Because if the SDMB kept costing the Reader money, the plug was going to be pulled. If they’re making enough now to start getting some of that back, more power to them.
And for people who didn’t know about this board until last week? Are they being told they’re being held (somewhat informally) partially responsible for a six-figure debt?
I’m not trying to make a fuss out of nothing, I’m just concerned that senior figures should make such comments in a throwaway fashion, without adequate explanation.
What I don’t understand is how after charging for subscriptions, the board has gone to hell in terms of performance? Let’s assume this board in now breaking even. My guess is the server this board runs on is so obsolete it could fetch maybe $100 if sold on Ebay if someone paid too much for it.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=6499954&postcount=25
Kaotic Newtral obviously knows what he is talking about.
If subscriptions were raised to $20 for new members/$10 for Charter Members AND all the extra revenue was spent on renting a decent quality dedicated server + bandwidth, this board would go so fast it would make your heads spin. Decent servers with lots of bandwidth allowed can be had quite cheap nowadays.
The performance has always been shite. But there was never any guarantee that any subscription money would be spent on improving the system.
This isn’t the United Way or the Red Cross. They can spend the money on whatever they feel like, as long as it isn’t illegal.
You do have a point, in that periodic server upgrades to those running the SDMB could mean upgrades will happen only after the server has been inadequate for at least 10 years.
Talking in a veiled manner about $120k of previous expenditure, which AFAIK has not been mentioned before, and in the direct context of payments, is worth examination. I’m hoping TubaDiv (or others) will clarify one way or the other, either stating that this figure does not have any relevance to the revenue from ongoing subscriptions, or otherwise explaining the situation.
rfgdxm - your link states “Do subscriptions mean the board will run faster?…We make no promises, but we’re hopeful”
Sounds like no guarantee, as I said.
You say that like it is a bad thing…
One can only imagine what would happen if you put your mind to it.
Adequate explanation? Why do they owe you an explanation? It is simple; you pay your money, and you either like the product or you don’t. If you don’t, you are free to join the 1,468 other ex-Dopers who registered their discontent by not renewing their subscriptions. But an explanation? I didn’t see that in the list of benefits.
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Geez, would y’all calm down?
Some back story (my apologies for everyone else who has heard it/lived through it already):
When The Straight Dope first went to cyberspace on AOL in 1996, the Chicago Reader got paid for the privilege. The Reader owns the rights to The Straight Dope, which at that point was a syndicated column and that was it. Everybody was pretty happy with getting paid.
When AOL stopped paying for content in 1999, the initial thought was to just stop . . . close the AOL site and call it a day . . . but we had built such a community in our time on AOL that we fought to keep it going. The Reader had a website it was not using and they let us camp on it, with no promises of anything except “oh what the hell, why not.”
In the time since then, we’ve grown: Lots more columns, old and new . . . the message board has grown to its current gargantuan size. We’ve built a serious community here.
Over this time, we’ve strained the Reader’s servers . . . at one point, the Reader management had no real internet access in the building at all; the SDMB filled the pipe. That’s when they moved us out to Rackspace.
Service has been intermittently adequate and often sucky. We’ve been hacked twice. We’ve had some database glitches that caused major havoc. Actually over the past couple of years, it’s been on the average better than it was for most of the really sucky times; most of you have no idea or have forgotten how truly horrible it was.
For all this time, the Reader paid for everything it has taken to keep this site operational, hardware and software. Ed and Jerry have responsibilities on the site and some of what they get paid has to do with their oversight, but in neither case it is by no means their only responsibilities. They both have fulltime gigs already AND this on top.
With the exception of a tiny bit of advertising revenue that has dribbled in over the years, the Straight Dope store (which the Reader also assumes all overhead cost for that, it’s not a big profit center for them), and now what we derive from subscriptions, with those exceptions we have contributed nothing to the Reader bottom line in return; an estimate of the costs OVER THAT TIME in in excess of 120K TOTAL.
The Reader didn’t have to do any of that; they could have just shut us down. (Still could, for that matter; it’s their bat, their ball, their stuff.)
