We’re on it, Liberal. Check your PMs.
Have done so. Thanks. 
(Check yours as well, please.)
Oh, please. You know that it’s Ed. No one else matters in the long run. And Ed pays attention to these things as he has time/desires to do so. He’s well aware that some people want this feature adjusted; it’s only been the subject of several threads. 
My post count needs to be displayed.
That way, people will know if I’m an inexperienced ignoramus, as opposed to a dumbass who keeps posting the same thing over and over again.
Hang in there, BigT. TubaDiva is all over it. She has already PM’d me twice. And we are working on the problem. Apparently, it has something to do with my Charter Member status. But I have sponsored many guests in the past, and so maybe the process has changed. Or maybe I’m just misremembering how I did it before. But we’ll get it done. Thanks for your patience.
As to the topic at hand, if I may register a comment: it seems to me that allowing guests to enter their locations or not as they please is the simplest and most fair solution. If they don’t want to, they don’t have to. If they want to, they can. Why that would not satisfy everyone is a mystery.
With respect to the post count, it seems to me that post counting should begin when someone subscribes. It is a perk for membership. If it is something people don’t care about, then no one is forcing their eyeballs to focus on the post count figure. On the other hand, if it is important to them, then it is there for them to see.
You’re probably right. Ed directly represents the owners of the board.
Well, then, it makes sense to just keep complaining here. Unless there is a better way of contacting Ed, I would think his own Message Board would suffice.
BigT, I’m afraid it turns out that the technical difficulties of a Charter Member sponsoring a guest are insurmountable, at least for the foreseeable future.
Let me explain the nature of the problem to you. I actually DID go through all the motions of sponsoring you, and I did them correctly. My credit card (actually, my debit card) was charged for the transaction, which I verified by checking my account online. It was in “Transactions on Hold”, meaning that the bank had already deducted it from my balance, but had not yet posted it on my account ledger.
Therefore, there was no question that an economic transaction occurred.
What did NOT occur, however, was the establishment of you as a member. Now, the reason that happened was because the drop-down box that lists the prices listed only the one price for a Charter Membership. You cannot qualify for a Charter Membership, and therefore your membership was not assigned.
Now, I’ve been assured that the money I paid will be credited, I won’t be out any money in the long run (depending on how swiftly Straight Dope issues the credit.) But sadly, since there is no option for renewing regular membership in my User CP (the only option is for renewing Charter Membership), sponsoring you is, for me, a metaphysical impossibility.
BUT…
There is a thread in which you can request sponsorship, and knowing this community, a regular member will be along lickety split to sponsor you.
You might ask why Charter Membership is so special, and what’s the big deal about it. Even many Charter Members themselves ask this. And I can answer only for myself. There was a time when Straight Dope was in need of cash, and went pay to post. Not pay to read; pay to post. And so, you really had to care about being here if you intended actually to pay for the privilege of posting.
But the Dope had a need, and hundreds of us (maybe a thousand or more) responded. We were offered a special rate — about half the normal member rate — if we would suscribe within a specified period of time. Once that time had expired, there were to be no more Charter Members. Only regular members and the rate would double.
And so we, the Charter Members, were like Charter Members of any organization. We were the ones who helped launch it. We were the ones who stuck our necks out, because it was not even guaranteed that the board would continue at all. No one knew whether our money would be enough.
Because of the risk. Because of the being first. Because of believing in the community (despite my recent unfortunate attempt at moving away). Because of helping when help was needed, we earned our titles of Charter Member. And the agreement was that we would be Charter Members for life so long as we renewed before our membership expired.
Some of us who have the title Charter Member couldn’t care less. But others of us are proud of it, because of what it represents that we did for the board. So that’s the gist of it
Go to the thread I linked you to and just post up a request. You’ll be sponsored quickly by someone. I do hope that someday soon, the glitch in the sotware will be corrected so that Charter Members can once again sponsor quests. Know that I would have (and in fact, thought I did.) Good luck, my friend.
Liberal,
You went to great effort to help someone only to point out how Mickey Mouse this board is (my apologies to Mickey).
Cripes, if a Charter Member can’t sponsor a Guest, WTF?
It’s one thing to be clueless, it’s another to simply ignore. This smacks of incompetence.
C’mon Ed Zotti. Sponsor me. You cheap bastage.
SFP
PS, Please fellow dopers, I know you are a kind hearted and generous bunch, but save your sponsor money for others. Ed Zotti must sponsor me or it just wouldn’t mean as much.
<crickets>
Or, because we get a discount. :dubious:
Jesus, Lib, I don’t think even those who are really protective of their titles think it’s THAT important.
I agree that locations and post counts in posts are more of a benefit to the board in general than to the member who posts.
I don’t know if there has been a large influx of guests recently, or if I’m just noticing it for some reason, but there’s been a large increase in posts that I’ve noticed lately where someone writes something for which knowing their location would be needed to make sense of the post and I’ve gone and looked and it wasn’t there because they were a guest, and for whatever reason (maybe they didn’t realize theirs wouldn’t be displayed when they made the post) they didn’t mention it in the post itself.
I don’t personally find myself looking at post counts ever but I do look at the location a lot and I hear other people find the post count useful or interesting.
