isn't he great!" I could do that, or I could just fill the ads with obscure quotes from the Marx Brothers, Firesign Theatre, or Tom Lehrer, which is far more likely in my case.

Oh, no, it wasn't the ads I was talking about. I was talking about the suggestion for avatars and custom member titles.

I like the ads idea very much.

[elmwood]

Much as I hate to use e-jargon, I have to say that I wonder whether vBulletin is ... well, scalable and robust enough to handle the amount of traffic the SDMB takes in. (At least I din't use the word solution, okay?)

My vBulletin-based board does just fine on a shared hosting account, with 30 to 50 visitors at a time, and most of the optional features turned on. The SDMB implementation crawls, even during the wee hours of the morning. I get the feeling that, even with an outrageously fast dedicated host and a T3, the SDMB will still crawl.

A crawling SDMB is better than nothing. Still, considering the growth in membership and traffic, there will be a point at which the SDMB just breaks down. Think of the board as an expressway ... adding lanes is a temporary fix, but eventually the highway will clog again as more users take advantage of the added capacity. What's needed isn't more lanes or faster cars, but mass transit.

I think vBulletin is stretched to its breaking point in this implementation. What now? Most "corporate" bulletin board systems don't have the same features or ease of use that vBulletin has, and they're also outrageously expensive. Do we hack vBulletin to use an Oracle back end? Try phpBB or InvisionBoard or some other board that could possibly use a faster back end? InvisionBoard uses fewer queries than vBulletin, so it might be able to hold its own using a mySQL back end.

Then again, these may be the words of someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. Carry on.

[RTFirefly]

Originally posted by AudreyK
Oh, no, it wasn't the ads I was talking about. I was talking about the suggestion for avatars and custom member titles.

I like the ads idea very much.

I apologize for any misunderstanding on my part.

And at least until the next vBulletin upgrade, avatars and custom titles can't be part of any membership-with-perks package. Anthracite recently posted (on Fathom) a list of those services that could be turned on and off for an entire list of people with just a couple of clicks:

* Ability to view profiles of other Members
* Ability to download attachments.
* Ability to search.
* Ability to "email to friend"
* Ability to post to threads.
* Ability to reply to your own threads.
* Ability to reply to others threads.
* Ability to edit posts.
* Ability to post polls.
* Ability to vote in polls.
* Ability to use private messaging.
* Ability to use PM tracking and read receipt.
* Ability to post events on the calendar.

She later said specifically that avatars, custom titles, and sigs could not be turned on and off like that.

elmwood - I've got no idea whether vBulletin software has scalability problems. I've got zero firsthand experience here, and I've never thought to ask anyone about this who would know.

[dantheman]

RT, this whole thread is asking people who might know. I'm sure Powers That Be check in on threads like this from time to time - I know Anthracite does...

[callie]

Why can't they just do it like Live Journal does? Pay if you want to (I think its $25 a year/ $15 for six months) but its not mandatory to get in. If you become a paid member - you're put on the fast server and pretty much guaranteed entrance. If you choose not to pay then you can still enter and make/read entries but it may take a while and you may lose some entries. LJ did it through paypal which I found really easy to use.

[Sam Stone]

If the problem is vBulletin scalability, one solution would be to split the SDMB up onto multiple servers, each one running its own copy of vBulletin. The databases would be separated, so you wouldn't be able to search across them all at once, but other than that, it should be able to be made reasonably transparent.

Chalk me up as another person who would shell out some serious coin for a CD-ROM containing the database of the Straight Dope message board. Put a searchable front end on it, and you've got a real product.

Then remove archive searches from the main board entirely, and force people to buy the CD if they want to go back and search. Or better yet, limit archive searches to the last three months only, and sell quarterly updates of the CD to keep a constant revenue stream coming in. Maybe your premium board membership gets you an automatic subscription to the archive CDs.

Or make archive searches a pay-only feature. That would have the dual benefit of lightening the load on the SDMB server (I'm sure those archive searches are a big performance hit), and would also generate some revenue.

IF you SDMB operators are looking for a programmer to write such a searchable front end for a CD-ROM database pro bono, give me a shout. The software company I used to own wrote full-text retrieval software.

[Sam Stone]

It just occurred to me that you don't even need the CD's. The archive is text, and can't be all that big. Make it downloadable, and set up an e-commerce server to allow people to go on and pay for it and download it on the spot.

To me, the archive is the most valuable part of the SDMB. It is an incredibly rich resource of facts. You can find answers to almost any question by searching the archive.

