Yes, definitely. That is a wonderfully generous offer. Thank you, Jonathan! (You can register in the ATMB thread.)
The branch where I am ashamed of myself and ask your forgiveness for my harsh words. God bless Jonathan for his generosity and kindess as a healer and facilitator. 
You know, I really don’t want to read too much in to this, but I have to say that this aspect of Christianity ranks up there with the things that really annoy me about it. You seem to have this pattern of either being a shit to people, or flying off the handle and then abasing yourself in this strange “I am a bad Christian, but it is now all ok because I am apologizing” masochistic orgy of self-depreciation. It is like some strange spiritual bipolar disorder.
And I may be reading too much in to this perceived aspect of your character, but it seems to me that any belief system that seems to not require any work towards personal growth is inherently flawed (after all, it seems fine do and say whatever you want as long as you are sorry later) . Why not put some of the energy that you spend in self-flagellation into just not being a pompous shit to people in the first place?
Thank you, Libertarian, apology accepted.
You’re welcome! Thank you as well. And Binarydrone is right. I should always be loving and kind.
I’m going to derail this derailment of this thread, and toss in my two cents.
I occasionally go through bursts of posting like mad, then I go dormant and only lurk. Currently, I’m only lurking. I’d just like to say, re: charging for posting privileges- it’s five bucks. Per. Year.
Five freakin’ bucks.
I can’t even think of anything that only costs five dollars per year. Even in my poor years, when I could only afford knock-off ramen noodles, and that not reliably, I could’ve always shelled out five bucks for some necessity. And the SDMB is just that- a necessity, in my opinion. When I’ve got a question, I need the sharp brains here to solve it for me, right then.
I’m not saying everything’s gonna be roses when they start charging- but I’m not a’skeered of it, neither.
I’m a dev on an online MMORPG. We recently started charging, as we’ve gone out of beta. We’ve seen exactly this sort of hand-wringing (and -stabbing) as we’re seeing here on the SDMB. Hell hath no fury as that of a netizen who has to pay for a previously free service.
I’m going to pay. Five bucks a year is a no-brainer. I don’t really understand why there’s any discussion.
Oh. The wild-and-free-electronic-frontier canard again. Must we reiterate that the Internet began as a government-funded enterprise of military and university computer networks? The Internet was never free. If you lived in the United States, your tax dollars went to pay for the servers, whether you used them or not.
If anybody here wishes to visit a free bulletin board with thousands of active users and tens of thousands of hits per day and millions of posts archived back several years, without online pop-up advertising, and closely moderated to keep out the trolls and sock puppets, he is free to create one.
I have very little patience and sympathy for the Information Wants To Be Free people. I certainly plan to pay.
There may be many reasons why some people would stop posting if the board goes “for pay”; most of these reasons, I believe, have nothing to do with the price of subscription. I run a site and we have a message board, I mostly pay for it from my own pocket, whatever little income we have at the moment comes from the selling of merchandise, and advertisement and our MB is NOTHING compared to the size and variety of the population here, SDMB should be doing at least a 100 times more money than I am doing.
If only 50% of the posters leave (and that been extremelly optimistic) the SDMB will stop been the vibrant community that I’ve grown to love and visit often (and in which I post less often). I will not pay. I would, however, contribute, buy, subscribe or whatever IF members are not required to pay to post.
Ms. MacPhisto said:
Libertarian said:
Not to pile on, Lib, but that’s a tad bit disingenuous. Unless there’s some SDMB payment plan I’m unaware of, it’s really not just over a dollar a month. It’s $15 in one lump sum. And that’s qualitatively different. Like yosemitebabe said in the ATMB thread, we each have our “too much” thresholds. Were I a newbie (being a law student on a relatively moderate budget), $15 would be “too much” to give, at one time, to participate in a message board I wasn’t sure how long I’d be sticking around for. If you’d asked me to cough up fifteen bucks at the end of my first month of posting/lurking four years ago (maybe seven posts in thirty days), I would’ve thought it was too steep.
Yeah, $15 comes out to just over a dollar for each month of membership. And you can get Time Magazine for ninety-six cents an issue, too–but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to ask you for fifty bucks up front.
If it means that the board will be faster
If it means that the board will be pithier
GREAT!!
If it means that SDMB finances are open and availible so that we know that our money is being spent to keep the board vibrant and not Cecil’s yacht buoyant
If it means that I can control my view of the board a little (I HATE the popup windows on the topic pages and really don’t care to download you idiotic avatar)
FINE!
If it means that we get rid of the people who just want to be jerks
But we also lose the odd little person who changes our whole way of thinking
OK, maybe
If it means that the only folks left are the ones that agree with each other
If it means that that Enlightenment has been replaced with Banality
so long
One year, 5 bucks.
Only time will tell
Sorry, but I think the pessimists are right.
As much as I love the SDMB, I’m simply not going to pay to post here, for reasons which I’ve outlined elsewhere.
