A Question for the "Smartest Man in the World"

The BBQ Pit
1

I fully expect to become a pariah for asking this, but, so what.

If you’re so damn smart, why does your message board suck so?

It isn’t the quality of the post or the posters. They’re the best to be found. It’s the glacial speed of your servers.

OK, OK, now you can hit me with the obligatory “This costs us money” response and the “How much do you pay for this fabulous service?” corrolary.

I pay nothing for the SDMB. Just like I pay nothing for Fark.Com. Just like I pay nothing for Memepool.com. Or Cruel.com. Or Lileks. Or Homestarruner. Or Snopes. Or (shudder) Drudge.

Why does your site take 5 to 10 times as long to load a single page of plain text as other similar sites? And it isn’t my crappy home dial-up connection. The front page of the SDMB shouldn’t take 3 minutes to load over the T1 line at work.

OK, webhosting costs money. Why can’t the world’s smartest man figure out a way to make this site profitable (or at least a way to make it pay for itself).

I don’t post or even lurk here much anymore because of this condition. I miss the Teeming Millions. I just don’t have the patience to wait minutes for each thread to load.

If a nimrod like Matt fucking Drudge can create and maintain a workable website, why can’t Cecil?

Let the flames begin.

2

I thought this was going to be a trick thread, to see how many “Views” you could get from all the people who thought THEY were the “Smartest Man in the World”.

Eh, to address the OP:

As has already been made clear many times in the, let me see, over three years since you registered, Cecil has nothing to do with the day-to-day operation of the website.

That’s all.

You may now go back to not posting here anymore.

3

And, Oh yes, one more thing…

Just to pile fuel (gasoline) upon the fire.

Mods and Admins,

Make sure you react with the surliest righteous indignation possible whenever anyone directs the slightest constructive criticism your way. Since you are unpaid no one should be allowed to suggest improvements or point out problems or inconsistencies with the way things are done.

4

The SD can’t collect donations, because it’s not in the tax structure for the Chi Reader. I always had the pipe dream of having some sort of “love child list” where people could give five bucks to get on the list and help the Dope. Nothing else other than being on the list, and you can write it off as a “premium membership” for taxes (I think).

5

Way to respond to the question DDG. Gee, CA isn’t involved in the day to day running of the site. Therefore, it’s perfectly OK that it’s slower than Dubya answering a Mensa test.

OK, let me rephrase the question. This site is full of extremely intelligent people. Why can’t we, as a community, figure out a way to make it run at a post 1993 speed?

6

Sorry, maybe if Cecil hopped on a treadmill that added power to the server…

Sheesh! Frank, if you have legitimate ideas on how to make the site faster, feel free to let the world know. Otherwise, your song’s going to get real old, real fast. Fair warning!

7

I am perfectly willing to admit that I have none.

However, I’m willing to look for something. I don’t really want more popups, or more spam or a monthly fee.

But I’m here complaining (and thereby exposing myself to your derision) because I appreciate this place. Forgive me for using a provocative topic to attract attention to this issue.

Am I the only one who has noticed this? Tell me so, and I’ll gladly shut my trap. But I doubt it.

Why the kneejerk reaction? Is the SDMB above ALL criticism?

I believe this community deserves a workable message board. I agree that we all have an obligation to contribute towards creating one.

Blindly defend the SDMB if you will. I just feel that a vast amount of superior content is being wasted.

I’m willing to help however I can. How does denying there is a problem serve anyone’s needs?

8

We’ve had this discussion before. It’s a catch 22.
SDMB members to Chicago Reader-
Tell us how much money do you need for a better server etc package and we’ll collect it for you.
Chicago Reader to SDMB members-
We aren’t set up to take money for this and if we do take money well… it’ll just get complicated. Maybe we’ll go pay, then again maybe not. Trust us, just buy a T shirt.
SDMB members to Chicago Reader-
Sigh

9

I’m going to bed now, so this will be my last post in my (first ever) intentionally provocative thread.

You’re telling me that the Chicago Reader has a (mostly) captive audience of thousands of dedicated web readers who are willing to pay for their services. And that the Chicago Reader is too a) lazy or b) stupid to take the time and effort to collect on that asset?

Man! We’ve got smarter people than that here in Bagdad, Kentucky. And they’re still growing tobacco.

10

It’s not a matter of lazy or stupid. It’s a matter of legal problems, tax problems, and other complicated things. There are any number of threads about this around.

Here’s one.

Here’s another.

11

I don’t care enough about this to read the links (ducks and covers) but I don’t really get the “We aren’t setup to accept money from this service”. Surely a newspaper has a subscription system? Let SDMB members sign up for a subscription for the paper, and waive the actual delivery of the paper… Payment made.

I am guessing however that it all boils down to “if we accept payment for a service then we must be held to certain standards of provision of this service” …

12

Part of Fighting Ignorance involves teaching people how to be patient, for, indeed, the hasty make rash judgments and conclusions.

13

Read the links, folks. There was endless discussion when the pay-SDMB proposal was first seriously toyed with a year or so ago.

And Frankd6, if I may be blunt, you certainly do not sound appreciative of the SDMB. I see more abuse than praise in your posts.

14

Yeah I kinda agree. What if Anthracite et al. raised 8k for a new server, and the slowness problem didn’t improve?

15

Are you suggesting this is a modus operandi for us, you fucking peasant?

[sub]This post not subtitled for the humourless.[/sub]

16

Frank, it’s because you’re not in The Clique[sup]tm[/sup]. Me, I get blazing fast speeds even at noon on Mondays.

Sorry, it all depends on who you know.

Fenris

17

Serious answer:

All the websites you mentioned in your OP serve primarily static content (with the exception of maybe Fark); that is, they’re regular HTML pages. It’s much easier for a machine to serve 1000 static-HTML pages, where it just spits up the content on the screen and it’s the same for everyone. Notice that there isn’t really a problem accessing the daily columns or main pages of the site; the message boards are the slow part. My website hosting is easily affordable even though I get tons of traffic precisely because I’m just offering some images and static content. The computer doesn’t need to generate a unique page and assemble it for each user and every page.

Message boards and dynamic content are waaaay more work for a server than static HTML. To open a SDMB thread, the computer has to figure out who is logged in, figure out if you decided to view sigs or not, figure out if it needs to edit out posts for anyone you might have on Ignore, format all the messages every time the thread is opened, etc. Every time you view a forum it moves the newest thread to the top and readjusts the post count, views, etc. Essentially, each time you view the SDMB, the server is generating every page on demand for you. That’s so much different from me getting in my text editor, writing up some HTML, and you looking at it. In that case, the browser says “give me this HTML file,” it gives it, and your browser renders it. It stays the same each time. That’s what Memepool and Cruel are – Rogers Cadenhead and the Memepool editors are posting those links manually, each day, for you to view. The computer isn’t doing the work, the humans are.

Cookies, sigs, e-mail notification, special preferences for each poster, smilies, VBCodes, parsed URLs, and all of things which are just the nature of the content are what’s making this site slow. It would be impossible for a human to ever do what the computer is doing to run this message board – by its very nature, it needs to be automated – bit it is quite a list of complicated tasks going on at one time and that naturally takes up a lot of processing power.

I post quite a bit in the middle of the night, and the board is much faster, because there are less people using up the site resources. It’s more processing power than bandwidth issues (though with more processing to do back and forth between your machine and the server, and unique pages generated you will eat up more bandwidth). During the day, around lunchtime, most of the pages I try to view will time out because everyone is trying to access the SDMB from work.

Now, there’s your reason why Rogers can offer Cruel fast for free, but you have to wait for the SDMB. As for why they don’t have a better, more capable server, I just have to say that you get what you pay for.

I guess if and/or when they decide to find a way for the users to pay for an upgrade, you’ll have the option of what you’ve got now or something better.

18

Haven’t we seen this OP before, with nearly the exact wording, about a year ago? Was that you, Frankd6?

And is “Frankd6” a D&D reference, by chance? :confused:

19

Frank . Those “smart” peoples down there are just lucky they’re on welfare. Taking money NOT to grow too much tobacco.

Maybe The Reader could take money from the Fed. Gummit to NOT let certain people post to their board. That would get 'em a mother of a server in a hurry.

20

Yeah, sometimes the servers are so slow that its impossible to get through. Admittedly, its frustrating. Do I keep trying? Do I put up with the hassle and eventually find a time of night when I can expect a quick response? I do, because this is the best damn site on the web for intelligent debate, and it doesn`t cost me a penny.