Anyway it kind of feels that I as a paying member am being deprived of something because somebody else is being charged for it when it’s more of a benefit for me than them.
I am distressed to learn that Cecil Adams, widely recognized as one of the world’s smartest human beings, still hasn’t learned how to turn a profit. Is the economy really that bad, or did Cecil not take econ 101?
I don’t know about ad blockers, but I will say that of all the websites I frequent, there are only two that I like the ads on:
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facebook - I’m guessing it’s because they do some mumbo jumbo magic based on the things you list in your profile, but I often find my eyes being caught by a facebook site ad, even though they are unobtrusive - mostly text with a small icon off to the right not bothering anybody - because they are often for things that interest me, and I actually find myself clicking on them often
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boingboing / some other websites - While these have some randomly generated ads too which I don’t notice, I do notice some of the “specifically asked to be on this website because the readers are the specific type of people who would like this specific shit” ads.
So if I were you guys, I’d try to have a combination of 1) whatever ad algorithm facebook uses that incorporates either the user profile (in which case it would benefit the SD to make a bunch more specific user profile boxes like favorite music, interests, etc to help generate the ads) or the thread/post language (which google seems to try to do but I’m guessing fails since only a few of the posts are directly relevant to restoring foreskin) and 2) ads specifically for this site and not randomly generated
Cecil gets paid to write a syndicated newspaper column, for more than 35 years. I’d say that’s evidence he’s doing something correct, yes?
I do believe that I allowed for a wide range of opinions, Guin. That’s why I wrote this:
“Some of us who have the title Charter Member couldn’t care less.”
With respect to the discount, I also wrote this:
"We were offered a special rate — about half the normal member rate — if we would suscribe within a specified period of time."I can see how, in a post with nearly 500 words, you might have missed these statements.
In fairness, the glitch, as I explained it, is the result of programming by a third party. Not Ed. Not Jerry. And not anyone on the regular staff (as I understand it). This sort of third party programming is, as I recall, what many people had demanded. And now we have a glitch. Having been a programmer for nearly 20 years, and now as the Senior Vice-president of a firm that writes payment gateways and other Internet commerce software, I can testify that, if I were Jerry, I would not even touch coding done by a third party. There are many technical reasons why. Therefore, the SDMB must wait until the third party is contacted and decides to clear up the glitch.
There was no incompetence on behalf of anyone on the SDMB staff, unless you want to assign the choosing itself of the third party a label of “incompetence”. But if that is the case, then we must assign to ourselves the same label because we continue to post here despite the glitches that exist. And we wouldn’t want to do that.
There are advantages to us in seeing post count. For example a while ago I reported a thread where a poster opened it by saying “I like (name of commercial business)” as possible Spam. Dex properly replied that the poster had a fair number of posts on regular subjects before this, but graciously thanked me anyway.
A first time poster that shows an inordinate knowledge of the board is likely a sock, and should be reported, however. Esp as often those threads go bye-bye, thus we need to get them reported asap, before someone posts a classic reply, which then disappears forever.
As to location, a guest posted a thread where he asked a question which was very State specific, and I had to ask him what state he lived in, delaying answers and annoying the hampsters.
So, displaying both will lead to smoother operation of the board.
Here’s the thing: Why all the secrecy? Why not make it abundantly clear what the following facts are:
- The kind of servers this place is running, how much they cost, and what the load is
- How much the hosting/bandwidth costs
- How many people are looking at ads and how much money that is bringing in
- How many members are there and how frequently are they coming in
- More general traffic statistics
- etc… etc…
It’s preposterous to me that this stuff is considered super secret. TPTB have only ever said that the boards are a black hole of money and that despite their best efforts it just continues to cost more and more. But I’m tired of hearing that excuse year in and year out and I think other people are too. These demented, twisted, irrational business models that don’t work just blow my mind! The alternative is for the TPTB to switch to a model of complete transparency. This is a community and if the boards die someday its something the community is going to care very much about. Not giving us full disclosure and giving us all the information we need to group together and come up with the best model for this place is a CRIME! Cecil is smart, but he is NOT smarter than all of us. Provably in the domain of making money from the SDMB.
I don’t know that we should get a weekly report on all this. A snapshot was once given by Ed himself on the revenue side. Long story short, ad revenue was around $200 a week. He also mentioned posts and views for that period (which I cannot remember but I think they were around 200K impressions per week). Traffic statistics get thrown around often enough from all kinds of different sources. You can do your own math tracking the total number of posts and views which are available on the front page.
As for the hardware and the costs of running it, I am not sure what is it that you expect to learn from knowing those. Assume barely sufficient hardware, which is obvious from the fact that this almost always works but breaks under pressure, and average costs.
What do you expect would happen if they opened the book for you? A dozen diverging opinions and the respective dozen bitchings about why someone’s idea is not being immediately implemented.
I won’t speak any more on that subject, as those are not my place to speak on. I understand why you’re wondering about these things, however, I personally have no answers. I will say if you called up my company, even as a paying customer on one of our message boards or web communities, and asked the above questions, unless you had a contractual right to know my company would act exactly the way that Creative Loafing does w.r.t. information about the things behind the scenes. You may not agree with that, but I’m saying that I don’t think it’s uncommon.