Una:
What if you just went with plain text? Its not as pretty, and does not have the feel, but the content is there, links wouldn’t be clickable, but for the determined, that’s no big deal. Also text has no other extraneous code to wade through. But as ** dantheman ** is pointing out there may just be no market for it. But more people would have to weigh in before I gave up. I would love to have a copy.
The bells and whistles probably wouldn’t be necessary for it to be marketed. If you click on “Show Printable Version” at the bottom of a thread, that’s kind of how it could look. But could it still be easily searchable? Ah, that’s the rub.
** dantheman** wrote…
Yeah, in a simple format, on CD. I would then copy them to a dedicated hard drive so I wouldn’t have to switch CDs, you may not want to. When an update comes it just gets thrown into the pile with the rest of the previous information. If a thread references another thread, its done by number, other wise a text search utility should do the trick. At least thats what I *think *. I’m now getting the Idea that this is way to complicated. Some how I don’t think it should be. Also, I don’t want to download * anything *over 5-6 megs if I can help it, I buy a CD (or something) and they mail it to me. **What would be the point? ** I would have it. It would be in my possession. Part of the collection of cool stuff that I just happen to have amassed over the years, also I could give money to the SDMB without causing The reader to stray to far off it’s beaten track.
Yes, I’m getting the drift.
I realize that. Jerry doesn’t make coffee mugs does he? Or print Tee shirts. No it would have to be out sourced probably. As for producing the CDs, I would vote for production on demand, rather than produce a bunch of stock and hope it sells.
Just an alternative formula to pass the hat as it were. About the cost
I still think that would depend on the format.
And that just may be my answer.
AND NOW: Where the heck did I get the idea that this would be easy?
About 3 years ago I worked as a consultant in the are of hospital administration, costs and financial management. One project I had was to build a searchable on line reference list of all the articles and books we had in our library. The interns would open a trade journal (lets say). Then in text , write the name and month of the journal, the author, title and page number of a given article and a brief overview of the content. This was saved as one archive with the name being a number. We paid someone to write an application that searched all the archives in a given file for key words. So when new content was produced it was just added to the existing file. So then one would do a search for “JACHO” and then would get back a list (in html) of all the archives that contained that word. Start clicking, when something looked interesting, you would go pull that magazine (or book) and there was your article. Any fool with a minimum of training could update the “Data base”. Now we only had about 3000 entries. I was thinking “Hay, why not strip all the HTML gibberish out of the existing threads and sell 'em!” I had not thought about the structure if the SDMB or the sheer volume of information. I still cant believe it would be that hard though.
::grumble grumble::
Well, who knows? Maybe in the near future there will be a better way. It’s a sound concept, and one that’s been floated before.
I think that because there’s so much data that would need to be placed on a removeable medium (DVD, CD, floppy, or whatever new technology’s out there), it might be tough to do them as needed. Maybe it would only be cost efficient if they did a lot at once. I don’t rightly know.
Of course, it might all be moot, as good of an idea as it is, since they don’t seem to want any money - whether it’s donated or the result of a purchase, other than for the existing products. I think the SDMB is in limbo in the eyes of the CR and has been for quite some time.
** dantheman ** wrote…
Ya know, honestly, this is why over the time I have been here I have refrained from making any suggestions, because, I have seen some pretty good, sound ideas booted out, mostly for lame reasons, lame in the context of a company not seeing the on line community they created as an asset. Well, obviously its not. I could be cynical and point out the fact that all corporations want a tax write off – and if this division isn’t a big fat loser then it they want it to be. –OR- the powers that be are profoundly short sighted thinking that having a very loyal, world wide, customer base of over 41,000 people, (many of whom would just simply send money with no product in exchange) is NOT an asset. In fact I would just call that STUPID. Now with this attitude the boards can’t last a whole lot longer. They will go POOF during a time when The Reader doesn’t want to spend money. All the users will take the community someplace and all the content will be gone. And the SDMB will just be a memory. Damn shame.
While it’s an attractive idea, it’ll only work if the money the Reader gets out of it is clearly worth whatever trouble they ahve to go to.
I’ve got a feeling that, as a businees, they sort of look at the Straight Dope as a collective, and judge it’s profitability altogether.
I can’t say if Cecil’s column sells newspapers, but the online version probably doesn’t net much revenue. Almost all the ads on the Straight Dope Front Page seem to be for the Reader itself. As well, we’ve been told that the reason new Straight Dope book collections have become less frequent is because they don’t want to print another one until they finally sell out of the latest one.
Now, the books have a prospective market of, well, anyone who goes to bookstores, I guess. But almost noone is in the market to buy this CD except members of the board. So at best there are 40,000 potential customers. Most of whom won’t buy the CD, I expect. Considering they can’t sell the books, and that that market for the CD is small, would the Reader go for it? Would it be profitable? I think they see the Straight Dope merchnadising as a bit of a hassle.
