I beg to differ.
If there is to be a long standing, true, community, it has to be owned by the members, and members need to have a say as to how the board is run. Otherwise, it is going to be too tempting for an individual to turn it into a cash cow and sell its soul when it becomes a successful community.
How would we organize such a thing?
Godless Commie. 
As arbitrary as the mods seem sometimes, I don’t think the ads would be there unless the board needed the money.
Well, isn’t this a pleasant place to make a first post? I’ve lurked off-and-on for a while, but figure that in a month I’ll either be convinced to pony up or never visit the site again, depending on how this scenario plays out.
I’d like to start off by pointing out that I don’t see the ads, nor will I ever see them - I don’t have Flash installed on my computer. So the fact that there’s sound / no sound / flashing lights / blocked text is entirely irrelevant to me. The only real issue is what the ads really say about the site.
It really pisses me off when people view a site primarily as a moneymaking venture. Oh, sure, I understand that it’s the goal of a business to make money, but there’s enough free boards out there that pay boards have to demonstrate something significantly better.
The reason why most people didn’t mind the Google ads on this site (I remember that big debate), and since SomethingAwful ads were mentioned earlier in the thread, the reason why goons don’t mind those, is because the ads actually matter to the people looking at them. I don’t really care if Google Ads brings up a Ford Focus ad on a car thread, because there’s a decent chance I’m interested.
However, the most obnoxious thing about the banner ads is that they’re trying to cram shit you don’t want. No, I don’t want to sign up for a dating site, or eat at a restaurant that doesn’t even have a branch within 300 miles of my location.
And, of course, the most obnoxious thing about the management is not that they put banner ads in, but apparently had no idea that they were so reviled. Even in the most charitable scenario (they disappear), the admission is, “Oh, wow, I guess you guys don’t like banner ads.”
You don’t say? :rolleyes:
So, for what it’s worth, TPTB, in a month you’ll either get a $15 registration or a small decrease in bandwidth used.
I’ll also add my voice to the chorus–sort of. I may or may not be the first one to suggest this (I’m not gonna comb through 11 pages to find out), but I think a great alternative would be to offer a more expensive ad-free membership. I think a lot of people could spend $5 or $10 more a year (a year!) if the ads bug them that much.
Otherwise, ads with sound cross the line for me. I have them blocked at home, but the computers on campus use IE and I’m not about to fuck with my computer privileges there by tweaking their hosts files and browsers. (Not to mention that I’d have to do it at least once every time I got on a different computer, which would be pretty much every time I got on one at all.) I’m not going to pay to talk to myself and 50 other members who weren’t driven to leave by ads with freakin’ sound.
And I may have been labeled by some as a Reader apologist, but the way this was done–a surprise baseball bat up the ass for the admins, the mods and the users–is completely fucking despicable. Fuck you, Reader.
I’d definitely be willing to participate in a boycott.
I think it’s a good idea… anyone else?
Me too!!
I’m not particularly tech savvy, so what is the bandwidth you’re talking about, specifically?
I looked on this site: http://www.hostgator.com/shared.shtml
Look under “swamp.” Are they talking a different sort of bandwidth than you’re talking?
I would go to another board that was started up to be exactly like the Straight Dope, except with less Powers That Be treating us like walking wallets. I would donate money to that, and come and participate (I have no other particular skills for this venture). There is much to lose if we lose the Straight Dope. I’ve tried other internet sites, and they don’t compare to this one. Plus, the quick answers to real questions is worth the price of admission here alone.
Giraffe, you say that TPTB don’t know what’s going on on the Boards; I don’t understand that. The threads are here for anyone to read; do they not know how to access all of our opinions? We’re not exactly a shy bunch; it wouldn’t take long for anyone to figure out how we feel about things. Heck, if they started a thread asking us what we thought, it would go faster than this one.
Someone earlier posted the names of the Chicago Reader execs, with a telephone number. But we could do better if we waged an e-mail campaign. On a blog I frequent called The Consumerist, they often talk about the concept of the “executive carpet bomb,” in which dissatisfied consumers e-mail their complaints to company executives by finding their e-mail addresses or figuring out the way a particular company structures its e-mail addresses.
Using this strategy, we would get:
<contact info removed --Giraffe>
I also found more
<contact info removed --Giraffe>
Also, we know that the CR was acquired by Creative Loafing last summer, so we might want to contact people at that organization too.
So, is anyone up for participating in an e-mail campaign?
Can anyone offer to come up with a good form letter for people to use?
Just found this - note the correct e-mail address for Mr. Roth:
Bob Roth
President, Chicago Reader, Inc.,
<contact info removed --Giraffe>
I think that the biggest problem with that model is that, while it might be a viable solution for those of us who are already members, it might cut drastically into the number of new members the board gets, leading to a slow death by attrition.
Those of us who’ve been around for a while probably feel that the SDMB is worth 20 or 30 bucks a year (maybe even more) to us, but there’s a big, wide internet with lots of free stuff out there, and getting someone to pay that sort of money just to talk to other people online is probably going to be difficult.
I think it is, however, for a site like this you’ll want a dedicated server which adds to the price considerably. Of course you could save by upgrading then running it on their OWN servers. If they did it that way (which they don’t anymore, I think they’re on Rackspace) then I would believe Jerry spends 10 hours a week on the site as suggested by carnivorousplant’s “25%” guess. Maybe.
Why would it require a dedicated server?
In addition, here is some info on Creative Loafing:
<contact info removed --Giraffe>
I could swear that since the banner ads started appearing at the top of the page, this Board’s server seems to be running even slower than usual. Any connection? (This point may have been covered already in this thread . . . but it’s already up to 11 pages . . .)
Actually, I’ve noticed the exact opposite. Since the banners went up, the board has been loading like lightning for me.
Still not worth it, but still…
Not really. It’s possible that you’re seeing some lag as your browser needs to download slightly more stuff. The ads come from the chicagoreader.com domain, which does not seem to be using a content distribution network, and thus is more subject to network latency.
But the ads don’t do jack to the server itself.
The amount of traffic it gets coupled with the amount of database access going on would kind of require it, unlike even a large business site which may get qet lots of hits but there isn’t a whole lot of “computing” going on. I’m no expert but that’s my understanding.
And holy crap nyctea. Chill out with the frigging email addresses.
Because a shared server is just that. You (we) would be sharing resources. Flash crowd on another site hosted on the same box would impair your (our) performance.
My viewpoint may be slightly skewed by the fact that I do operations for retail ecommerce so I’m used to really large-scale solutions, but I also have some experience with small-scale options. Shared hosting sucks really bad.
Because there are a lot of folks posting and browsing, searching, sending private messages and reading Teemings.
Posts are saved on the server. I talked the Boss into a second server at work just to handle email for less than 200 users. Those 200 bog down two T1s, although they are streaming, downloading and generally abusing the bandwidth more than I believe a board would.