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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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?
: