Yep. We’re all, as we say in the South, just happy as pigs in slop. 
We just did.
And as Sapo mentioned, it shouldn’t have been a big deal in the first place.
I’m glad BigT is a Member, but I don’t think this thread demonstrates a finely oiled machine in action. It demonstrates to me a bumbling staff with a bad business model that can’t do the one thing it needs to do the easiest: take in revenue without a hitch.
Oy. Some people. :rolleyes:
ETA: What did you fail to comprehend about the fact that the payment software isn’t something they do themselves, but is probably a third-party add on that they don’t really have control over? Oh, wait, that would require reading with an unprejudiced eye. <snort>
The point - which seems to deftly fly over the heads of aspiring intellectuals - is that you crowdsource the “business model” to your “customers”, your loyal ignorance fighting community. Together they constitute expertise in every field and every occupation. Given the affordance that is this community combined with the forum it can only be considered to be an obvious oversight. Especially in the context of the year-in and year-out complaints by TPTB that they just can’t figure it out on their own. I don’t consider blind persistence to be a virtue, do you?
I suppose you are still thinking to yourself, “TPTB have done everything that can be done with this information and they are doing the best possible job. This place couldn’t possibly be improved in any way given our limited resources, and the resources we have are actually very impressive!” That’s because You Just Don’t Get It. You just don’t get lots of things, like what makes Wikipedia successful and how to happily make a “profit” in the online world. Like the folks who run this place you think it’s tough to get a passionate community to sustain itself. That’s because You’re Doing It Wrong and You Don’t Get It.
I think someday “we” will figure it out, and then it will seem all too obvious. Until then I’m going to keep bitching when I see crazy ideas.
My two cents is that we follow Wikipedia every step of the way. Make all the information free. Make posting free. Make membership free. Get rid of the ads. But require that the site be paid for by donations, with the community having full knowledge that if the donations run out the community dies. If, as a member of the community, Cecil Adams wants to provide some free hosting in the absence of donations, that’s fine. But make the community aware that it is in debt to him and owes him some cash. Put it right up there across from the logo - the community balance sheet. We pitch some extra cash, we get some extra servers or ensure the hosting fees are paid for an extra few months or years. New users (much like Metafilter) can pay a one time fee to post. Maybe there are some perks they can then buy to spruce up their profiles, whatever the community agrees on.
The notion that the SDMB is a “business” and needs a “business model” has never worked. Face it. One of these days Cecil is going to get fed up and pull the plug if we don’t find something better.
Christ almighty, I KNEW that wasn’t shoe polish on your nose!
I don’t have to stroke TPTB to let them know that their customer service sucks, and the inability for one member to pay for another shouldn’t take the coordination of 4 people and two weeks. I don’t give a hoot if it is a third-party add on or not. If you want to collect money, figure out how before collecting it. I’ve seen ebay’ers with a more sophisticated approach than this place. Ever hear of PayPal?
If you can’t see what I’m frustrated about, that’s your problem. :rolleyes:
Save your eye rolls for someone else. If this board’s paying membership didn’t accept such crappy service, it would be a better, smoother running board. I’m a Guest because to pay for this board would reward mediocre customer service and poor planning.
And I’m not even asking to see their financial numbers.
Let me explain the rationale for why we haven’t made this change (yet - I’m not saying we never will). As is often the case there’s a lot of background, which I ought to explain for the benefit of those who came in late. My apologies if I’m telling you more than you want to know.
When we switched from subscriptions to free posting last year, our initial idea was that we’d treat members and guests the same, the only difference being that members wouldn’t see ads and guests would. We hoped to generate revenue for the site through advertising; the cost of subscriptions would compensate for the income we’d forego by not showing people ads.
Demonstrating yet again the exquisite timing that has characterized all our business decisions, we implemented free posting just as the economy tanked, and with it the online ad market. Ad revenue the first few months nowhere near made up for the lost subscription revenue. Things have perked up lately, but it’s clear that for the foreseeable future we’ll need multiple income sources. We don’t want to go back to pay-to-post, but we do want to give people more reasons to subscribe.
