Why do we have to have a web-based message board anyway?
Why don’t we just move all our witty reparte to Usenet?
There’s already a newsgroup, alt.fan.cecil-adams, that gets quite a few posts as is. I don’t think it would take too much trouble to have that newsgroup broken down further:
Apparently, there’s some sort of formal application process to have a newsgroup added, but I doubt it would present too much of an obstacle. I know that Usenet groups can be moderated also, but I’m not quite sure how that works.
Benefits:
Usenet is free
Most usenet readers have filters
Let the suckers at google.com do our archiving
Drawbacks:
I suppose alot of people on the Internet haven’t been around long enough to know what Usenet is, so we’d be harder to find. But maybe info could be posted to http://www.straightdope.com saying where we’ve all gone.
No fancy smileys, just the old-fashioned analog ones.
Spamming might be a problem (but not if the group was moderated and everybody posted from a throwaway account)
Increase in “drive-by” postings
I was reading alt.fan.cecil-adams way before I knew about the SDMB, so perhaps returning would be a lot easier for me than most.
So, am I way off base here, or is this a possible solution?
You know, you may have a point, even if Usenet isn’t the answer.
There are lots of free boards, and they already have advertising lined up, so they wouldn’t care if they suddenly got lots of activity. They’d see it as windfall profits!
The usernet isn’t a good idea because there is not a way to keep jerks off the board. There may be other free boards, but there are not other SDMBs. At most this would cost you less than $4.15 a month and you’re going to jump ship for that amount. Anyone that won’t (I’m not saying “can’t”) pay that amount isn’t really interested anyway.
Maybe, maybe not. There’s two things to consider: First of all, costs of running a board are not linear in the number of users. To use ours as an example, if we grow too much bigger, we’ll absolutely need a better server… Which is an investment of somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 grand. If we set up on EZ Boards, or whatever, then either EZ Boards would need to get new servers to accomodate us, or, more likely, the “Straight Dope” section would just be a quagmire of molassess.
The second problem is that you’re assuming that other boards are making a profit in the first place. Maybe they, much like us, are operating at a loss, but it’s a small enough loss that they can deal with it. Get a whole bunch of new people, and the small loss would become a big loss, and they’d have to fold. It’s like the joke about how Amazon looses money on each book, but makes up for it in volume. It just doesn’t work.
There is also a risk with allowing someone else to host our data. Didn’t one of the freebie boards just close up shop? If that were to happen, obviously we’d lose everything. In additon we’d likely not be able to transfer our existing information. Another drawback is storage space. I’m relatively certain those freebies place some kinda limit on the amount of space they are willing to let any one board consume. Finally, there’s the copyright issue. It’s not out of the realm of possiblilty that content from this board makes it into Cecil’s next book(s). There’s quite a bit of the old AOL stuff in a couple of them. Would those free board operators allow us to use posts made there?
Lotsa questions. And the usenet is simply a bad idea. Too much garbage on unmoderated forums. Part of the appeal here is that content is controlled pretty well.
These discussions are too spread out over multiple threads!
Anyway, there’s a Usenet discussion also going on page 5 of the “PAY-PER-POST?!?!?!?!?!” thread.
My point over there is that Usenet access can be a real pain for those posting from work. While Web access is ubiquitous these days, the Usenet no longer is. My work e-mail system is not set up to act as a newsreader (Pegasus Mail), so I’d have to use some kludgy web-based reader, I guess.
Also, because of the porn and spam that is so prevalent on the Usenet these days, many companies have banned Usenet access entirely. While the Web is useful enough that companies will maintain elaborate blocking software, with Usenet, it is easier to just block it entirely. It’s hard to make a compelling argument to a company IT department as to why you need access to Usenet groups, especially an “alt” group.
