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what do you know about the straight dope message board?
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Are you looking for general background information on the Straight Dope Message Board, such as its history and purpose, or are you interested in something specific like notable discussions, user demographics, or its current status?
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give me some background and history, and then a notable discussion
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The Straight Dope Message Board: History and Community Highlights
Origins on AOL and Launch of the Web Board (1973–1999)
The Straight Dope Message Board (SDMB) grew out of a popular question-and-answer newspaper column called The Straight Dope, written by “Cecil Adams” (a pseudonym of editor Ed Zotti) and published in the Chicago Reader starting in 1973
. By the mid-1990s, as the internet gained traction, The Straight Dope expanded online. The column was featured on America Online (AOL), which at the time paid for content and provided a dedicated forum for Straight Dope readers
. AOL users could simply use the keyword “Straight Dope” to access an exclusive area that included the columns and a threaded message board
. This early online community – along with the Usenet group alt.fan.cecil-adams – allowed the column’s devoted fans (dubbed the “Teeming Millions”) to discuss Cecil’s answers and ask their own questions in a pre-web environment.
When the AOL contract ended in the late 1990s, the Chicago Reader moved The Straight Dope to its own website (straightdope.com) and launched a new public message board there
. The Straight Dope Message Board officially opened in spring 1999, initially as a section for readers to comment on Cecil’s columns and Staff Reports. The SDMB adopted the tongue-in-cheek tagline “Fighting Ignorance since 1973 (It’s taking longer than we thought.)” reflecting the column’s mission
. Even Cecil himself, famously tech-averse, was persuaded to drop in occasionally on the new forums to read comments on his columns
. From the start, the board’s purpose was to provide a place for inquisitive, trivia-loving people to ask and answer questions and continue the column’s spirit of humorous yet fact-driven discussion in a community setting.
Community Growth and Major Milestones in the 2000s
After its 1999 launch, the SDMB quickly grew into a vibrant online community with multiple discussion categories. In addition to “Comments on Cecil’s Columns”, new forums were created for broader conversation: “General Questions” (GQ) for any factual queries, “Great Debates” for controversial or deep discussions, “In My Humble Opinion” (IMHO) for polls and personal viewpoints, “Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share” (MPSIMS) for casual chatter, and the infamous “BBQ Pit” for rants and heated arguments
. This structure evolved organically – for example, Great Debates was spun off when religious/political debates started overrunning GQ, and Cafe Society (for arts, entertainment, and culture) was added a couple years later as the member base expanded in interests
. By the early 2000s, the SDMB had become a lively corner of the internet where users (known as “Dopers”) exchanged knowledge, humor, and friendly banter across a wide array of topics.
The community developed a strong culture emphasizing both intellectual curiosity and civility. Cecil’s mantra of “fighting ignorance” set a tone that valued accurate information and well-cited answers. At the same time, the board embraced witty irreverence – it wasn’t unusual to see rigorous debates in one thread and goofy in-jokes in another. A firm but simple rule was enforced: “Don’t be a jerk.” This golden rule, coined early on by the administrators, meant virtually any opinion or question was welcome provided users remained civil and respectful
. To uphold this standard, a team of volunteer moderators policed the discussions. One long-time administrator, Jennifer “TubaDiva” Paradis, served as the board’s matriarch for over 20 years (earning respect for keeping the peace in a often raucous community)
. Regular members, too, took pride in maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio; “peer pressure” from veteran Dopers often kept spam and trolling to a minimum. The result was a self-sustaining community that Cecil Adams himself lauded as “the heart and soul of the enterprise” – even if the discussions often roamed far beyond the original newspaper column’s scope
. Throughout the 2000s, the SDMB’s user base was large and active, with thousands of registered members and notable spikes of traffic whenever an SDMB discussion was linked from outside (the board was Slashdotted and Farked on a few occasions, causing brief surges of “the Teeming Millions” that could number in the millions of views)
. Members organized real-life meetups called “Dopefests” in cities around the world, and even found romance – finding a spouse via the SDMB became enough of a trend to be joked about by the community
.
Like many growing forums of that era, the SDMB faced technical and financial challenges as it expanded. In February 2002, a server crash led to an event the community grimly nicknamed the “Winter of Our Missed Content.” The board was down for several weeks, and several months’ worth of posts (stretching back into late 2001) were lost in the outage
. Loyal Dopers congregated on temporary off-site boards until service was restored. Despite setbacks, the community rebounded, and this episode passed into SDMB lore as a testament to how tight-knit and resilient the user base had become (it’s often recalled with a mix of groans and nostalgia on anniversary threads).
Another major change came in 2004. Facing rising hosting costs, the Chicago Reader implemented a subscription model for the SDMB. Posting privileges now required an annual fee (around $14.95, with a 50% discount for those who subscribed in the first days). Early adopters were honored with the title “Charter Member,” which they could keep as long as they renewed, whereas new paying users were simply “Members.”
This move was somewhat controversial – many internet forums were free – but thousands of dedicated users ponied up. The subscription system went live around April 2004, and for a few years, the SDMB was essentially a semi-paywalled community (guest accounts could read most content but had very limited posting abilities). While this provided revenue to keep the servers running, it also slowed the influx of new members. By 2006–2007 the board’s activity had dipped from its peak, and management began to reconsider the pay-to-post approach.
Changes in Ownership and Platform (2007–Present)
Through the 2000s, The Straight Dope and its message board remained under the umbrella of the Chicago Reader. In 2007, however, the Reader (and by extension the SDMB) was sold to Creative Loafing, Inc., an Atlanta-based publisher
. The new owners promptly ended the subscription requirement and returned the board to a free model to boost participation
. By the end of 2007, registration was free to all once again, with revenue coming from on-page ads for non-subscribed users
. Many longtime members kept their “Charter Member” status (and ad-free browsing) by continuing to pay the optional fee, but new users could fully join the community without charge. This change, along with fresh ownership, gave the SDMB a second wind in the late 2000s.
Ownership changed again in the 2010s. After Creative Loafing went through bankruptcy, the Straight Dope property eventually landed with the company that owned the Chicago Sun-Times. By the mid-2010s the SDMB was owned and operated by Sun-Times Media (while the Chicago Reader itself went to different owners)
. The Straight Dope column was still being written weekly during this period, running in the Reader (and online) until 2018, when Cecil Adams announced that the 45-year-old column was going on hiatus as the Sun-Times retooled its media strategy
. Importantly, Sun-Times Media decided to keep the Straight Dope Message Board alive even after the column stopped. In a 2018 farewell note, Cecil Adams reassured fans that the massive archive of ~3,400 Straight Dope columns would remain accessible, and *“the Straight Dope Message Board (SDMB), the online community that has grown up around the column, will remain open for business.”*
The SDMB had, by then, long since taken on a life of its own, independent of weekly new columns – a fact Cecil acknowledged by calling the board *“in many ways the heart and soul of the enterprise”*
.
Under Sun-Times stewardship, the SDMB saw overdue technical modernization. For nearly two decades the board had run on aging forum software (early on, it used Ultimate Bulletin Board, then in July 2000 it switched to vBulletin). By 2019, it was still running on vBulletin 3.x – software dating to the early 2000s – which caused frequent performance issues as the database grew to millions of posts
. In early 2020, the SDMB was finally migrated to a modern Discourse platform, greatly improving stability and adding new features (such as real-time updates and better search). Today, the Straight Dope Message Board continues to operate at boards.straightdope.com, still carrying the motto “Fighting Ignorance since 1973.” It hosts over two decades of discussions spanning everything from trivial questions about song lyrics to rigorous debates on science, politics, and philosophy
. The community is smaller than it was in its early-2000s heyday, but it remains active and tight-knit – a testament to the lasting appeal of Cecil’s premise that no question is too odd or too foolish to ask, so long as you truly want the straight dope.
Memorable Discussion Thread: “If LotR Had Been Written By Someone Else!?” (2002–2004)
One legendary SDMB thread that illustrates the community’s creative and witty character was titled “If LotR Had Been Written By Someone Else!?”. Started on October 10, 2002 in the Cafe Society forum (the board’s section for arts and entertainment), this thread invited members to imagine J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings re-written in the style of different authors or genres
. What followed was an epic collaborative parody spanning over a year and hundreds of posts: SDMB members contributed pastiches of LotR as if written by Ernest Hemingway, Dr. Seuss, William Shakespeare, H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, Ayn Rand, and many more
. Each entry cleverly mimicked the chosen author’s tone and quirks while re-telling snippets of Frodo’s journey. For example, the Hemingway-style take opened with terse, masculine prose about an old man in the shadows of the elven hall
, whereas the Dr. Seuss version was a rhyming romp with hobbits and orcs. The thread became a showcase of the SDMB’s collective humor, literary knowledge, and enthusiasm for geeky pop culture. Contributors built off each other’s ideas, often good-naturedly one-upping the previous parody.
The “If LotR were written by…” topic struck such a chord that it kept going well into 2004, making it one of the longest-running creative threads on the board
. It also gained attention beyond the SDMB: the hilarious parodies were copied and shared on blogs and fan sites (at least one member even archived the best posts on a personal webpage, recognizing it as an internet gem). Within the SDMB community, this thread is fondly remembered as an all-time classic. Years later, when users reminisced about the “funniest threads” in board history, the LotR-as-other-authors thread was inevitably cited as a fan favorite – essentially SDMB canon
. The enduring appeal of this discussion lies in how perfectly it captured the board’s spirit: equal parts erudite and playful. Members drew on their literary chops (and a deep well of nerdy references) to entertain one another, all in the cooperative, anyone-can-play-along style that makes forum communities unique. In short, “If LotR Had Been Written By Someone Else!?” stands as a shining example of the Straight Dope Message Board’s tone and interests – smart, irreverent, creative, and driven by the joy of shared imagination.
Sources: The Straight Dope Message Board and Straight Dope archives; Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Reader coverage
; user posts and community recollections on the SDMB itself
; and contemporary reports on the board’s early presence
. The famous “If LotR had been written by…” thread is preserved in the SDMB Cafe Society forum
, and is frequently celebrated by members as one of the board’s most memorable discussions.