Still, I’d be excited to have one. And if the boards ever go down, I would definitely buy one,even if it was a little pricy.
[sub]Shh!, Stu. Don’t say that so loud. They’ll get ideas…[/sub]
One thing. dantheman said:
I thought that it takes more hamster exertion to find the old ones. I’m sure I’ve seen the staff recommend that, if we must search, to limit our searches to as short a time window as possible, instead of searching ‘Since the Beginning’, as a habit. The search feature was adjusted a while ago to allow more short periods to serch in, too, and I thought this was to help people search in just the last few months instead of having to use the longer periods, thus saving the hamsters some exercise.
Am I wrong?
Janx I don’t know what problems would be involved. I also realize that eventually ALL of the links would die. So what!
The wealth of knowledge and entertainment contained would be AND should be preserved. It makes me sad to think about what was lost in “our winter of missed content.” This board is also an intriguing sociological study. The diversity of its members discussing any variety of subjects. Many with practically impossible solutions. Yet for the most part, these ideas are discussed/debated intelligently and civilly. If our world leaders could only do the same.
Hmmm… world debate via message board, world leaders as members provide evidence, discuss options, publicly viewable,
uh sorry, got a little off track. 
Great idea Janx. I want a copy. There’s bound to be a way to do it.
Lessee, how many do you think we’d sell? Say, 1000? And how much will people pay? Say, $10?
… drop in the bucket.
Hm. That would yield a gross profit of $10,000. Let’s say it costs $5000 for production, including the wages the programmer(s) would command. That leaves $5000 for a better server or other components.
I don’t know a thing about servers, and I realize $5000 might not be enough. Wouldn’t it be a huge help, though?
wolfstu, I swear I read that the server takes as long to find an “old” thread than to find a newer one - it searches by keywords and postIDs and the like, not dates. I think. I need a vB expert to confirm.
I don’t know about that Dex I was thinking more like several thousand at $29.95 with another $10 ea. year for the updates.
With a little advertising… “this CD collection contains a wealth of knowledge, facts, funnies and fantasy. Follow along as the greatest issues are debated. Politicians beware: No one has diplomatic immunity here. This fantastic archive with nearly four million topics to browse… no encyclopedia can compare…yours for only $29.95.”
Could take on a life of its own, huh?
So, let’s say SDMB members pick up the first 2,500 CD’s. What’s that? $75,000 off the bat, w/ another $10,000 year in upgrades.
Plus newbie sales each year. There’s no way you’re going to keep something like this secret. It’s bound to draw attention and then what? National advertising…sales to 1/10th of 1% of the US population. CD rentals?
Any International Dopers interested in owning this collection? friends etc.
Hmmm, I see now. This could just turn out to be too much trouble. Besides, if the SDMB turned out a few million disks a year, I’d want to talk about profit sharing.
The boards would really be a pain wouldn’t they. Folks would be buying disks just to see themselves archived in print, their chance for immortality. Memberships would increase astronomically. Upgrades would be continuous. Nevermind, we’re better off just cussing the hamsters once in awhile. 
Hey, somebody’s gotta be the optimist around here.
I don’t think a simple cost analyses of this would be so difficult, Jeez, what do ya got? Programmer time? Agree on a universal, updateable format and go, how many hours at how much per hour. Pay some mope to burn the CD’s and the CD itself, oh yeah, other fixed costs like the building and electricity and the water, (if you want to be a ween) now what. I have no idea how much programmer time is in the states nor do I know how much info there really is. and that’s the problem. As ** Una **stated though, why re-invent the wheel, the boards software is open source. So sell a back up as is. In any case I would shell out like $50 (or more) for the first set and say 25 a year after. If 1000 people responded I’m *sure * the Reader could find a new server, and up grade the old one(s) for 50 grand. Then the residual revenue each year would help with the maintenance. Again folks, this is not to make the boards self sufficient, it’s to get the hamsters some steroids without pissing off the pope. That’s all, again why in the hell is ANY money making proposition shot down? Even if this one sucks, there have been better, but none of them have passed muster either. Lets face it they don’t want to assist the boards in being self sufficient, or the people who run the show simply are complacent bone heads who have no clue as to the importance of the entrepreneurial spirit, or using it in order to develop an existing asset. I would not invest in The Chicago Reader. The board is nice, but being the step child of the company is a very precarious position to be in, and I expect we will see its demise soon enough, unless takes * someone *an attitude and decides to nurture it.
Umm…more accurately, the MySQL database and PHP are. vBulletin is licensed, so while access to and use of the database and PHP are unrestricted, you have to do it without reverse engineering the vBulletin code (not that hard, but a lot of busy work) to make things 100% legal.