If the reader doesn't want to let the archive database out of their hands, how about setting up an archive-only server? Take archive searching off the SDMB itself, which would lighten the load on it. Move the archive to a pay-only server, and improve the search capabilities. Throw in cecil's columns. Charge a monthly fee for access to the archives.

I'd pay for that.

I do agree that you need to maintain free access to the board itself. If you charge even a couple of bucks a month, you'll lose most of the posters. There are just too many free alternatives on the net for new people to be willing to pay money for the privilege to post. So fees have to be attached to 'value added' services like faster access, archive searches, etc.

[dantheman]

It's not even just a question of money, at least in terms of paying to post. There are people who don't buy things online, whether by using a credit card or a debit card (or even a pay-by-check method). If the place was pay-only, then people would be scared off not because of how much or little the cost would be but because they don't feel right about paying for things online (especially if it were a subscription, in which money would be debited each month).

I think Sam's idea about charging for the archives is a sound one. Question: Is it possible to determine how much the search engine is used for old threads/posts as opposed to more recent ones?

[ataraxy22]

one problem I see with making the archive a premium product is that it may lead to much more thread repetition. Right now, many users (most hopefully) will search the archives before starting a new thread to see if the topic has been discussed before. If the archive is pay-per-read, this won't be possible for those not paying for it, and thus many more repeat topics to wade through.

[dantheman]

Well, I would bet a lot of people actually don't search the archives. But then again, this isn't always necessary.

For example, when starting a new thread in any of the column forums or ATMB, one should probably do a search to make sure the topic hasn't been covered recently. Same with GQ and GD although one should in that case search a little further back than ATMB (maybe up to a year?). But MPSIMS, the Pit, IMHO, and even Cafe Society to a degree don't need to be searched before a new thread is created, IMO, because the threads there are generally looking for opinions or an opportunity to rant (or babble), rather than discussing a topic or a question.

And of course, as has been noted, using the search engine does put a strain on the server, no doubt. So putting the archived material somewhere else, whether it's another server or a CDROM, would lessen the load.

[RexDart]

How about changing nothing? It may be painfully slow at times, but that's part of the board's unique charm. And any sort of fee-based system, or members-plus system, is just going to screw up membership. Is a faster server worth the risk of ruining the membership, the contributors who make the board worthwhile in the first place?

[Sam Stone]

It's not just that it's slow... It's also unstable. There have been numerous database crashes, and data lost on more than one occasion. It looks to me like the SDMB isn't going to hang together forever the way things are going. And if would be a tragedy if this database were lost.

[cainxinth]

Originally posted by RexDart
How about changing nothing? It may be painfully slow at times, but that's part of the board's unique charm. And any sort of fee-based system, or members-plus system, is just going to screw up membership. Is a faster server worth the risk of ruining the membership, the contributors who make the board worthwhile in the first place?

That kinda sounds like the basis of conservative ideology. IOW, "Things are fine now, if you try and improve them you're might ruin what we've got." I guess the liberals among us would reply, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."

Personally, I am open to many changes to the board. vB Polls and Avatars especially. And, I'd be willing to contribute to the bandwidth and hardware costs in many of the schemes suggested. The SDMB is unique as far as I can tell, a message board devoted to the truth. I'd pay $20 a year to make it more useable.

[RTFirefly]

1) Avatars take up a lot of bandwidth, compared to most features.
2) In vBulletin's current incarnation, the only way to turn avatars on or off for a group of people at once is on the basis of post count. So
3) The SDMB can't make them available to everyone without further bogging down the board, and
4) It can't make them part of a premium-membership package, period.

Unless somebody's got a way around this, we should really ditch the subject of avatars.

[RTFirefly]

one problem I see with making the archive a premium product is that it may lead to much more thread repetition.

If I read them right, ataraxy, I don't think Mtgman, Sam, or dan are proposing pay-only access to old threads. I think they're suggesting that the CR copy its archives onto CD-ROM and sell them to those of us who have sufficient interest and money to buy them. This would allow us to search old SDMB threads without putting additional load on the server - in fact, without even being online. I've got to say I like that idea a lot.

I wonder (a) how many CD-Roms it would take to contain the board archives from 1999-2001, say, and (b) how much it would cost the CR upfront to put that first copy of the archives onto CD-ROM. (After that, I'm assuming per-unit costs would be slight.)

RexDart - I agree that if the SDMB requires payment to post, it will hurt the boards. But we've bandied about a number of ideas in this thread by which the SDMB could potentially create revenue without requiring anything of anybody to maintain their existing level of access to the board. I can't see any of that harming the SDMB.

