TubaDiva wrote:
That is exactly my sentiment.
No one’s trying to tell the Reader what to do with their assets. What people are trying to do is hypothetically explore options for the Reader.
Thank you, dan, that’s it exactly.
While having a community form on their webspace surely wasn’t part of the Chicago Reader’s initial plan, the reality is that such a community exists, and isn’t easily portable.
For two years now, this community hasn’t been making demands of the Chicago Reader; it’s been asking, “What can we do to make this whole shebang work better?”
Discussing possibilities and asking if they’ve been considered (and why they’ve been rejected, if they have) is all we’re doing here. I’m hoping the folks that run the CR don’t take offense at that, because none is intended. Since they run an alternative newspaper, asking questions is what they do for a living. I’m sure they don’t have a problem with friendly questions from people who are favorably disposed towards them to begin with.
I think a Straight Dope calendar would be a great idea!
And the mods can pose for the monthly pictures! hee hee
The Norm has an on-line month-at-a-time calendar, which you print or use as computer wallpaper.
http://www.thenorm.com/calendar/2002/
It’s just clippings from his cartoons. Slug cartoons would work the same way - no extra drawing required.
Happy Lendervedder, splitting the board into a free section and a pay section has been discussed before, and it just doesn’t work. The board is segmented into fora for ease of moderating and viewing. It works as a unit, because each forum is equally available. Thus, it is only a few mouse clicks to go to the proper forum to post. If you start locking off certain fora as pay locations and allow certain ones as free, it will be a lot harder to get people to post in the correct forum. Even well mannered posters will be saying, “I know I should really post this in MPSIMS, but I don’t want to pay the $XX.XX, so I’ll post it here in GQ. I’m so lonely.” Besides, now you’re setting up a system to say one part of the board is more important than another part, therefore some posters are more important than others simply by virtue of where they post.
I don’t think that has been decided by the Reader, nor proven true. It most certainly does and can work, if implemented properly. For example…
And I would argue that well-mannered posters don’t willingly violate Board Rules.
If they post in the wrong Forum on purpose, warn them. If they do it again, ban them. It’s simple.
Yes, that’s the whole point - they are more important. Just like you pay more to sit in First Class, if you pay for the SDMB, you should have more rights and abilities on it. This is the way that life works, or is intended to - you pay for services, and if you pay more, you get better service.
And if you don’t pay, well, then you are at the whim of the generosity of the Reader.
Which is what we are right now. Although I don’t know if I’d ban someone because they twice forgot which forum to post in. 
Whoops, Anthracite said “on purpose.” - so never mind that last statement.
I can’t see anything wrong with that.
Comments on Cecil’s Columns, Comments on Staff Reports, and General Questions are very directly related to the Straight Dope column and the Fight Against Ignorance. Great Debates is a step removed, since it’s not usually about factual issues, but fights ignorance by debating issues with a large element of opinion while insisting on a high level of factual support where possible. ATMB is here because you’ve got to discuss board policy somewhere.
But where is MPSIMS in the fight against ignorance? I assume it was originally there to keep the other fora from getting too chatty, and it took on a life of its own. IMHO is for polls and the ‘soft’ debates, and Cafe Society is for questions and chat about books, movies, the arts, and so forth. Clearly these aren’t at the pinnacle of the fight against ignorance, nor are they closely related to the column. So there is a basis for a hierarchy if the Powers That Be want to see it that way.
My thought was that I could see a possible universe where the CR was unwilling to relinquish any control over the ignorance-fighting part of the board, but might be willing to let another entity run the social fora under a contractual relationship with the CR. I don’t know if we’re in that universe or not, since I have zero inside info about the CR management, but until it’s clear that we’re not, I saw no harm in tossing that possibility into the discussion.
Anthracite, I think perhaps you misunderstood my comment. It’s obvious that someone who pays is more important than someone who doesn’t. My comment was not that you’re making two classes of posters, but the method for deciding the classes.
Upon further reflection and consideration of RTFirefly’s comments, I withdraw my previous comment. It’s the Reader’s board, and if they want to limit the discussions to the columns only, that would be their right. If they wished to charge for certain sections, that would be their right. If they wanted to eliminate the Pit and MPSIMS, they could do that.
That is true. However, it’s my impression (based on what veiled comments Tubadiva has felt free to make, that the Reader, while not thrilled about the costs of keeping the board running, recognizes the intrinsic value of a worldwide community focused around one of their columns and keeping them in the public eye – e.g., the recent snafu where the no-longer-Manchester Guardian misrepresented the Straight Dope.
We all recognize that they have every right to do what they want with their property, including charging for its use, shutting all or part of the site down, or whatever happens to seem fiscally and morally appropriate to them as a business.
