I thought that since we moved to this platform, membership fees couldn’t be paid any more/all that’s in limbo.
I have a serious question: how about Reddit.com ?
It this site dies, would it be possible to open a sub-reddit forum for us Dopers?
Reddit has over 2 million forums, Could we transfer to there, and still keep our character ?
Reddit is awful. The SDMB wouldn’t work there. It’s not a real forum.
According to codinghorror, Discourse is capable of this and already does so on other message boards. IIRC, we (Sun-Times) already pay for the top tier setup so it’s an option that just needs to be turned on and payment details worked out. This was all going on back when Ed floated the idea of resurrecting Cecil, so my info is a few months old but I haven’t seen any updates since.
Excellent! I second Cheesesteak to be in charge.
How much can the message board be worth on its own?
We’ve speculated about this in the past. If mordecaiB is correct and the Board has fewer than 800 paying customers and no real connection to anything else, then it probably has little to no value.
However, in the murky world of intellectual property, there are six books and a domain name associated with The Straight Dope, and they all have at least some value. GoDaddy estimates the domain name straightdope.com to be worth ~$4,500, and the book series probably has some residual value. Businesses don’t like to surrender a copyright or a trademark if they don’t have to, and the SDMB may be the cheapest way to defend the trademark.
That’s encouraging - yeah, defending a trademark, surely that’s reason enough. An old trademark for a canceled feature that last appeared in a diminishing number of what was once a thriving underground, I mean “alternative” press circuit - tied in with a book series that’s out of print and out of date - titled like something off an old Firesign Theatre album. We better cross our fingers on that one.
But we really shouldn’t speculate idly. Maybe one of the Chicago kids here should just go to WBEZ and knock on the door, see what’s brewing, maybe make a case for the forum not to be abolished. Worried that will just draw attention to a low-value asset that had been slipping under the radar? Well, I’m not sure doing nothing is the best way to proceed.
If they’re determined to cut us off, it would be nice to get a tip-off.
If the SDMB gets cast adrift, I’d jump at the chance to give my money to whichever mod is willing to toss the board on a server in their treehouse.
I mean, we got this! The mods are in place, we’ve got the difference between MPSIMS and IMHO down, I bet we’d keep going with minimal upset.
(Or maybe it’ll be a few of us running the board… “the teeming dozens”!)
I personally am not at all involved in the financial side of things here, so this is all speculation on my part.
I can say that those who think our costs should be minimal need to consider that based on the number of page views we get, we’re up above the limit for the $300 / month tier of hosting and we’re well into the expensive Enterprise level hosting. Discourse doesn’t list a price for that level of hosting so I don’t know what that costs us.
Based on some comments that I have heard over the years, I’m fairly certain that most of our income used to come from the main web page and not from the message board, and that most of that went away when Google’s mysterious algorithm decided to royally screw us over.
Again, I don’t know anything for certain, but I suspect that the income from subscriptions isn’t enough to keep the lights on. It may be that the reason TPTB haven’t bothered getting this running is that it wouldn’t bring enough money in to justify the expense of getting it going.
As for our subscription system, as I understand it, Discourse expects to tie into their customer’s payment system, and our payment system used to be built around a vBulletin plugin (which obviously can’t be used to Discourse). So on the Discourse side, yes, it’s basically just a matter of putting the hooks in place, fairly simple. But the problem is that we don’t have anything for Discourse to hook into, and as long as we’re missing that piece of the puzzle, this ain’t gonna work.
I don’t know how much has been done behind the scenes for filling in that missing puzzle piece. I haven’t heard anything at all one way or the other.
Then who is Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor paying his annual membership fees too?
Maybe the BDSM message board? That’s an honest mistake.
That’s what I tell my wife when she sees the payments. Honest mistake. Over and over.
At the risk of being whooshed, I assume Bosda was referring to NPR membership.
Since I don’t have any idea how this stuff works, can you dumb it down for me? Are you saying that the banking side was set up for vBulletin and it won’t work with Discourse or that it does not exist at all anymore?
For instance, if Discourse turned this option on and I tried to pay $15 for membership, is the fact that there is no bank on the receiving end that is the problem?
So how did we make the switch to Discourse in the first place?
I understand that the late TubaDiva did almost all the work herself, as a volunteer (like all the mods)…
But did Discourse want some money at the time?.They knew how many page views we get.
It would almost work for those MPSIMS, IMHO, and BBQ posts whose OP basically amounts to “well look at this link!” because most of the discussion will be about the link, and nested threads are good for focused discussion. For other, more social and complex discussions, the quality of the - ahem - discourse would lower so much that I would no longer consider the Dope to be the same on Reddit.
Those tiers are suggestions, really, that work generally for most sites. But there are also individually tailored packages that are somewhere between Business and Enterprise in terms of cost and features. Given the modifications of the Discourse model here at the Dope, I’d expect that we operate under Business with a few more bucks thrown in for increased page hits.
I personally would expect a business + additional pageview plan rather than full on enterprise. Last I heard we still can’t do enterprise level plugins.
~Max
In Chicago terms, Macy is still holding onto the Marshall Field’s trademark and barely supporting it, and the name Carson’s/Carson Pirie Scott was sold to a Chinese equity firm and is currently being parked as an online store.
Stranger things have happened.
I disagree. Reddit has some very good discussions.
Here are some examples:
There is a forum called Reddit - Dive into anything which has high-quality posts equal to our forum on politics.
for example: read this thread about imagining the future of American politics
Reddit - Dive into anything
And there’s a forum called “explain like I’m a five year old”, which answers questions that are often(but not always!) as good as our GQ forum.
Here’s a thread asking why it’s a bad thing to drive with the clutch pressed:
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/q2an2e/eli5_why_is_it_bad_to_hold_down_a_clutch_in_a_car/
If our beloved SDMB dies, I think we could migrate to Reddit, and make it work.
There are close to 3 million forums there, so it’s quite possible that a new one for us Dopers would go almost unnoticed. We could keep our sense of community.
Many threads at reddit have over a thousand posts, so the atmosphere is not as personal-and fun- as the Dope. But a new forum of ex-Dopers might well remain smaller and more intimate.
If we call the forums with odd sounding names* which we Dopers would love, but not attract millions of hits,-- we might well be able to keep our community alive.
But let’s hope that the new owners don’t force us to find out.
*say, "reddit\r\ex-straightdope-GQ, and reddit\r\ex-straightdope-IMHO
I have a Reddit account and I joined a number of boards. It is decent for what it is. But it’s not a real forum; discussions can’t flow there the way they do here. The SDMB would not be the SDMB there, nor would it work on Discord, or as a Facebook group.
I’ve been holding my tongue during Reddit discussions, but since you brought it up: +1, @chappachula . Sure, there is a vast wasteand of stupidity and worse in parts, but also a lot of really good discussions.
And I say this as an old guy who doesn’t understand these damn kids these days. If I’m looking for an answer to a question, whether it be something like “QYLD vs JEPI”, “how to start a settlement in No Man’s Sky”, or “best dishwasher”, I often add “site:reddit.com” because 9 times out of 10 I’ll get a fine list of on-topic posts by people who know what they are talking about.
Yes, the thread flow is different. It has pros and cons to the traditional pure-chronological flow. But I don’t think it would be a deal-killer.
Frankly, my biggest concern is that “our community” would then be opened up to…well, 1000x more people. Folks would drive through our neighborhood just to look at our stuff, and would sometimes thrown things on our lawn. But: Reddit’s post up/down vote system and the ability to ban people easily goes a long way. And, it could be made as an invite-only subreddit (I’m not sure I’m in favor of that, but it is a possibility).