I was one of those affected by the dial-up blockage. If it helps your tech people any, my husband (who has not succumbed to the charms of the SDMB - he just sort of wriggles his eyebrows when I call his attention to choice morsels of text) is a computer-type and fixed the problem for the system I use. In short, for the lay person, he said that the new SDMB ISP uses an address which used to be illegal and which was thus blocked by our firewall.
This may be why Dr Pinky can’t get through at work, which probably has a firewall, but can from home, which probably doesn’t.
Mr Mame’s more accurate version follows:
SDMB’s new ISP is using a 65.0.0.0 IPv4 address which used to be reserved by the the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) but was assigned to ARIN in July 2000. Any reasonably paranoid firewall maintainer blocks traffic to and from reserved addresses and, if they haven’t updated their list, they will block access to the SDMB. Any users having difficulty needs to talk to their system administrator to get them to remove 65.0.0.0 from the firewall.
Subscription would definitely cause a problem on more than one level: ability to pay, first and foremost, and the concomitant severe dwindling of the Doper community (yes, it would weed out the undesirables, but also many valued members along with them); the diversity of the points of view expressed (and therefore the quality of the ‘debate’) would invariably suffer; the Internet’s all too well known security problems re: credit card information; etc.
Perhaps this point has been raised in the past, but has some thought been given to commercial banner advertisement? I’m not necessarily thinking of your friendly neighbourhood sex shop, but of ‘tasteful’ advertising, à la National Geographic Society (what was initially feared by some readers - myself among others - as a vilification of a sacred institution, seems to have now been accepted by most as a way of keeping the cost of the subscription down and the legendary quality of the magazine up to its usual highest standard). Granted, there’s no common measure between the size of NGS’s readership and ours, and it could be somewhat of a daunting task to find quality advertisers given the numbers involved, but I for one wouldn’t be adverse to the idea of having quality publicity on this site.
I wouldn’t object to advertising, but advertisers are increasingly wary of splashing out on banner campaigns. Surfers are just not clicking through; some design experts have even suggested users are “tuning out” ads to the extent that anything remotely resembling an ad will be instinctively ignored (along with any surrounding content).
I think the credit card security issue isn’t that bad; credit card fraud on the internet is getting much more media time than “traditional” credit card fraud, like restaurant card skimming, but I haven’t seen any figures bearing out an online epidemic. A halfway competent sysadmin and IT team can secure credit card data.
Medea’s Child was saying to me that she was having just such problems accessing the SD (and the SDMB). I saw this thread, sent her the OP, and I’m posting her information here to see if she can get some help:
She’s been talking to her ISP quite a bit, because of problems with them, but this problem in particular is not clearing up.
I’m sure she will appreciate any help that she can get. Thanks to anyone who can help (from myself, as well).
I don’t think the number of accounts is an issue but rather the usage of the board. Unused accounts probably have very little impact on the server.
A subscription-based service may reduce the number of registered users, but that in and of itself may not reduce the load on the server. Reading the board would still be free, and that still places a load on the server. I’m curious whether any statistics are available on number of hits by registered users versus number of hits by others.
I love the SDMB, and miss the days when I could keep up with the various fora. I just don’t have the time to wait for threads to load. I would gladly pay a subscription fee if that would improve the access time. Or donate money. Whatever.
[folk tune]
bring back, bring back, oh bring back my es-em-dee-be!!!
[/folk tune]
Thanks for all your comments, folks, both on the connection problem and the subscription idea.
We’re working on finding out what’s going on with the connection part and we’ll let you know the outcome, fixes, whatever it is and whatever it’s going to take.
As for the subscription idea, while it’s still being formulated and we’re some distance out from getting this happening, I can’t speak for the Reader but I would think that we would want to get as many people signed up as possible so options like taking checks and money orders and PayPal and the like would be available.
However we do handle the money your transactions will be handled with safety and security; please note that while we have been hacked into in the past (name me a major site that hasn’t) that they didn’t get information from the Straight Dope store and we handle credit card transactions there all the time. Of course “never say always and never say never” but we do take this seriously, we want you to spend money with us and so we’re not gonna mess around with your peace of mind on this issue.
