I’d like to get in touch with someone at the Chicago Reader about hosting the Straight Dope Message Board. I think we could come to an agreement that would massively improve performance of the board (which would look good for CR) at little or no cost.
That’ll teach me to post personal info on a message board profile! I shut down that site about two years ago, which is probably the last time I updated my profile here.
But seriously, they need to do something. The performance of this site does not reflect well on its owners. If they don’t have it hosted by someone in exchange for advertising rights, they should consider joining some affiliate programs and advertising them on the SDMB. They could very easily target ads toward demographic groups on a per-thread basis. Let’s see, the thread title has “Star Wars” in it? Better put Amazon.com’s Episode I banner on it! Do that with all the busy and easily-targeted threads and cha-ching! New server!