Well, obviously the SDMB is slow because the cheap bastards didn’t pay to have the COLECO rustproofed.
You save some money up front, but it always costs more in the long run.
And I’ve found a lot of them.
What I’ve never understood is the argument that this is the only forum that’s worth using.
This is not really a unique site.
Yeah, it makes a difference to me what I spend my money on. When I purchase a product or a service, I expect that I get a good product or service. If I buy something, find out that it’s crap, and that those people who want me to give them my money in exchange for a service are giving me a crap product or service, I’m not about to buy that again.
And if routinely waiting 2 minutes for a page to load is to be expected, I can’t see how this is worth even more of my money.
I believe it was a board admin who first called the Reader a ‘corporation’. Corporations are typically owned by shareholders.
So now that we’re paying for a service, who’s supporting who?
Corporations are not necessarily publically held. Most aren’t. My friend is a self employed Public Relations consultant. He is a corporation. LLC, I believe, although he may be an S Corp.
After years of supporting us, we are now supposed to be self supporting. And maybe even - get this - profitable. Corporations exist to turn a profit. That’s what they do. They don’t exist to provide services to people for cost of good sold. That’s a non-profit or not-for-profit (I admit to being fuzzy on the difference between those two). The Reader is not a non-profit.
Let’s look at this from Tom’s point of view.
He has a columnist called Cecil Adams.
Cecil publishes a few books a turns a profit for him.
The internet hits - everyone is looking for content and willing to pay for it.
AOL calls Tom - hey, we want to pay you for this SD stuff - and we will give you a message board.
The AOL message board is moderately popular
AOL switches their business model - they can’t make a profit paying for content - at least not on the SD level - and says Tom will have to pay them if he wants to stay (that’s an assumption).
Tom decides to not abandon the community. He has a server and some spare bandwidth, the admin has some time, why not just set up his own SD community.
The message board becomes more popular as it becomes open to the whole internet. It consumes more and more bandwidth, more server processing, more hard drive and more admin time. This is no longer something the Reader can do with spare time, spare bandwidth and spare parts.
Moreover, if the Reader is like most other corporations, the money isn’t there like it was four years ago. Things are tight all over.
The Staff spends years trying to figure out a way to make the board self supporting. Advertising doesn’t pan out. They can’t take donations because the Reader is a for-profit. Eventually, it is obvious that only subscriptions will keep the board alive.
Subscriptions are implemented.
Maybe the board now pays for itself. Maybe it looses less money. Maybe it makes a zillion dollars a year. Don’t know, and frankly don’t care. The question is - is it worth the $$ to me in its current form. Not in the form it may take if the Reader upgrades bandwidth, I have no more control over that than I had over New Coke.
Although, FWIW, the shareholders are entitled to the same information the SEC and outside auditors receive. Also, publicly traded companies must publish an annual financial report, and every shareholder receives one.
All this is moot, however, as the Chicago Reader is a private entity.
Catsix, I promise you the Reader is not publicly traded. It’s not that big of an enterprise. Also, being a corporation does not in any way imply that a company is publicly traded. All being a corporation means is that it is a chartered enterprise and is considered a seperate, distinct legal entity by the government. There are quite a few one-person corporations out there.
I have pondered it.
In this thread, the questions you raised have already been hashed over and answered (to my satisfaction … YMMV) many, many times. I knew the ins and outs of every concern you had – and I’m not even an admin.
Having said that, it’s hard for me to say that additional clarification – now and in the future – is a bad thing. There are certainly lots of folks who missed the past discussions on these topics (Maureen perhaps being one).
But Maureen, understand that the Board at large is not a collection of sheep, and you are not asking fresh new questions in this thread. This ground has been covered many times. The clarification you wanted has in fact been given before. Your dissention, as it were, was not specifically necessary to receive clarification from the admins, as it had already been given in the past. No one at the SDMB has been holding back information.
And once again completely ignores my saying “No, I was never against paying,” refuses to actually read my post and continues to try to find hidden meanings that aren’t there…I said a great deal more than “You’re all sheep.” (Which, btw, I never said)I addressed every one of your points. I’m sorry, you’re calling me stupid because you intentionally misinterpret my post? Which upon review was English, and fairly direct and to the point? Shit flinging does not add credence to your arguments. And frankly, I’m bored with trying to discuss this with you on a logical level when all you want is a reaction. As for my psychoanalyzing you; that’s quite alright. Please. Remain an enigma to me.
Bordelund, I’m not calling everyone here sheep, and I do apologize for giving that impression. I said sheep are boring. Everyone in one place having the same opinion, never questioning what some believe are arbitrarily imposed rules and saying “don’t rock the boat!”… that removes what I consider to be an essential part of a healthy society. Whether I agree with those people or not. But unfortunately, the number of those people are dwindling. It’s usually the same people over and over, rather than several people with degrees of differences. The best thing about coming here was getting a variety of opinions due to a range of different cultures. Possibly it’s due to the U.S. being in the midst of political frenzy, but it’s extremely polarized on the board. There is very little middle ground, and reading the same arguments over and over makes my hair hurt. Also, I feel the “weirdo factor” has deminished some. That may very well be just my impression, but from some posts I’ve read, I don’t believe that to be the case.
I don’t know about unique, but I’ll certainly agree with the position that this site is rare. I am something of a message board junkie, and have come across way too many sites that seemed promising but ultimately had one or more of the following problems:
–too much political talk and nothing else
–too much ‘fluff’ talk and nothing else
–too few members
–members who were almost exclusively of the same race, political party, background, etc.
