I may only have 300 posts, but I have lurked here a long time.
I was around when Satan and heartherlee were still friends.
I was around when Mark Serlin was posting his “poofy hair” bit, and Opal was cutting herself due to comments made by PunditLisa.
That said, this board was shitty then, and it is shitty now.
Servers down all the time.
But now you have revenue amounting to several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and yet the same shitty service.
What have you done with our money, jackasses?
Many people who are in the biz have testified about the cost of servers appropriate for running this site properly. They have stated that you have MORE than enough to meet the needs of the PAYING users.
So what’s the deal?
And please, I don’t care to hear from those die-hards to whom the SDMB is God, Allah, Gaia, Ahiator, or whoever else is dumbfuck enough to not care about getting what they have paid for.
Well, i agree with you that the board’s performance can be shitty at times, and that it does get annoying, but i’m not sure how you come to the conclusion that there is “revenue amounting to several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.”
Revenue of, say, $300,000 per year, would require 20,000 full-price paid subscriptions @ $15 per member. I’m pretty sure the SDMB has nowhere near 20,000 paying subscribers. Also, a lot of the paid subscribers are Charter Members, meaning that they pay half price for their membership.
Now, there is also some revenue from the Google adwords, and i truly have no idea how much it is, but i’d be very surprised if it added up to more than a few grand a year. And if i’m a typical user, probably less, because i block the ads using Firefox, and would never click on them anyway.
This is not. Even if we assume that every member pays $15, that would require 6,667 members per year just to achieve an income of $100,000. I think you can rest assured in the knowledge that there are not that many people that pay on the entire board, let alone at the full rate.
That’s a good question, but why do you think they owe you something? You paid knowing what it was like, and you can vote with your feet at any time. Perhaps that will prompt some movement towards improvement, but the status quo generally accomplishes nothing.
It’s not God to me. I don’t spend neraly as much time here as I used to. Nevertheless, I got exactly what I paid for. I have access to the SDMB, no more and no less. How much more should I care?
Maybe I’m not around online for all of the times the servers are down here, because I’ve never experienced it. Ever. And I’ve lurked around here for awhile before I subscribed also.
This board performs WAY better than it did in 2003, when I joined. I remember losing at least 35% of my posts–maybe more–to server hiccups. That’s when I got in the habit of writing my posts out in Notepad and then cutting and pasting them to the Reply box, which I still do to this day. The board was also down a lot more often then, and it was a lot slower. (Granted, some of this could be due to a smaller user base.)
Then why the fuck are you still here? I seriously cannot understand this. This place is the shits! I’ve been here forever and it’s sucked the whole time! Do you honestly not see the irony in this?
It’s easy to bitch. But please, take this opportunity to list the things that you want from this board that you think you ought to be getting for the money.
Furthermore, I’d like you to let me (and the rest of the board) know how you arrived at your estimate regarding board revenue.
By all means, please. I would like to understand why you’re dissatisfied, but you must see that your unsubstantiated assertions and baseless guesses as to the money side of things makes it difficult to take your side.
Not to come down on either side, but one of the reasons some people paid was possibly in part because of the hope of improved performance. Many people had even offered to donate money to help performance long before pay-to-post.
My ass is currently covered by a nice medium weight denim, thanks; I’m not much concerned about my level of endearment here; and I never read the MMPs.
So I guess your response is that the entire Board isn’t the suxors, right? And this is just the latest in the garden-variety “bitching about Board performance” threads. I’ve got no problem with that; bitch away; at least you’ve removed the element of “THIS RESTAURANT SUCKS! THE FOOD IS COLD, THE SERVICE IS SLOW, AND THE TABLES ARE DIRTY! Meet you back here tomorrow for dinner!” That’s the part that was amazing me. Happy griping.
It doesn’t seem like you care to hear from members. Maybe you should e-mail someone higher up on the food chain to get an answer. I suspect you’ll never get the answer you’re looking for, however.
Really? I’m sure you have some evidence of this, based on revenue and server costs?
Look, i’ve been critical in the past of the board’s poor performance, and i agree that the performance can still be pretty bad at times. I also think that there have been lots of promises, followed by not much improvement.
But you don’t do yourself any favors by simply making shit up.
That’s the second time you’ve asserted that. Mathematically it simply isn’t true. Why do you insist that this is correct when there is no possible way it could be?