Well, to those with strong ethics and some sort of sense that one is ethically required to view all forms of advertisement that our corporate masters decide to push onto us. It’s quite possible to have strong ethics without such an obsequious disposition.
As to the OP: I’m not a member because it seems odd, to me, to pay an organization for the privilege of creating the content that they use to make money (either by other subscription fees or by advertising).
I was a charter member and let it lapse for some reason. Maybe if I could remember the year it expired I could figure out why. I haven’t gotten around to renewing or getting my status back. I might.
I was a Charter Member and paid all through the pay-to-post years, and for several years afterwards. I’m sad I let my charter title lapse but I honestly don’t have $15 to spare. If my financial situation changes, I’d re-up. OTOH, if the board went pay to post again, I’d probably have to take a hiatus.
I think that if you are a regular poster and can afford it, you should pay. BUT I am very much against “pay to post”.
It did in the beginning, in fact, it lived without ads or subscriptions. When the paper changed hands, the board had to provid the new owners with a reason for our existance. That reason turns out to be money.
How much, d’ya think?
It’ll never be enough, I tells ya.
I thought that was a tuba in your pocket.
I used to be a member, a charter member in fact. I paid all through pay-to-post and was happy to do so. When they abandoned pay-to-post, they told us that with the addition of ads, they would make more money from us if we didn’t join and just viewed the ads. So I dutifully did so. (I think. I’m not positive I didn’t pay for the “charter member” title for at least a little bit.) At some point they decided that they would rather we do pay for membership, but I don’t think they said anything to that effect. At one point a year or two ago, I mentioned in a similar thread that I had been told by the administration that my money was no good here, and I got a very nice reply from Tuba explaining that they do in fact want paid subscriptions and that my money would be more than welcome and would be appreciated and treasured beyond its worth. Unfortunately, by that time, Ed had managed to lose a lot of the goodwill I’d felt about the board, and I’d long ago decided that I wouldn’t be sending him any more of my meager earnings. Also, I got fired from my job due to a virus I got on a work computer from this website. Seriously. I don’t totally blame the SDMB admin for that; there were other issues involved in my firing. But my already low income still hasn’t completely recovered relative to c-o-l. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, SDMB!
I still love this place in spite of myself. If they’d never told me to stop paying, I probably never would have.
You don’t even want to know what’s in my pocket.
Bit of history and explanation here. Long story, sorry.
We’ve gone through a lot of changes over the years.
Initially The Straight Dope in cyberspace was an entity on AOL; you were required to be registered on AOL to access the content, make posts, etc. AOL paid the Chicago Reader to use SD content and covered all costs of the offering, including the message board.
After a couple years of that AOL discontinued their pay-for-content model and closed the Straight Dope channel. This was a new situation for the Chicago Reader; they had no real online presence, only a token placeholder of a website that they only had because they wanted to reserve the url for future use. They were focused much more on the printed page and were totally busy with that. (It was still making them big money.) Management did not understand the internet, wasn’t interested in it at all, and were kind of “Well, okay, if you want to do it, go ahead and try it.” They saw The Straight Dope online as Cecil’s weird idea and were totally happy to ignore us, pretty much.
We went on like that for a while, then all of a sudden they did get more interested in an online presence and it was more of “well, this is costing us money.” And now the site needed to if not make a profit, at least generate some income. That led us to subscriptions.
This worked sorta okay for a while, there were problems. So rethinking the issue, Ed and Jerry thought that with sufficient ad revenue the site would better run itself and we could go back to the more carefree days before subscriptions when people could just sign up and post. Ads were easy to set up and run on the site and the ad mechanism was a reliable and steady source of passive income; you just collected the money for running the ads, you didn’t have to tend anything. They wanted to encourage looking at ads so they made subscriptions optional. Also the mechanism for paid subscriptions was something Jerry came up with that was a graft between vBulletin (vB didn’t have a payment mechanism in the software at that time) and the Reader ad payment system. It was clunky and difficult and compromised the security of the ad system and they were hoping to eliminate subscriptions so they could remove this trouble spot from the server. They were discouraging subscriptions so they could take that down.
Then vBulletin came out with an upgrade that had a payment mechanism in it and that made all that easier and safer … and the dictates changed. New owners expected more from us, including showing a profit.
So now we needed BOTH subscription and ad revenue.
For those of you like Alan Smithee who may have been whipsawed by these changes, I don’t know what to say except I’m sorry you were adversely affected. I’m especially sad that this place was a factor in you losing your job; that’s terrible.
Today the corporate entity that owns The Straight Dope expects this site, like all their sites, to be profitable, period. They are not invested in the history of this place, they don’t know about the culture, and they have no emotional ties to this place at all. (Unlike Dopers.)
We hope this site will continue until at least until The Next Big Technological Breakthrough comes along. Maybe in times to come this stuff will be shot directly into your brain and you won’t need a website. You already don’t need a computer, so who knows?
By being a subscribing, dues paying Member you support the Dope.
By clicking on the occasional ad you support the Dope.
By being a participating member of The Straight Dope community you support the Dope.
If you do any of these things, we appreciate you.
If you do all of these things, you are really great and we love you. Aspire to greatness!
I think Jerry’s working on that right now. But then what happens to us when we’re Banned?
You don’t really need that lobe, anyway.
And the most intelligent, idiotic posters whom I disagree with notwithstanding.
I discovered Unca Cecil when the first SD book came out, lurked here on and off for years (mostly on), finally ponied up the $ a year or so ago because… I felt like it.
I hate ads but Firefox w/adblocker was already taking care of that.
Thanks for the history, TubaDiva. And, interesting thread. I found this place 2 years ago and quickly got pulled in, so I decided to pony up.
It’s kind of like most churches, in the sense that you can contribute if you want to, but you don’t have to. All of us contribute where and when we can and want to. In any place that does not require paid membership, I figure that nobody has any right to judge based on who does and who doesn’t. But, human nature being what it is, and typically consistently so, people often do judge others. I try not to, but I think I just did!
But not giant fonts or ALL CAPS.
not even if we pay extra for the custom title?!?!?!
NOT EVEN IF WE PAY EXTRA FOR THE CUSTOM TITLE?!?!?!
For some strange reason, the system won’t let me post that in all caps unless I include the un capitalized version, first. WTF? 
Count me as another who is vaguely annoyed that I wouldn’t have a Charter Member title even though I was in the first round of paid members. I’m glad that Tuba is willing to consider reinstating it for people, but this is the first I’ve heard of that.
You need the special charter member override code for that.