I see now the confusion. What I said before:
was specifically addressing that the Reader has the right to access the data in their database, without licensing issues coming into play with the three software products mentioned. However, that does not mean they can use vBulletin without license per se - just that they have the right to have access to the data, by another means they may decide themselves. And MySQL and PHP are open source (which I did call out), so those two packages can be worked with without copyright issues/licensing issues. HOWEVER - redisribution of the MySQL server in a commercial product (that is, as a standalone server on the CD) can fall afoul of GNU license issues, according to the MySQL page, which says:
(emphasis added)
From: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/index.html
So that’s something else to consider.
Look, it’s nice that you’re thinking of these things, very creative.
But … the last time there was serious discussion about charging some nominal amount, the overwhelming majority of people posting said that they wouldn’t pay anything. Nada. Not one cent.
So, now we’ve got maybe ten or twelve people willing to pay $50 for a CD? Great. Big help.
The idea is interesting, but the economics don’t impress me and I don’t know beans about it.
Well, Dex, if you guys ever enabled polls on here, perhaps you’d get a better handle on it. Why don’t you do that?
Ok… UNCLE! I give up. I know lots of people would not pay for the privilege of
posting, and well, I can see where those numbers might follow a product like this. I mean, realistically, of the 40K plus users we have around here, how many are truly regulars? And of THAT group, how many would be interested in a thing like this? Probably not many (that’s why you wouldn’t want to go and make 10 thousand of them and hope they sell, just make them on confirmed order) but still not that many, I cant say how apathetic the rest of the population is, but I can see where even setting it up may be a chancy bet for an organization that is already running on a shoe string. Oh well.
So let me re-phrase the OP.
Dear SDMB, can you sell ME a back up of the message boards? For various weird little interests of mine, I think this would be a real neat thing to have. If so, how much?
Sincerely,
Janx
Janx, I’ll see to it that Jerry sees this thread.
But, please, y’all seem to have some notion that there are dozens of people sitting around to handle things like this. There aren’t. We’ve got Jerry (the Tech God) from time to time when he’s not busy with other things that the READER thinks are more significantly more important.
I have no idea whether Jerry will have the time to even look at this thread, let alone answer.
Well, he did advertise for a techie not too long ago; how did that work out?
Make a couple of them. I want a set also. The updates too.
I could probably swing as much as a $100 for the initial set. Maybe another $10 quarterly or $25 bi/annually for a CD w/ new stuff. Throw in a mug and you got a deal.
From high atop the 23rd floor of a humble urban abode, the sun is poking up over what is left of the Atlantic rain forest. Janx is seen donning his ceremonial purple and white lab coat, the words “IT Dept.” clearly embroidered in gold across the front left pocket, giving credence to the plastic pen filled protector that lies within. Reverently, he reaches into his laptop attaché case and produces several AOL promotional CD rom/coffee coasters, (10 million hours, free for 1 month). Striding purposefully towards the sacrificial Bar-B-Que… errr, altar - he respectfully arranges the sacrifice. Dousing the silvery rainbow indicators of life on the other side of the screen with liberal amounts of liquid, (the distilled juice of the sugar cane stalk), he produces his official Star Trek TNG Bic™ lighter. POOF, all are aflame. Ringing out over the hard-scape we hear the plea: "Ohhh Great Jerry, God of Tech, Tech of the gods, hear our prayers! Forgive us of our ignorance, for we are but lowly end users, we know nothing of SQL and Vbulletin, and HTML and DB and CTRL+ALT+DEL. This is a sacred tung, which only gods such as yourself can fathom. Today we pray for your guidance. May we not be lead into the pit of FORMAT: C, for no good reason except that it would be neat to see what happens. May we not be tempted to bother his righteousness until we make damn sure the unit is actually plugged in to the wall. Yae, may we not be tempted to summons thee during month end reports to resolve system conflicts caused by our new “Beasty Boys” screen saver, faining lack of responsibility. Nor, if it pleases thee, let us not bother you for your professional opinions of the new computer system that our sister’s, in-laws cousins are thinking about buying. Nay, this morning, we offer this small sacrifice in hopes that you may dane to grant a humble “take a look see”. What would it take to send your awed and humble servants a copy of your next back up of the SDMB. We know this is no small task, oh hollowed one, we know that we are asking for a copy of the modern counterpart to the great library of Alexandria, for which you are keeper of the flame. We will not bring forth his wrath by asking for a freeware front end, nor will we complain at a lack of similarities between his righteousness’ “real board” and the one he would bestow upon his lowly servants.
Let us bow our heads in payment.
Janx suddenly snaps out of his trance. Ho shit! The fire trucks are on their way up the street * already*! Wiping the sweat from his brow, Janx crosses his fingers and clicks “Submit Reply”. Sorry, no time for preview!