–too many teenage members (call me prejudiced or what have you, but you know what I mean!)
–too many members who couldn’t even spell ‘logic’ (usually a subset of the ‘too few members’ issue)
Maybe I’m too easy (hey! I heard that!), but just the fact that this place has a debate forum – where they MEAN debate – and a separate forum for all of the flaming makes it attractive to me. I like most of the personalities I’ve come across, I like that there is a significant ‘rest of the world’ (i.e. not just the U.S.) membership, I love having a place where I can ask all of the weird questions that pop into my head from time to time, etc. I have never found all of these things in one place before.
(DISCLAIMER: I’m not claiming to have participated in all of the message boards available on the Web, nor am I claiming that no other site like this exists. Again, I’m not saying that the SDMB is unique, I’m just saying that – in my experience – it’s rare. And worth $15/year.)
How can your second sentence above apply to the SDMB if everyone here is not a sheep, though? Are you making complaints in the abstract, or do you have specific concerns about the SDMB?
My mileage varies here, though I don’t frequent Great Debates all that often. However, I am not sure what this has to do with the general concerns about the SDMB’s performance as expressed in the OP. Remember, the OP was a complaint about page-loading speed – you seem to have gone odd on a tangent.
How did you get from there to here?
To me, this has always been the case in Great Debates.
There are still many “weirdos” here, IMO, though they were never of great appeal to me. My impressions differ from yours.
Perhaps if the load times per page for me, when I’m here in the middle of the day, weren’t so long (and I can’t buy that it’s my connection or my computer when other websites load instantly) I would think it’d be worth the fee.
But if I was paying nothing, and now I’m paying something, and service has not improved, I don’t see that as much incentive to keep paying.
You are not considering the network itself that carries data from the Reader’s ISP to yours. There can be (and often are) bottlenecks there, which are the fault of neither the Reader or your ISP. Other websites wouldn’t necessarily be affected. No amount of subscription money can help that kind of problem.
I also post most often in the middle of the day, and yet I only see the slowdowns you report extremely rarely (maybe every few weeks). It’s highly likely that the network points between the Reader and my location is in top shape, or is unusually large, or happens to carry less traffic than others.
Well put, and welcome aboard. 
Btw anyone else noticing the board is flying right now?
Still seeming the same to me.
I’ve even done tracerts to see where bottlenecks are happening,a nd I can’t identify one.
The time on a ping or a tracert doesn’t seem that bad, but when it comes to actually loading a page here, it takes at least a minute.
No, I was expounding on why I think sheep are boring.
It was a tangent. Someone made a legitimate complaint, someone else followed up with an agreement, and there was the usual, typical sneering comeback of “If you don’t like it, go someplace else!” Which I have heard, finally, too many times. I was attempting to make the point that, were everyone who ever disagreed with the mods & admins to go somewhere else, it would leave a group of people who never question authority, never break out of the lock step, never say anything to offend “the group.” Sheep.
Mine also, which is why I’ve mostly only lurked there. But the number of participants seems to have boiled down.
I do like the appeal of what I call the “weirdo factor.” I like NCB’s popping in and saying he wonders what it would be like to be a cow, moo. I really liked Lobsang’s one word at a time story. There used to be quite a bit more of that. I just see more homogeniety (no pun intended), less diversity.
Same here, too. This page took 1:10. I’m guessing I’ll doze off before this post goes through. There has to be a bottleneck somewhere. Why else would it do this at work, and yet be perfect at home?
There was a brief problem yesterday afternoon, but it cleared up. Honestly, just about the worst thing you could do about it whenever it happens is start a brand new thread. It’s king of like tossing gasoline onto a fire.
2:14 pm CST, took 14 seconds to load the second page of this thread.
To me, acceptable.
There’s something about this that I’m not understanding. It was stated upfront when the subscription plan was announced that no upgrades were being planned and if service/load time improved at all, it was due merely to lowered traffic by anyone who left in response.
And now you’re angry that the service hasn’t improved. Why did you expect it to?
And what’s more, what in the world makes you think you deserve better service? The goal of the money was to pay for what they were giving us, since they were no longer willing to offer it free. How does that then obligate them to come up with the money to provide more service? That makes no sense to me.
catsix, as I pointed out before, they offered this place up to us for years, all for free. And it was expensive for them to do so. Now they’re not providing us that freebie anymore. Why should they? It was very, very nice of them to do it, but that doesn’t mean they’re obligated to continue. The money we pay now goes to covering the costs of the service they’re providing us. Now the bandwidth, disk space, maintenance, et cetera, is being paid for by us. That does not entitle us somehow to even better service.
Christ, I’d hate to have you as a houseguest. If you get invited to someone’s home for dinner, do you try to move in and get pissed when they throw you out?
As bordelond suggested, I went and did some digging through the old threads, and I hope they can shed some light on why I and certain other people felt board performance was going to improve when paid subscriptions came about. Some of them are well before my time; now I’m rather glad the archive was there.
This post from Arnold Winkleried:
In this thread. (Sorry,I don’t know how to do that cool link-to-a-single-post thing)
Now. While what Lynn said a page ago is quite correct, and no mod or admin came out and said verbatim “When we start charging, we can improve the servers and board performance will improve.” it certainly was interpreted that way. Obviously by more than just one poster, or this thread would not be on its second and close to third page.
Excalibre, just for clarification, do you often charge your dinner guests the price of their meal? If not, your comparison really isn’t one.