For all that they have given to us, the Chicago Reader is not a nonprofit, it’s a business. And while we are a tiny part of that business, it IS a business. I can think of few businesses that would have a division that did nothing but cost them money and management would smile and throw MORE money at them.
We hope the Straight Dope continues to be online. We hope the community thrives and continues to be the most profound and silly and ornery and wise and wiseass and occasionally cantankerous self that it is.
But we can’t survive without your help.
We hope you subscribe. We hope you stay.
If you don’t, well, damn. I assure you, it’s your loss.
your humble TubaDiva
Wouldn’t the Charter Member or Member tags under our names give it away?
No, because raw data is not the full picture. To speculate based on subscription numbers only opens the door to more arguing. How is that useful?
The Reader offers you this service; it’s your choice to sign up for it or not. If you don’t think it’s worth the money charged for the service, no one is forcing you to subscribe.
Offering subscriptions was not intended to grant a sense of entitlement or to raise expectations ahead of reality. We have never promised blinding speed; in fact, we specifically told you that while we hoped for better days, nothing was guaranteed. And there’s few complaints of not being able to sign on . . . everyone seems to be making their posts okay . . . not much gets eaten by the system . . . even the cursed email notification system seems to work more or less okay. It’s not perfect, but it does work, at some times faster than at other times, at some times not so.
Either you think what we have here is worth supporting – in which case no justification is necessary – or you don’t – in which case no justification is enough.
your humble TubaDiva
Sounds like the Board only pulled in around $43,412.50 in Subscriptions
After salaries & Hosting & a small profit, not a lot left for Hardware upgrades.
Calculation: (34732/3$15)+(3473/3*$7.5)= $43,412.50
Assumption of roughly 1/3 charter members.
Performance is not terrible, though it could use much improvement.
I am happy to have found this board. One of the only intelligent ones I have ever found.
I stumbled onto Straight Dope while trying to answer one of my daughter’s infinate questions.
Don’t forget the cost for care and feeding of the hampsters. Hampster Kibble rarely goes on sale and you’d be surprised how hungry those little buggers can get. In fact I don’t like they way they are looking at this
I hear that Chetah’s run faster than hamsters. Maybe they should invest in a couple of them. 
It’s getting 'em to fit on that little wheel, that’s the REAL hardware problem.
your humble TubaDiva
I don’t really understand this paragraph. What does the Straight Dope store have to do with the SDMB. It’s all SD stuff. When calculating that $120,000 expenditure does anyone subtract book and product purchases made by SDMB subscribers?
Also dribbles from advertising? Were there banner ads at some point?
Member #41 checking in here.
I’ve seen the AOL pushpins come and go. I crawled under the Chicago Reader’s building to find stray hamsters on that infamous Winter. I’ve seen the servers evolve from Coleco to the fairly spiffy ones at Rackspace.
Right now, we’ve got it good. The system’s been stable and performance has been more than acceptable. If you want hyper-fast response with all the snazzy features enabled that would otherwise strike fear in our hamsters’ and administrators’ hearts, go get chummy with Jeff Bezos at Amazon. Maybe he’ll be nice and let us move to one of his servers. Probably not.
I’m just saying that I’m tired of hearing all the whining about how this place is terrible, the subscription cost is outrageous and that the hamsters have been gnawing on your email. We’ve been here as a message board for over six years, plus however long we were on AOL. The Straight Dope has been out there since 1996 - That’s an eternity in Internet time, so the CR’s obviously been doing something very right.
I guess this is gonna be something new for you, check out this page:
The Straight Dope (front page)
>http://www.straightdope.com/
There’s a banner ad that has run at the top of the Straight Dope front page for . . .I dunno, 5 years now? Something like that.
I guess this demonstrates why we don’t make much in ad revenue. 
For those of you who might believe the Straight Dope Message Board is an entity unto itself, you may consider it that way and ignore/disregard/disrespect Cecil and everything else, but when you do that, you’re missing out on a good part of what makes this site so great. .
Certainly I would think the Reader considers all Straight Dope-related business to be one thing, albeit a small thing in the Reader works.
your humble TubaDiva
Howzabout a BIGGER wheel? Yeah, that’s the ticket.