First of all: thank you sincerely to the sung and unsung folks who grease the wheels of the board and selflessly keep things running as smoothly as possible. Really. Thank you, from myself and I’m sure from others, from the bottom of our hearts.
Second of all: the board seems to be increasingly creaky. I’m guessing this is due to lack of money/resources/time on the SDMB/Reader staff…?
What can the membership of SDMB do to help?
In other words, to make the board run faster/be reliable/be better ?
I’d personally donate money, organize a bake sale (ok, maybe not, but I’d consider it), or somesuch if I had some idea what would help. I recall there was talk of an SDMB user fee late last year. I know this blew over, but don’t recall the details.
So, to the staff: How can we help?
To the members: would you help if you could? How?
If this has been discussed in ATMB ad nauseam before this, apologies for the repetition.
All I can say is this: a solution is being made as we speak. If all is well, there will soon be a way for members to directly help the message board. Until then, it doesn’t hurt to head over to the Straight Dope Store, and buy some of Cecil’s books. That always helps!
Has there been any further discussion of charging for something, anything here? (E.g. annual fee for unlimited posting, charges for higher levels of service, etc.) Where does that stand?
If a nonprofit were to be formed for the purpose of running the SDMB, and raised a credible quantity of money to demonstrate its ability to handle that aspect of it, what other conditions would you require before you’d consider letting such an organization run the board? (E.g., CR representation on its board of directors?) Or would that approach be dismissed out of hand, and if so, why?
Would it be possible for such a nonprofit to fund a server that would house the social fora of the board - MPSIMS, Cafe Society, probably IMHO, possibly the Pit - to take some of the load off the CR’s server that would handle the ignorance-fighting fora?
Pretty much everyone knows the quick-and-dirty business analysis tool known as SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. The main weakness of the board at present is that it doesn’t have a source of funding to support the level of use it gets, and one threat is the tendency of the server and/or board software to keep on crashing under the load. But that load is the result of the board’s main strength, a community of posters that is strongly devoted to this place. It would seem like there’s an opportunity to turn that devotion into a source of funding in a way that takes into account the differing resources of the posting community, some of whom have barely enough to get by as it is, and others of whom have large chunks of combustible cash.
It has seemed to me for a long time now that running the board, or some part of it, as a nonprofit is the natural avenue to exploit this opportunity. It’s not the only way, but it sure looks like the most natural way. Besides, it puts the membership of the board in a position where we can potentially solve the problem that our constant use of the board causes, rather than being in the position of supplicants.
Your response - be it answers, ruminations, digressions, or whatever - is welcomed.
In order to abide by the universal law of supply & demand, revenue has got to come from somewhere. As it is now, the revenue collected from the customers (us) remains constant ($0) and therefore as demand increases, supply suffers.
Asking the customer to pay for services rendered seems like a reasonable solution. I believe this is what will eventually happen as soon as The Reader can guarantee a ROI.
There are a couple of issues surrounding pay-for-use.
Every registered member pays a flat annual rate. The downside of this is that there are more than a fair number of people who simply have no intention of paying for this place, either out of principle or because they can’t afford the fee. Choose this path would ensure the departure of many people from the board; a good number of those who leave would be people who contribute on a daily basis to the board.
There are “goodies” that the vBulletin software permits, including the use of avatars and images. These can be turned on, but my understanding is that the big reason that they’re not turned on is that doing so would introduce a huge strain onto the server as each avatar and image was downloaded (even if they were cached). Also, people could abuse the functions. Under this method, these extra features could be used on a member-by-member basis; if you pay the extra rate, you get the goodies. Don’t want the goodies, don’t pay the rate. Downside of this is that it might not produce enough revenue to be feasible.
Regarding the implementation of a “nonprofit” organization to run the board - “nonprofit” versus “not for profit”. A nonprofit organization, as I understand it, takes in no revenue whatsoever; a not-for-profit organization takes in revenue, but only for the purpose of improving their product or business. Perhaps a lawyer out there can help me better differentiate between the two.
I think it’s important that there are many people on here who recognize that this place is far more than just a large repository of information. It’s an exceedingly special place.
As Coldfire said, a plan is in the works. For reasons of their own, Ed and the rest of the administration would prefer not to discuss the details of this plan until it is implemented. I think that we can trust that a plan which has gotten the approval of all of the mods is probably a pretty good plan, so I don’t think we need to worry.
Just be patient.
On the other hand, there are non-monetary things we can all do right now to improve the board, by decreasing the load. Since much of the load comes from search, much of what we can do to help involves search, as well. If you can, for instance, it helps to schedule searches for relatively quiet times, like the middle of the night. When you do a search, restrict it as much as you can: Figure out a day range, and determine what forum it should be in. If you can find a thread using some method other than the board’s search engine, it’s worthwhile to do so. For instance, if you think that the thread you’re looking for might have been in Threadspotting, first check the Threadspotting archive (or the main archive, if it’s recent). And if you do use search and find a list of relevant threads, don’t post a link to the search results, which would require everyone in the thread to re-run the search. Instead, copy the links into your post.
I still think a Straight Dope calendar at abou $10 a pop is the way to go. People who have money can buy as many as they want and give them to friends.
I can’t read Ed Zotti’s mind, but my understanding is that the SD administration is aware of the effect that it would have on the board to require all posters to pay for the privilege, and that there’s little likelihood of that happening.
OTOH, there’s some logic for placing some ceiling on the number of posts one could make in a year (500 posts? 1000 posts?) without paying, if the software allows that.
I mentioned avatars because many boards have them, but I’m aware that they’re a big server drain. Many other things aren’t. In a parallel discussion on Fathom, Anthracite, who runs a board that uses vBulletin, provided me with a list of services that can be turned on and off for an entire list of people with just a couple of clicks:
Most of these things are much less server-intense than avatars.
If the possibility of involving a nonprofit in the running of this place becomes a genuine possibility, we can make sure we’re using the right legal words then.
Absolutely. What we have here is a community, one that has enriched all of our lives in many ways. I think the Powers That Be recognize what this place means to us. Otherwise, given the trouble involved in maintaining the board, they would have probably pulled the plug on it long ago.
I just hope that if it ever does come to the point where they’d like to pull the plug, they give us a chance at making it work first. I think it’s awkward that the burden of keeping the board going is on them, while the desire to do something about its problems is with us.
Just a humble suggestion. We’ve been told a plan is in works. Why don’t we shut up and see what they’ve come up with rather than rehashing the same ground to no avail.
Though RTFirefly, if the two concepts are distinct, then it makes sense to use the terms correctly.