What’s likely to happen is that the business model they’re adopting is going to introduce lots of new headaches related to establishing a commercial contract with it’s posters, whose expectations will then rise - expectations about performance, bells-and-whistles, increased/decreased moderative intervention, lawsuits related to trolls/flamewars/harrassment, etc.
Eventually, the Reader may even hand it over to an MBA to milk it for money, which MBA will have no second thoughts about selling it or even closing it down in short order if it doesn’t perform.
All IMHO. (Sorry if I’m a little scary, but I’m trying to be honest here in the SDMB’s “moment of truth”, as the administrator’s announcement said.)
I’m curious about what you mean. I surf the site daily but rarely post. Perhaps as a result I’ve never noticed any real on-going problems. Sometimes the SD runs slow, granted, but your statement seems to suggest there are intolerable problems. Others seem to feel this way too. Are you and others referring to different issues that might be solved by going to a subscription service that less frequent users like myself are less likely to notice? Just curious about what I might be missing.
Personally, I don’t think the proposed fees are at all excessive. I wish they would consider an option where, instead of giving guests 30 days, they give guests 30 posts. That would be more beneficial to folks who just like to pop in on a thread ever so often over the course of many months. Sometimes I go in bursts and might post 6 messages in a week; then I might not post anything for four months. Folks like me could stretch 30 posts a long way.
The only way it really qualifies, as true charity is if you arrange to sponsor the one person who you find most abhorrent, most annoying, and most banal, and then manage to sponsor him for a year, without anyone finding out who you are.
Anything other than that is shopping. Maybe shopping for sycophants, maybe shopping for glory, maybe shopping for self indulgence, but shopping none the less.
But, as most of you know, I am a shopper.
So, let me know if the actual five bucks is the reason you are not going to stay. Been there. It sucks, and the fact that no one believes that you “really can’t” is just another part of it. Even if you are wrong about what you can, and can’t afford, that doesn’t mean you should follow fiscal advice from anonymous Internet posters.
And for Irony’s sake, I will try to extort the money from Libertarian.
Seeing as it’s my comment that set him off, I’d also like to point out that he doesn’t seem to have read my previous post very well. As I said previously, I’m a student (well, just graduated and looking for work, but I was a student when I signed up here). So when Lib posted that anyone on a tight budget should be working to improve their circumstances, it really pissed me off. It seems to me that going to university is, by definition, working to improve one’s circumstances down the road. Yes, it involves some sacrifice now, and for most of my studies I’ve been on a budget where $5 isn’t a lot but $15 is, especially since I’m in Canada and we’re talking American dollars.
So, to bring this back on topic, I’m willing to pay the $5 to continue using the SDMB, and it seems that a fair number of other current members are as well. However, I’m worried about the ability of the boards to continue attracting new members, and I’m afraid for the boards’ future as a result. Hopefully I’m wrong, but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens in the coming year or so.
Well, to be fair, I was saying that anyone on a tight budget who wants something he can’t afford should be working to improve his circumstances. That just means what it says, honesy. And there are a lot of things it doesn’t mean unless there are preconceptions about it. It doesn’t mean that poor people are lazy. It doesn’t mean that people who can’t afford things don’t deserve help. And it doesn’t mean that I think you — or anyone else in particular — are doing something wrong. I’m speaking from my own experience. There were times when I wanted more than I could afford. On some of those occasions, I took charity. On some, I acted irresponsibly. And on others, I did what you’re doing.
Respectfully disagree. But then I am still waiting for the option to “ensure the posting privileges of X random dopers for the next year”, which would be better than ensuring the posting privileges of someone I hate, because either way (shopping or someone I hate) I am choosing. This way I have no way of knowing who is here because of me, and I’d like to keep it that way. Of course, such a thing does not, AFAIK, yet exist, so those of us who presently have the comfort of ensuring the comfort of others can only go by who says “Hey, got a spare five?”
[sub]Email’s in the profile. If it bounces, send it fizzy’s way.[/sub]
Wow! This thread is still up too! That makes 3 so far.
I posted Admin’s Attitude Towards People Who Can’t Afford $5 this morning. It was shut down ten minutes later. Czarcasm said I should have posted it in Please place all SDMB subscription complaints in this thread, you cheapskates!.
I did. Unfortunately, it’s been lost in the shuffle. It would have done quite well on its own. The frustrating part is this thread wasn’t about the subscriptions. It was about the Administrator’s attitude towards those who said they can’t pay.
The more threads I see about the “change”, the more I wonder why mine was really pulled.
CheekyMonkey613, you do know that cross-posting is frowned on right? Is this some suicide by Mod thing?
Binarydrone, I didn’t realised it would be frowned upon in this circumstance. I’m wondering why everyone else is allowed to keep their posts going about “the change” and mine is shut down. Doesn’t matter anyway. Mine is closed; people can’t reply to it.
Point of clarification: I am not in any way trying to junior-mod here, just passing on what I have observed.