Well, Brain, if the owners are about to be committed, then how are they going to help with anything on this message board? Narf!
Very solid post Slypork.
So the owners seem to be committed or they should be committed? 
As anyone who has worked in the business world knows, it is easy for an owner to appear interested in what the employees and customers say, it is another thing altogether for them to crack open the change purse, dust off the cobwebs and part with a few shekels. Unless they see some profit from the effort and expense, they won’t do it. Most owners are so cheap they wouldn’t give you the froth off their piss.
The SDMB has been limping along on antiquated equipment with outdated software. That thread showing what the SDMB server room looks like (I’d link to it but…yadda, yadda) should have been stapled to the forehead of the person in charge of IT procurement.
Giraffe, if you have any kind of influence or could bend the ear of the SDMB equivalent of Nick Burns please help us. I’ve been making burnt offerings to Cecil of People magazine and the National Enquirer (trying to eliminate ignorance)but they haven’t been accepted yet. Maybe with the assistance of one of the High Priests of Dopedom our pitiful cries will be heard and we will be delivered from this vast wasteland.
shrug Story of my life…
I’m not one to bitch and whine a lot or wonder why shit happens but it IS getting a little irritating. I can’t type or spell for shit and the other day I typed out a very informative answer to a GQ and it got eaten. Maybe one of the big boys will take notice and get this thing firing on all cylinders.
Could be that the lesson from all of this is that running a message board should be a hobby and a labor of love, but it’s not an effective business model.
You have to be careful about reminding certain people around here that they have not lived up to their promises regarding improvements, or they might suggest that there are many things they’d like to promise you for your general dishonesty and unkind ways.
Well, that is, if you are me.
Of course it is interesting to note that the point could not be refuted, and instead veiled threats were used.
Question that’s tangentially related - do SDSAB staff have to pay for their membership? Or is that comped as a “thankyou” for writing free content?
SDSAB Members do not pay for membership. Except if they pay on accident. Like I did one year.
Well golly gee–I did a little cursory looking around and I’d appreciate it if some of the techie types would check me on this. I found these prices online in about fifteen minutes total, and that was because I was drooling over the server systems. Shoot me…
First off, I found what looks like a pretty nice little server system with 2.5 TB storage for $3500–that means that about 250 of us ponying up fifteen bucks each covers the cost for this. I’d say it needs a bit more RAM–it has four available slots, probably wouldn’t want to go with less than 4GB so tack on another couple hundred for that. I’m not sure what an 8 million post database needs in the way of storage but I’m thinking 2.5 TB would probably cover it, with an external RAID array for static archived read-only of really old stuff. Call that maybe another $500-750 for that just for S&G’s–what are we up to, $4500? Okay, so that’s 300 of us at 15.00 each.
Server OS–Ubuntu, probably. Free download, can’t beat the price of open source.
vBulletin software–$160.00 for the latest version. Throw in a WHOLE YEAR of phone support–that’s another three hundred, personally I wouldn’t bother with it but let’s assume somebody might need handholding. Email support is free. Let’s say another 30 memberships for the software and support.
So tell me, geek types, is this a reasonable server for this application and is there anything wrong with my math? I know there are more than 330 full price or 660 half price memberships being paid per year and yes there are bandwidth costs but still–I could afford this server on my home equity line of credit and I’m UNEMPLOYED. What, precisely, is the excuse Creative Loafing has for not ponying up for a decent server box?
Anyone?
The box is, of course, a big part of it. But if you cannot tweak the SQL engine properly, locks and waits and inefficient indexes will murder the performance. That’s what crack SQL administrators take care of.
That’s also what free email support is for.
Surely the forum software should put in the proper indices and such for you? I wouldn’t want to have to reverse-engineer the DB design just to get proper performance from a software package I paid for.
Cylinders? Shit-I’d be happy if the fucking rubber band was regularly wound up.
