Sorry for quoting Sam instead of you. 
From what I have seen from stats of various boards, likely the SDMB averages over 10 reads per post. The reason being most of the SDMB is information type posts that people would want to search the archives for. On a boards that is mostly MPSIMS or BBQ Pit type posts, people have little interest in reading 4 year old mindless or flame threads. However, with say GQ, that is a forum worth searching the archives for.
Interestingly enough, I was at the local IKEA store the other day; it’s a place I like very much, having good furniture at very affordable prices. Right at the exit they have alarge sign soliciting suggestions from the customers: “Help us become better! Do you have any suggestions, complaints or other thoughts you want to share with us?”
One would assume that the management appreciate people that actually fill out the form and provide some kind of feedback, realizing that maybe they’ve missed something, or that some stuff could be made better - or even the odd note with just praise for how good things are. Most people don’t bother filling out these forms, but I’m sure that when someone do, they just don’t throw it away and move on to the next item on the agenda, while smiling blankly.
Maybe this kind of customer feedback will make itself across the Atlantic eventually. And maybe it will even reach the Reader and the SDMB.
Oh wait, it seems it did:
(my bolding)
Did you get the memo Dex? Or were you too busy writing up a not so witty, but snarky reply?
If by “over” you mean easily double that, and almost certainly higher, then you’re in the ballpark.
Some information on the posts/reads ration is easily available.
Taking the first page of each forum as it appeared in my browser in the last few minutes, I just cut & pasted the posts and views for each thread into a spreadsheet. The result is the following:
Forum Posts Views Ratio
ATMB 299 5878 19.65886
CCC 134 5290 39.47761
CSR 62 3241 52.27419
GQ 715 21728 30.38881
GD 2614 61403 23.49005
CS 3995 42764 10.70438
IMHO 1454 30143 20.73109
MPSIMS 1834 35028 19.09924
BP 2849 104795 36.78308
Average 13956 310270 22.23201
So taking posts only**, we see ratios of as low as 10 to 1, and as high as 52 to 1, with an overall average of 22 to 1.
This says nothing about searches of course, which can read dozens, hundreds, or thousands of posts at a time, and assumes that the ratios wouldn’t change dramatically over time.
IMHO, adding searches would easily bump that ratio to 50 or 100 to 1 (as Una has already pointed out).
** These numbers do not include the “sticky” posts (which have much higher ratios for the most part) because they are relatively few, and since they collect posts and views over a longer period of time, I didn’t think they were strictly on point for average bandwidth usage or server resource utilization.
Found in the IKEA suggestion box:
Nice store, although the windows could be bigger. And why not get more bamboo furniture? We like bamboo.
And even though I’ve never been out on your loading dock, I’m pretty sure you have no idea how to run one. Based on the way the furniture is scattered around the showroom, I think you should definitely get bigger trucks. In fact, I can show you how to get bigger trucks for only $200 per month.
And the cash register? Forget it! Obviously proof that your corporate IT people have no idea how to do these things. I don’t have a cash register mind you, but I’ve seen the one in McDonalds, and you should be using those. I can even show you how to make those little pictures for the keys. The one for that little bookshelf on page 59 of your catalog is cute as can be.
And by the way, when I was telling you staff about some of my suggestions, they looked at me funny and just walked away. Could you fire them please?
Yours truly,
A concerned customer
Possible response to concerned costumer 1:
“We value your business and your suggestions. We’re going to look into the things you suggested and will take your views into considerations in our future plans. Please feel free to contact us again should another matter arise.”
Possible response to concerned consumer 2:
“You’re ignorant and unwilling to accept reality. We will certainly disregard anything you say, because we know how to handle things better than you do.”
Which would be a better way to handle suggestions and questions, RJKUgly? Option 1 or 2?
Mind you, the end result and lack of action might be the same, I’m just wondering if you really think that option 2 is the better way to deal with someone if a complaint, suggestion or question should arise?
Interestingly, according to the Chicago Reader, the combined websites of chicagoreader.com and straighdope.com had over 100 million page views in 2003. I assume the subdomain boards.straightdope.com is included in these figures.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/readerinc/pdfs/RetailRates.pdf
Note that page views is usually counted as one view per user per day.. Multiple views (refresh) are not counted.
