# A modest proposal for the Straight Dope **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [June 11, 2021, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-modest-proposal-for-the-straight-dope/944055 "2021-06-11T15:48:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 114
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2021, 11:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-modest-proposal-for-the-straight-dope/944055/114 "2021-06-12T11:43:32Z")
> [@mordecaiB](#): > > Since Ed say payment options are going to happen, a good solution would be for posters to pony up their cash for membership, just like they’ve been asking to do for a year. I don’t think most of us would mind a little bump in price. Maybe add a donation button, which, again, posters have been asking for. Or the ability to buy memberships for those that can’t afford them, as we have asked for and even had for awhile. Also, people have been clamoring for years for Straight Dope coffee cups, tee shirts etc. A Cafe Press shop or something similar has to be as easy as Patreon to run. You have quite a few talented artists on the Dope, plus people like me that suck at it. Why not do ask them to submit a work, show them to members and let them have a vote. Hell, maybe the pros would do it just for a chance to have their signature appear on the items for a limited time. Do the contest every year and people would be buying that shit all the time. Trust me, anything Dopers come up with would be better than the solid blue Straight Dope masthead or anything put out by Slug. Last time anyone posted about the crappy old Dope stuff, someone said there was loads of it left because nobody wanted them 'cause they looked like shit with the same design year after year. With a Cafe Press type of business you don’t have to worry about unsold merch. This is how I feel. If a payment-for-_some_-posting-privileges is going to happen, it couldn’t be that much harder to re-implement something very like the old membership system alongside free guest posting with ads. Which isn’t to say that a new forum with extra-special-paid-membership on top of the old ones is a bad idea, I just don’t think it would bring in the most bucks. Ditto for donations and swag. All are reasonable - again, there isn’t a downside to trying to sell merch through instant-inventory places. But just doing the math it seems like the percentage of people who would pay twice as much to post in one special forum, or the percentage of people who would similarly buy a $30 piece of memorabilia once a year, is just not going to compare to the people who just continue their modestly-priced membership. All of these can help, though, and won’t hurt. With regards to the column per se, there’s still a space in the world for a snarky know-it-all. For a while I had high hopes for What If by Randall of XKCD, but then he moved that particular column to the paywalled NYT without even mentioning it, just radio silence for years until I found it out randomly, and I’m not going to subscribe just to see if his well has run dry yet and I sort of resent him just stopping writing with no explanation. But the fact that I would still read What If if it were still on the XKCD website shows that I for one still have a desire for a regular feature of facts mixed with humor. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-modest-proposal-for-the-straight-dope/944055)._