While I am just as upset as anyone about the lack of search (what no new posts function?) I do understand when faced with a strange problem that one very good way to fault trace it is to disable a function for a short period of time, to see if it makes a difference.
::: sending positive vibes to Jerry:::
Hah!
It would be nice to have the Straight Dope on what´s going on with the boards since, well, always. Is it actually a slow server?, bad software, low bandwidth?.
As a conversation went on in my previous job.
Me and boss looking at an old computer.
Me: It´s very slow
Boss: Yes, we should shovel some coal into it to see if it goes faster!
Me: Shovel coal into it?, we should shovel dirt over it.
It hit me tonight at work what the real pisser about all of this is: Back during the dot com bubble, any fucking thing could get shitloads of money thrown at it, if it was on “the internet.” The Reader’s previous owners could have milked this puppy for shitloads of cash then and when the bubble burst, it still would have been viable enough to cruise along till somebody went all web 2.0 on it. Nope. Didn’t happen. Constipated Loathing can’t even be bothered to say, foist the hosting of this board on to Best Boards where we had the temp boards and not once did it so much as groan under the strain, even though many of us predicted that it would (and I should note that Tuba picked up the tab for that out of her own pocket, and got the most basic package!).
We’ve had how many fucking threads in the Pit or ATMB about simple things this place could do to improve the operation and/or make money off of it? And exactly how many have TPTB done? Zero. Zip. Nada. Now we hit the same promises that they’re going to “fix things.” Let’s see, since the last massive Doper protest (about the banner ads), the only improvement that I’ve seen is the forum for game threads. Oooh, boy. I am not going to hold my breath, or even hope that things will be different in the near future. “Fool me seven times, shame on you, fool me eight or more times, shame on me.” Amy Wong.
I just posted this in Lobsang’s thread about the board’s issues, but think it’s important enough to do twice…
Anyone who thinks running a message board is profitable needs to go to bed. Can an IT professional actually explain a few things?
Throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. Or, to be totally accurate, it works to a degree, then stops working. The average application, especially a database-centric application like this one, has grown way beyond the ability to just throw servers at it and performance will improve. You’re not just talking about installing more hamsters, you’re talking about creating load-balanced clusters with shared storage arrays and having a huge pipe to serve it all up, as well as constant maintenance of the SQL database supporting it. That’s expensive, complex, and difficult to maintain. Banks and other IT-centric businesses spend MILLIONS per year managing and updating their systems with staff in the dozens, and I’d think some of them don’t have the load this place has.
Let’s just talk about one cost briefly: I work for a storage company, and we charge for our large fault-tolerant high performance storage array (in either NAS or SAN, SATA or fibrechannel) on the order of $40 per GB, which is a bit lower than the industry average. So if every user has .5GB of data, which is not exactly beyond the realms of possibility for anyone who’s been here a while, you’ve already spent all the user fees for the first year just giving users storage for their threads and posts. Unless you don’t want fault tolerant storage, in which case don’t count on keeping those old posts.
So you’ve paid for the storage, and you have nothing left for the servers to actually host the content, much less the people to run it and create those fault-tolerant load-balanced clusters of servers and ensure the performance actually keeps up with demand, manage and configure the data pipes to host it on the internet, renting or buying the space for the data center, paying for the power and air conditioning to run the server farm, or anything else. And don’t forget that this is all supported by the Chicago Reader, who has, y’know, a paying business to run which is more important to them than this little message board.
I don’t know how ‘free’ boards do it, but I’d imagine there is sponsorship, the data isn’t kept for as long, there’s less bandwidth, or there’s a metric buttload of ads.
Bitch away - it just shows you love this place like I do. But always remember that this board is at best a labor of love, tolerated by business types, and maintained as a hobby by someone with a day job.
huh?! is this deja vu?
Actually I just read what you wrote in the other thread. While I’m still confused a bit by how so many other members have their own boards without as much trouble, I appreciate what you had to say.
We need to merge all these threads, I’m really starting get confused.