I also point out that no credit card company would ever expect you to pay for charges you didn’t make and that you are actually at higher risk in your everyday life than you are in cyberspace.
I can help as I just had this problem myself. The only site(s) I couldn’t access was SD and SDMB. After many email to TubaDiva, calls to my ISP (also an @home sevice f-ing @home), and calls to Alter.net (the tech support people for the router in question where I kept getting hung up) I was finally able to fix the problem by setting up a proxy.
If she uses IE, she should go to Tools, Internet Options, Connections, then LAN settings.
Oh, by the way, if it’s a DNS problem, have the people that can’t get through tried just using the IP address of the site instead of trying the domain name?
If not, ask them to try: http://65.201.198.8, which will bring them directly to the SD and see if they can get through that way.
I can’t speak for the others with this problem, but that wouldn’t have helped me as I couldn’t ping that ip or run a tracert on it. It just wouldn’t go through. But once I did that proxy change I explained above it worked fine. Before that I was going in through http://www.safeweb.com.
(P.S. could one of you kind mods fix the coding in my above post? Thank you)
[faint with relief that it’s fixed, whatever it was, and I can now begin to make a full recovery from Straight Dope Withdrawal Syndrome]
Well, hey, I would pay to post. Some. Not an arm and a leg. Just enough to keep the monkey on my back, off my back. The Better Half very kindly admits that if it works out to about what he spends on his Chicago Tribune subscription, he wouldn’t complain too loudly. (Like he needs to know what’s going on up in Chi-town. :rolleyes: ) But he says, “Honey, there must be lots of other whiny, argumentative people on the Net.” I tell him, “Yeah, I know, but I want these particular whiny, argumentative people.”
Go figure.
And BTW, IMO that would be a reason against subscription-only posting privileges, because all the most interesting whiners would be too cheap to stick around.
Instead of having the money “magically appear”, we could have said money go into an ad. We buy an ad from the Reader with the understanding that the Message Boards stays free.
The Teeming Millions could send their nickles and dimes to a random shill.(Whoever wants to head up the whole "buy an ad to save the Message Board) This shill goes to the Reader with their bag of nickles and dimes and buys an ad. Message Board saved. (Yeah, big problems getting this scheme off the ground. We’ll have to run it through Legal.) And the ad could be for anything. The shill’s personal website, Save the Banded-Assed Puff Adder, Ha! Ha! the Boards are FREE!, whatever. It would just have to be pricey enough to cover expenses. (And I have NO idea how pricey that would be.)
Or we could use that “Internet Honor System” dealy that tanked so famously for Steve King’s online book.
Personally, this sad Kiwi hopes someone can come up with a solution to all the problems, so as to keep this board free/no charge. Pretty please, with sugar on top.
I’m becoming bummed out over this, people.
One consequence that springs to mind of a subscription-based SDMB is that of answerability.
At the moment the board is a benevolent dictatorship. The CR stumps up the resources, we are guests and we obey the rules that the CR stipulates. The mods enforce these rules and the admins ban those who need banning. It works and it is unarguable, since the CR is paying.
If it switches to a subscription system, y’all could be opening yourselves up to a far higher level of answerability.
Bannings for instance - I would have thought that you’d have to give a reason for a ban and make it public so paying members would know why they have lost the input of a friend. If members are paying for a service then they expect a certain level of service. Your “guest of the CR” argument wouldn’t necessarily cut it.
Another point would be in the closing, pruning and moving of threads. A paying member who doesn’t want their thread closed would have somewhat more of a valid argument than a guest. Again, you’d have to be answerable.
This answerability would in my opinion be annoying, tedious and add greatly to your admin time. You may decide that it is worth it or that you can get away with the same methods used at the moment. You may decide to take a “vote with your feet” approach and bank on not many doing this. You should, however, at least consider these consequences.
pan
NB rereading that, it may appear that I have a problem with the way that the board is run at the moment. I don’t - I think that you all do a wonderful job. But clearly others have shown dissent in the past. They would have more of a point under a subscription-based system.