According to the usage graph at Alexa, straightdope.com had, in late 2003, about three times the traffic of chicagoreader.com. So out of these 100 million page views, straightdope.com may have generated roughly 75 million recorded page views. That’s more than 6 million page views/month.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=2y&size=medium&compare_sites=chicagoreader.com%20&y=p&url=boards.straightdope.com#top
Note that the traffic for 2005 is almost twice that of late 2003.
We can also see that usage went down in 2004 (the board switched to pay in April 2004), but usage went up again in late 2004 (the server move was in September 2004).
Earlier in 2005 the board peaked at more than twice of that of late 2003. So about 12-13 million page views per month could be a fair estimate of what the server needs to be able to handle (again not including refreshing). If each page is 50kB that’s… that’s (counting on fingers) … 600 GB of bandwidth per month? If each page is 100KB it’s 1.2 terabyte.
On the other hand, if anybody bothers that person can also send an email to onlineadvertising@chicagoreader.com posing as a webmaster and ask for the real stats …
Much the same way as some of our pertinent questions get treated by the board admin, I suppose?
General information about the SDMB is available from bits and pieces dropped by the powers over the years:
-
When board changed to subscription in April last year, 3.800 signed up at $5/year. That’s $18.000. More signed up later of course.
(04/2004) - http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=251122 -
The highest number of users online simultaneously by 2003 was 1.626. In the same thread it’s stated that the member versus guest ratio is 2:1
(07/2003) - http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=199456 -
In 2001 the index file was 825 MB, which tells us something about the minimum amount of RAM the server should have. If someone knows where to get the postcount as of 2001, we can compare it to todays postcount and calculate how much RAM the server should have today. The Wayback Machine haven’t stored any SDMB pages, unfortunately.
(07/2001) - http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=77679 -
According to Netcraft the server is currently running Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) PHP/4.3.11 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a on FreeBSD.
What's that site running? | Netcraft
As for the hardware specs, I thought of playing around with some tools but I chickened out … 
5. And finally, a little bit of info about running SDMB before the server move, by IT-man Jerry:
Here’s another easy fix constructive criticism:
That banner at the top that says “The Straight Dope” should link to oh, I don’t know, maybe “The Straight Dope”. If you want people other than the staff to think of this as a cohesive site it should have more obvious connections.
Answering my own question, the 2001 index file of 825MB had 1.34 million posts. Today we have 6.4 million posts, about 5 times that. I don’t know enough about databases to say that simply multiplying will return an accurate estimate.
But anyway, so far we can estimate bandwidth, RAM and storage. We only need the CPUs. rfgdxm, I guess you can go shopping …
My little attempt at humor (probably poor attempt, I’m a techy guy, definitely not a comedian) was supposed make the point that it’s possible for someone to be rude and assholish even if that someone is being “polite” on the surface.
To answer your question, I’m fortunate in that I have a fairly small group of customers and I have good relationships with them. So my reaction to any customer suggestion is not to just say I’m going to give it serious consideration, but to actually give it that consideration.
However, not all businesses are so lucky. Many have deal with any idiot that can afford the price (as an old boss of mine used to say). For the most part, they still do the same thing: give a polite brush off no matter how dumb the suggestion or unfounded the speculation.
But the customer who continually pushes the “customer is always right” button as an excuse to spout off shouldn’t be surprised if they sometimes get the real answer they deserve. I’ve done it under the proper circumstances, and I’d do it again.
So, maybe it should cost more like…$250/month, maybe even $300. :eek:
To throw some, yknow, actual hard numbers into the debate re: costs, this board seems to be roughly in the same size range compared to the SDMB and is also running vBulletin3. Peak users for them was 800 or so and typical is about half that. From as much as the admin will leak out, it seems that this board at the current stage is just slightly more active than early 2004 so peak of 1800 and typical of 600 or so would be reasonable.