At the moment, unfortunately, we don’t have a lot to offer. We’ve got some things in the works, but right now mostly what we’ve got is small privileges like location and post count. How many people become members specifically so they can get a post count? Probably not many. But I do think not showing L&PC for guests creates awareness that we have two classes of posters, and gets people thinking about whether they should subscribe.
We wouldn’t do this if we were imposing a significant hardship on users. But we’re not. One rollover and one click pulls up a member’s profile, which lists all the publicly-available info we have about that person, including location and post count. The process takes maybe two seconds.
So the downside of no guest L&PC is a (very) minor inconvenience for some users. The upside is maybe we make a couple bucks. Maybe someday we won’t care about that; right now we do. Hope you can understand.
I don’t think anyone argues against that. The issue is that this inconvenience inconveniences everyone, not just us freeloading guests. No one, not even paid in full members, gets to see that info without the inconvenience, so there’s really no incentive for someone to pony up the cash. If you don’t pay you can’t see guests’ info without some clicking, if you do pay you still can’t see guests’ info without some clicking. Few people care about seeing their own data, they’re just curious about the other posters, how active they are, where they’re from. They know that about themselves already.
If you really wanted this to work, it would be guests never see the posts/location without clicking, members always see it without clicking. Would that be a big incentive to pay? Nah. Is it more of one than now? Yeah, considering there’s no incentive at all now in that regard. Is such a thing possible from a technical standpoint, or even worth bothering with? I have no idea. I would guess not.
Of course you could go with something like members being allowed sigs and guests lacking that. Then you aren’t taking anything away from members, while still giving an incentive that a few people might care about. Anyone would still be able to view sigs, just if you want one of your own, you gotta pay up.
Thanks for giving us the rationale, I just think that the way things are set up now, the post count/location setup isn’t actually working toward your goal of getting people to pay.
Yeah, that was my argument as well. I understand the impetus, but I just don’t think it’s earning the board any money in practice. I honestly think we’d do better (fiscally) by restoring these features, thereby making the board a more attractive place to visit for everyone.
Alternately: How about having sig lines default to ON again, which would bring them back into vogue (really, most people used to use them as a matter of course), then make it so only paying members can display them? Or you could give Members the ability to have (small, unobtrusive) avatars. Those are features that would make me more likely to pay.
I know, for a lot of people it makes no difference whatsoever, and for most others it’s only the smallest of inconveniences. For some of us, however, it is a meaningful annoyance – I generally don’t care enough to click through to a new page, I just want to know that information immediately while reading a post.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to respond.
Right. I can’t believe the powers (well, there’s seems to be only one power) believe that hiding the post counts/locations for guests is providing incentive to subscribe. Is this seriously the logic?
Just wanted to point out that paid members do have avatars in their profile, which totally took me by surprise. Here I had been griping about just that point. Pictures help me remember people. I’d like an option (off by default) that would let members see those avatars in threads. But Ed did say they were working on things.
As for the money system not working right, somebody had to be the test case. I’m pretty sure the problem hadn’t come up during testing, so they didn’t realize it was a problem until now. So I’m willing to give them time to work it out. And two weeks really isn’t that long of a time. to me. Lots of online businesses seem to take longer to fix problems.
As for the actual subject of the OP, I think I’ve already covered that (if in other threads). I like the idea of making you be a member to see those things, with guests having a reminder on each topic saying, for example, “Post Count: Subscribe to See!” instead of the the actual post count. That would accomplish showing the difference between members and guests, while still giving the members the better features.
I’m not sure whether anyone called it “a finely oiled machine in action”. I know I didn’t. It was simply a matter of those who have the power and the ability being willing to bend the rules and take a small loss for the sake of taking on a new member. I have worked in the business world for almost 40 years, and the most successful companies I have worked for did the same sort of thing. Guy comes into the place, can’t quite score what he needs, someone offers to help, but there develops a glitch — few, if any, businesses that I’ve seen have glitch-free computer systems — computer can’t handle the problem, and so the management staff intervenes, overriding the dumb machine in order to satisfy a customer (two actually, in this case). It may not be “finely oiled”, but it worked in this instance, and worked well.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, is a non-profit.
