Yeah! And what’s up with microwaves, huh? Five seconds waiting for a beef-n-bean burrito is five seconds too long! I swear, if I don’t get my – uh, wait, the red light is blinking, I have to tap the bar to shoot cocaine onto my cerebral cortex.
Grumble grumble, kids today, no gratitude, silver platter, grumble grumble
What about searching only via www.boardreader.com - does that reduce the strain over here?
Yes, it does, but it’s not like outsourcing our search function is a good option. Well, it works, but I’m sure the folks at Boardreader.com won’t be pleased if we link our search button directly to them, if you know what I mean.
Oh man, I wasn’t thinking of anything that extreme. They’d probably send the heavies round to break the hamsters legs, and then we’d be in a right state.
I guess what it must come down to is that the Board will have to be self-throttling, in that it will only support what it can support, and this will send Members away, not to return, and thus keep the bandwidth/server crunch from being impossible.
And this does not seem likely to change. The business case of the Chicago Reader for keeping the SDMB seems unclear at best and non-existant at worse. They are so altruistic that we don’t even get spam mail to the accounts we register with - and that’s highly respectable of them.
However, we end up with a dichotomy of positions:
The Reader runs this Board out of the goodness of its collective heart, for the purpose of providing a profound benefit and service for free. However, they can not and will not accept outside help to do this.
The Reader is really running this Board as a marketing tool, to try and either gain customers for a product, earn advertising revenue, or to be used as a e-commerce site. However, after 3 years or so online, there is no business plan in place, nor any hinted about concretely, although we are told the Reader is working on it.
There have been many “pledge drives” on this Board, many suggestions to software and hardware performance, and many ideas as to improving processes. For better or for worse, most of them have not taken. This indicates a willingness to give - or a vast untapped market that can at least be used to defray business costs.
Seems like what is needed is a bridge-builder here.
I put the question, in general terms, to the other Project Managers when we had our weekly management meeting, as a hypothetical situation only, to brainstorm for ideas. I got some interesting ones, some not feasible (porn), and some that seem like possible solutions, or at least talking points.
Some of these were:
SDMB Members who are attorneys chartered in Illinois do the legal research, investigation, and draw up a complete and executable set of documents that legally spins the Board and its administration off as a not for profit entitiy, able to receive donations, all pro-bono. This might be a workable solution, but I fear it involves “outsiders” too deep into the legalese of the Reader’s business practices. So I don’t think it is a viable option, but I could be wrong.
SDMB Members who are experts at marketing, sales, advertising, and e-commerce draw up complete proposals for expanding the role of the SDMB within the Reader’s strategic goals, and show clearly via examples how the Reader can progress towards a working cash flow situation. This would include market research, examples and studies of all forms of e-commerce, developing workable and practical rate sheets, and really trying to see how a site with this much traffic could generate some revenue. This would be presented in a formal proposal to the Reader Management. If the Reader Management does not care to hear unsolicted advice from individuals, then the Members who put it together form a not-for-profit corporation, and offer it as a consulting service for $1 to the Reader.
You have to ask yourself - hypothetically, of course - what would the Chicago Reader do if a group of SDMB’ers got together ad hoc and said “Screw this - we’ve had enough!”, collected money (being careful not to use the SDMB name, Chicago Reader trademarks, logos, etc.) for the most Tyrannosaurus Rex server machine(s) and associated hardware and software, then, through a not-for-profit legal corporation that they set up, offer the equipment to the SDMB for $1.00. Or, an Illinois P.E. offers it as part of an “service plan” for $1.00.
If the Reader had a completely, 100% legal way to buy, from a legally organized not-for-profit corporation, a hepta-Pentium 4 3 GHz machine with all the trimmings (including valid and legal software licenses) for $1 - would they turn it down?
My multi-billion dollar company would buy it in a heartbeat - just e-mail a PDF invoice. We buy off of E-Bay, after all - it would be little different, except the price is fixed.
Just speaking hypothetically, of course…
Not quite all. Ask your wife if you’re unsure.
She’s not a member!
Hah! Gotcha!
Some Dopers have links in their sig lines. Could the strain of making a link, or two, or three everytime a post by such a Doper is viewed be slowing down the boards?
Perhaps we could institute a one-link-per-sig rule?
You know, I just realized that there are a whole lot of things on these pages that probably don’t need to be there, or the convenience or prettiness of which is outweighed by their bandwidth. The regular version of this page is 129 KB, and the printable version is 25 KB. We couldn’t strip it down all the way and maintain functionality, but there’s probably some stuff we could do, depending on how difficult it is. The only buttons we really need under a poster’s post (in my opinion) are profile and quote. Registered, Location, and Posts info for every user for every post is probably unnecessary too. Who knows how much goes into style, appearance, and unwieldy layout. Reducing sigs might help, but I think there are probably a good number of other things that would help just as much.
Hey, I just checked out the printable page view. Pretty stripped down. If we had an option to use a view similar to that, I’d definitely use it.
Of course, I’m sure this has been suggested only about a million times in ATMB already…
Anthracite, it’s obvious you’ve put a lot of thought into your suggestions. Well-done.
I thought about this: There’s quite a bit of book recommending here on the boards. I wouldn’t be surprised if research (of some kind) showed that people suggest books to others here 10 times every day.
That’s over 3,500 recommendations a year.
Most of the time, the recommender links to a product information page at Amazon. Amazon just announced a new initiative aimed at their “Associates” (people who “sell” Amazon products from their own websites). Part of this new initiative includes using open-source tools to allow Associates to weave Amazon functions into their own sites.
See where I’m going with this?
Perhaps some code guru could develop a vBulletin hack that adds a “Recommend” button to the posting form. When someone used that function, code would automatically be developed to link the recommended item to Amazon’s servers, using an Associate Account created for the SDMB. That will generate some revenue for the Boards with zero overhead.
(Of course, I’m assuming that some people actually buy the items recommended to them here.)
It seems like a good idea on the surface; zero overhead, no obvious, intrusive effects (like banners or subscriptions) and no effort (aside from the initial programming) to make it work.
So, where are the holes?
Right here:
If it requires a hack to the source code, you can rest assured that it’s not going to happen. If it can be done without a hack to the source code, however, it might be an option.
I believe that this suggestion has come up before, with the consensus that it wouldn’t bring in enough money to be worth it. I don’t know whether the situation has changed since then.
This was very nice.
Could we get the administrators to contribute, to create a definitive list, then put it as a sticky here?
Being a conscientious user, I often find myself wondering how I can reduce my “footprint”. I’d like advanced tips, even if not everyone is interested. For example, I’m guessing that displaying my post after it’s already been accepted causes overhead.
Also, the recommendations need some priorities. Moving a thread may be expensive, but it probably doesn’t happen that often, and I’m not sure how we could effectively explain to people what sort of threads were liable to be moved.
“perhaps they could offer a stripped down version during peak times. Like text only.”
That’s funny. Plus, make it in b/w & grey.
Hayduke, you could, under profile, system options, turn off having to view sigs. Let me know
that makes it faster for ya.
I’m sure you DON’T speak for those of us whose only connection option is a 56K modem! I would be delighted to pay $5 per month for this board to run as fast as similar sites do.