Now, in Nov 2004, the aforementioned board built themselves a new server and the process was detailed here. Rough server specs include 2xAthlonMP2800+, server class MB, 1.5GB of RAM, fast SCSI hard drives and hardware SCSI RAID etc. They got their hardware for free so there was no final cost but all of this stuff is very high end. Assuming that the SDMB is twice as busy, costs don’t increase linearly at that level. At this size level, your straining the capacity of what a single machine can do. Virtually everything you buy has to be be bleeding edge top of the line just to get acceptable performance. Note that this is far and away from the 486 comments made earlier. The OCAU board is a board by computer enthusiasts, for computer enthusiasts. Several of their members are very experienced systems and network admins who helped extensively in drawing up the design and implementation of their new server. The sponsers who provided their hardware also sell to several enterprise level buyers and know what is neccesary to build sites similar to theirs. All in all, this represents a very competently designed server servicing a very similar need to the SDMB. It’s clear that, contrary to the uneducated opinions espoused by people who have never actually built a message board, such sites are incredibly resource intensive and require very high end hardware to run which costs in the order of 10’s of thousands of dollars.
This is no longer a concern. What Jerry wrote makes sense when a board is free. Since it costs nothing to use, anyone on the Net can use it. There are a lot of people on the Net. However, once you start charging this will discourage most of them. They won’t want to pay $15 a year to make a couple posts a month. And now that we charge, no worry if lots of people decide to pay up. If 1000 new people sign up, just use that $15,000 to rent a bigger server. The only problem would be if the SDMB is charging too little to cover costs. If 1000 new people raised costs by $20,000 a year, things go in the red.
To say the least. I always thought the static site was an independent financial entity. In fact I see no sense that it isn’t. Why should I and all other paying subscribers have to subsidized users of the free to the world static site? The static site is easily able to pay for itself. That it doesn’t is due to the fact the Reader is clueless about monetizing a web site. Just put banner ads on all of the pages of Cecil’s columns.
Rather than estimate, why doesn’t the Reader just give the actual figures? They know the exact specs of the server this site is on.
Three things tech-wise:
-
I posted my stats on the database makeup for vBulletin 2.0 in this forum, with all the byte sizes of all the tables, at “X” number of posts. Oddly I cannot find it by searching, but I did list things so people could see the comparative sizes of the “posts” table, the “threads” table, etc.
-
My observation over about 280,000 some posts now is that growth of the “posts”, “thread”, and “search” tables is fairly linear.
2.5) I don’t think the Index file is what you’re interested in exactly, and IIRC, Jerry posted later on that the 800 or so MB size reading was erroneous, although I cannot remember in which way …
- CPU usage is a strange one, and very function dependent. Jenny’s told me in the past that the SDMB CPU is maxxed out at times, although she did not say how many were online then. My experience is that on my server, I never go above 5% typical CPU usage (P4-2.8GHz, 1GB RAM, 2x120GB SATA RAID1 drives), even with 50+ users online. Typically, even under that loading, my CPU usage (via Task Manager) is 2%. If I do an IP search, however, it jumps to 50% (not 100%; thank you, Hyperthreading). So a basic Admin function takes away half of the Board’s power. Two Admins doing IP sweeps at the same time spike the CPU to about 90%. Three or more people doing “Search” at the same time will spike it briefly to 10-25% on a busy day.
Now, since the SDMB has typically 10-100 times the number of people using it as my place, you can scale things a bit. IIRC, my server was at one time more powerful than the SDMB’s in terms of CPU; I don’t know the situation now.
I know that.
It’s just that when the members (as I see it) are showing concern or offering advice, I think some admins need to be a bit more graceful about it. It’s not as if someone’s being pitted. I read most of the posts as people trying to help. Sure, they don’t know the whole picture, so some advice might be really stupid. To tell the poster that they are being stupid for trying to help seems… what’s the word I’m looking for …
jerkish.
On that point, I’d like to know how I took a “slap” at anyone in this thread as stated by miss humble:
And that’s why I said that TD is treating this as her baby. Most mothers (and fathers) will lash out if anyone critisizes their child.
Members have been warned for less, but I guess some are more equal than others.