Some things in the works??!?! Oh boy!
Haven’t heard that before. :rolleyes:
As others have pointed out, the problem with this idea of using Location and Post Count as incentives to subscribe is that it is a minor inconvenience to both guests and members alike which makes it not an incentive. If I paid up, the only difference is that I would be able to see my own Location and Post Count which I kind of already know. What would work as an incentive is the ability to see others’ locations and post counts.
I stand fully behind the idea of offering as many “perks” as you an offer as an incentive for people to give you more money. I also think that this community can only survive with Guests that can post for free as it opens the board to people who might answer a question without having to pay for the privilege of providing content.
I don’t know what the software offers but paying members should be able to customize their experience to the max. Change the appearance of the board, choose to see or ignore ads, signatures, avatars, profile info, use smilies and fonts and colors, and dancing elephants. Guests should be able to see unadorned content peppered with ads and post unadorned text. Guests should not have signature, profile pages, avatars, use PM, change settings or preferences, etc.
That would create two tiers that would work as an incentive to subscribe. People who just want to ask or answer the occasional question, have access to the board for free. and help the community by providing content. People who want to make this home, can pay to make this to their taste and support the community with funds besides whatever content they provide.
Also, although we have gone over the obstacles to receiving donations, it takes only a minimum of creativity to get around that. A donation doesn’t have to be called a donation
You could sell on the store something with minimum cost to the administration. Say those rubber bracelets or a plain key ring. Offer it at $5 and let people buy as many as they want as a way to donate money to the SDMB. Make the default shipping address your receiving address and give people the chance to even save you the trouble of packing and shipping them to further help the cause.
Make a sponsor-a-guest program where people with money can sponsor people who cannot pay to become members (as opposed to those who won’t subscribe for personal reasons). That would be another way for people to discreetly donate money to the SDMB without calling them donations.
There is plenty of people here who would dump a ton of money here to see the SDMB survive. Don’t let them go away with the money in their pockets while you circle the financial drain. Nothing worse than starving in a land of plenty.
A huge annoyance for me on this MB is that when having discussions with other posters and attempting to answer their questions their locations are not shown. Now, for some Dopers this is simply a result of their desperate need to be so damned witty and urbane that they enter something supposedly comical in the field as opposed to something actually informative (maybe they are afraid their tinfoil hats aren’t enough to protect them). However, for an increasing proportion of new users and lapsed users wearing the Guest label I don’t even have a chance to see where they are, you know assuming they are pragmatic folks who would share that precious info.
I’m sure I’m not the only person who realizes how often an OP’s location it pertinent to the question at hand. Whether it’s a thread discussing the types of flora and fauna they discovered in their yard or the quirks of the language they speak. Perhaps it’s a debate of local politics or a rant about a sports event. Maybe it’s a request for a food, media or retail recommendation. There are endless topics in which a members location is a critical piece of information. On a MB whose declared purpose is to fight ignorance, not displaying the location of Guests is curious at best. Do you think withholding this “feature” is a revenue generating tactic? :dubious:
Anyways, just a thought. How’s about you click that little checkbox so that everyone’s Location is displayed all the time in order to make that thread about the use of the word “toilet” and posters’ repeated descriptions of what things are like “here” meaningful.
Guests’ location is freely available to view in their public profile. It’s, what, two mouse clicks away? Three?
No.
I leave my info fields blank on purpose: I want my arguments to be judged by its own merits, not by the reader’s preconceptions of my nationality, age, gender or cholesterol level. If the subject I’m discussing warrants such information, I will include it in my comment when pertinent.
Also, penis.
On second thought, instead of closing the new thread and redirecting you here, I’ll go ahead and merge it with the existing one.
With all respect, what are you talking about? You do realize you can get post count and location (if the user has revealed this) by (a) clicking on their user name, (b) mousing over “view public profile,” and (c) clicking on that, right? I timed it just now; this takes literally four seconds.
Help me understand, then. If the information for guests is that easily available, that simple to find, then what is the argument for not showing the info after all?