And while some may find the board's slowness charming, I suspect that most just find it frustrating.

And there's one other thing: if the CR were to have a revenue stream directly attributable to the SDMB, then it would probably make them a lot more reluctant to pull the plug on it, should there ever be a reason to do so. I have no reason to believe that they're contemplating such a measure, but you never know what the future might hold, and the time to insure oneself is before disaster strikes.

[Una Persson]

Originally posted by Sam Stone
It just occurred to me that you don't even need the CD's. The archive is text, and can't be all that big. Make it downloadable, and set up an e-commerce server to allow people to go on and pay for it and download it on the spot.

The database is neither "not all that big", nor text. Are you talking about something else?

The "archive" is a series of MySql database tables, organized in a database. It is not text, and to view it properly, the easiest way to do it is that you need:

* A webserver
* PHP
* MySql

and a machine set up and configured to use all of these programs. This is not a simple thing that could be distributed on a CD.

jdavis at one time said that the entire database was well more than 800-900 MB. I imagine that it is quite a bit larger than that by now. To put things in perspective, my database, including the Search indexes, which is only 49,151 posts, takes up 82 MB. It compresses down a bit on zipping, but still...you can't run it zipped.

There is some common overhead, but let me tell you two stats. The 49,151 posts take up 29 MB in the "post.MYD" table. The two Search index tables take up 35 MB. Why are they more than the post table? Damned if I know.

If the reader doesn't want to let the archive database out of their hands, how about setting up an archive-only server? Take archive searching off the SDMB itself, which would lighten the load on it. Move the archive to a pay-only server, and improve the search capabilities. Throw in cecil's columns. Charge a monthly fee for access to the archives.

This would not be hard to do the *first* time. The first time, what you would do is copy the entire database to another server, then delete the old articles from the current "active" database. You then would need to run some MySql optimization routines to reclaim the space and defragment the database tables, and it would take oodles and oodles of CPU power. Most likely, the database would have to be "offline" for days, or longer.

The problem which comes in is when you want to move articles (threads and posts) from one database to another, as part of a quarterly housecleaning. You would have to write some sort of serious export script, and a corresponding import script, and God help you if you screw up one little thing, as you may as well delete everything and recover from the nightly backups...

Also - all thread links to other posts/threads/whatever would be broken, as the threads and posts would no longer exist.

If you charge even a couple of bucks a month, you'll lose most of the posters. There are just too many free alternatives on the net for new people to be willing to pay money for the privilege to post. So fees have to be attached to 'value added' services like faster access, archive searches, etc.

There are other alternatives.

My favorite one is making it such that you must pay to post in IMHO, MPSIMS, Cafe Society, and the BBQ Pit. Ignorance is still fought, in that people are free to post in the Comments on Cecil's Columns, Comments on Staff Reports, GQ, and GD.

Some have worried that people would just "pollute" the free forums with material that belongs in the paying ones, to get around it. And that this would make the "hard-working Moderator's job much harder".

No it wouldn't. One's job in moderating misbehavior is as hard as one makes it. Give Moderators the right to ban, and let them ban as-needed. If really wanted, give the Banned person the right to appeal to the Admins, or make a "three strikes" rule, or something. Like people say, it's a free net, there are upteen million other places to go, and if someone consistantly won't follow the rules and is an almost always an asshole, and has nothing really to contribute to the "core" forums, why do they seem to be unbannable?

I could expound upon this, but it's not the point of this thread.

[Una Persson]

Originally posted by Anthracite
The "archive" is a series of MySql database tables, organized in a database. It is not text, and to view it properly, the easiest way to do it is that you need:

* A webserver
* PHP
* MySql

and a machine set up and configured to use all of these programs. This is not a simple thing that could be distributed on a CD.

And don't forget the $85 a year vBulletin license, which is absolutely required for this, you dumbassed Una.

The short of it - it is entirely technically infeasible for 99.99% of the Members here. And that's not good market penetration.

[dantheman]

Anthracite, I completely neglected to consider the state in which the database currently exists.

My favorite one is making it such that you must pay to post in IMHO, MPSIMS, Cafe Society, and the BBQ Pit. Ignorance is still fought, in that people are free to post in the Comments on Cecil's Columns, Comments on Staff Reports, GQ, and GD.

How is this an alternative? People would still need to pay, and as the quoted post implied (I think), requiring payment to post (whether in some forums or all of them) would relfexively turn off a lot of people. I don't see how this is a plus, even if the remaining people post only Fighting Ignorance topics.

Did I misunderstand?