In discussing what might be done, many of us, acting out of a relative vacuum as to what the Reader may actually be contemplating, have been trying to assess ways in which the community can be preserved intact while either minimizing the cost to the Reader in doing so or else advancing potential ways in which the board might become a profit center for the Reader.
I honestly cannot see the problem from their perspective in our being interested in finding ways to help them make money, or at least save money. And of course Ed Zotti and Tubadiva, who do or at least may know something of the Reader’s intent, are free to stifle the suggestions most at variance with the Reader’s wishes – e.g., spinning off the board to a not-for-profit, as RTFirefly noted, is contrary to their wishes to retain it “in house” for whatever reason. (I’m assuming, which RT’s post did not specify, that adequate safeguards would have been built into such a proposal as to protect the Reader’s intellectual property in the Straight Dope, the Cecil Adams identity, etc. – my first reaction on reading Tubadiva’s response to that idea.)
Well, heck. If a membership fee or something isn’t forthcoming soon, I’m going to just buy 10 SD T-Shirts and coffee mugs. I’d guess there’s a healthy markup on those, and the Reader would get all the profits vs. a smallish cut from Ballentine for a book sale.
Darned if I know what I’ll do with the shirts & mugs, though.
Give em to the hamsters. They seem to need the motivation.
can anyone get me a cute little picture of these hard-working hamsters?
My feelings exactly. And as is nearly always the case, you’ve said it much more eloquently than I.
Absolutely. And the reason I’m curious as to why they’re reluctant to have the board spun off in some fashion is to know if there’s a way that their objections might be met.
There would have to be a contract between the Chicago Reader and any nonprofit taking charge of the SDMB - one could hardly expect the CR to just hand over the board without any controls. That contract would include pretty much whatever the CR wanted to have in there as a condition for letting such a nonprofit run the SDMB. Acceptable SDMB use of the Straight Dope name, logos and other intellectual property would have to be defined. The CR might well want permanent representation on the nonprofit’s governing board. It would probably want the current restrictions on ‘how-to’ discussion of illegal activities maintained.
Any or all of these things, and any other protections the CR desired, would presumably be written into such a contract. And they’d probably want a clause to allow them to end the contractual relationship, and with it the SDMB’s use of the Straight Dope name, if they felt the contractual safeguards didn’t suffice.
In short, I would expect the CR to relinquish any control over the SDMB only to the extent that their interests are protected by adequate (from their perspective) legal safeguards.
And of course, to add to that - if it was spun off to a nonprofit, then if the nonprofit somehow found a way to increase revenue, the CR would be the beneficiary of that (as opposed to the nonprofit taking it and channeling it back into the board). And since this is all hypothetical, if a nonprofit took over part of the daily operations, perhaps those fora would be housed on a larger, faster server, which would be beneficial to the members and the CR without incurring any additional charge for the CR. I think.
Following my previous post, I hate to bring this up, but this has been bothering me for a while. And I’d be interested to hear anything Tuba or Ed have to say that makes the equation look different.
Buying Straight Dope books, mugs, T-shirts, and so forth are often suggested as a way of helping out the board while the CR figures out a way for the SDMB to at least partially defray its costs.
I have two problems with this, really.
(1) Other than the books, which I’ve got, I really don’t want the merchandise, since I really don’t want to look at any of Slug Signorino’s drawings repeatedly. (YMMV, of course, but I know I’m not alone here.)
But that’s not the main problem, since I could presumably buy a raft of SD T-shirts, give them to the homeless, and mentally write that off as a donation to the SDMB.
The problem is:
(2) I don’t know what fraction of the money I’d spend in this way would actually go to the SDMB, but I presume it would be small.
For example, suppose I buy 10 SD T-shirts, which would cost me $100 plus $7.94 shipping.
(2a) I’m going to guess the Chicago Reader nets a buck or two per T-shirt; it might be more, but (at $10 per shirt) certainly not much more.
(2b) How does the CR know that I’m a SDMB member who’d like to see part of that money to be used to the SDMB’s benefit? They don’t. How much of that buck or two will actually help the SDMB? I don’t know.
But let’s say half of it goes to benefit the SDMB. That means I’ve spent $108 to give between $5 and $10 to the SDMB.
I really, really want to do what I can to help this place be economically more viable than it is right now. But not to the extent that I’m ready to spend over $100 to give $10 worth of assistance to the SDMB.
IANAL, but I don’t think the CR could be a sort of pseudo-owner of the hypothetical nonprofit.
However, the nonprofit could presumably be contractually obligated to pay the CR for the right to be the official Straight Dope MB, including use of the Straight Dope name and the link from the Straight Dope website. The contract could stipulate periodic renegotiation of the amount of that payment, which would be a back-door way to enable some benefit to the CR if the SDMB were to develop a healthy revenue stream.