So make them all moderated forums. Even better, transition the machine that currently hosts the SDMB into a private NNTP server and let us use it as a news host. Far lower load on the server both network(plain text < HTML, and far better client-side caching since articles/threads are downloaded) and CPU-wise. There may be some challenges in making them as easy to find/access as the current boards are, but usenet has been an amazing way to share information between millions of users for decades with minimal hardware/software/administration costs. Why can’t we use that knowledge/experience?
What do we have now that we wouldn’t have on usenet?
[li] Smilies.[/li][li] A semi-elegant web-based reader. Most web-based newsreaders, google included, suck. They do threading poorly and searching is kind of hit/miss in many of them.[/li][li] An extremely easy way to register/verify registrations. Newsreaders can be anonymous and a technologically clever troll would be much harder to ferrett out.[/li]
But, would moving back to usenet, especially since we have learned from the lessons of the last time we were there, unmoderated forums, no registration process, etc, really be worse than many of our best people leaving and charging newbies $20-$50 to ask a question in GQ? (Virtually guaranteeing a steep drop in the number of new members.)
It used to be viable, now it’s full up of spam and worse. The unmoderated USENET forums are unusable, I stopped even trying to read 'em ages ago, how much spam and porn can you stand?
Um, the fact that the server doesn’t belong to us?
The Reader pays for the server, the software, the power to run it, the T1 lines that go into it . … and oh yeah, the guys that keep the system going. You’ve all been getting the benefit of it for all this time, a situation that has been very generous on the part of the Reader but can’t continue, the Reader ain’t Santa Claus, ain’t a charity, deserve a return on their investment.
As it so happens, I am a real database application programmer. So here goes nothing.
I wonder if developing a real database application (a java applet even) might help alot. Benefits:
Would hugely reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to run the board. No formatting would be required (html), just the data, and the client would be smart enough to parse it correctly.
Huge reduction in processing requirements. One thing that has to be eating up alot of processing power is running the php scripts.
Retain all the thing people like about this compared to USENET, (emoticon, scripting, spam control, etc…)
It wouldn’t even have to be that big of an applet. All the admin functions wouldn’t HAVE to be incorporate. Just all the normal user functions (browser, search, post, etc). The board would still exist as usual, just with an alternate way to connect. I would guess, if a user comes by on a more or less daily basis, it would be well worth it.
Just a thought, and would be happy to provider more details if anyone is interested. Yes, this is well within my technical ability to write it personally.
Well, I’ll have to respectfully disagree. Usenet is still viable, especially if the newsgroups are moderated. With most newsreaders, spam and porn are fairly easy to filter out of the newsgroups themselves (at least that’s my understanding - frankly in the usenet groups I read it has never been a problem, as most spam seems to get cancelled by friendly bots before it ever makes it very far.)
As far as posters’ emails being harvested, that’s what throwaway accounts are for (not a perfect solution, admittedly).
And I think the ability to killfile certain posters or subjects is an advantage over the current message board.
My predication: if this board goes pay-for-posting, alt.fan.cecil-adams is going to be inundated with immigrants. I just don’t see people willing to pay more than $5 for the advantages the board offers over Usenet. The only reason I stopped reading a.f.c.a. was that there were simply more posts here…which will not be the case it posters have to pay, IMHO.
Usenet? What’s that? Okay, I’m kidding, but only slightly. I’ve heard of Usenet, but never used it and am not really interested in trying.
The Web is easy. Web browser, search for boards or BBS - poof. Straightdope shows up linked from personal web pages. People find their way hear easily. Usenet? A lot of people don’t even know what that is, much less how to get to it, or how to find the group of interest.
Going “back” to Usenet is a stupid idea, unless the whole point is to lose membership and be invisible. Can’t sell many books being invisible.
scotth, while your offer is appreciated (and other people have offered in the past to help “rewrite” the board software), I think it would be a bad idea for a commercial entity to try and implement software written by a volunteer who decides to write a home-grown application. What if the volunteer loses interest, decides he doesn’t like the people for which he’s doing the volunteer work, has more pressing real-life issues? Who will maintain the code once bugs are found in it? etc… etc… I realize that with the “.com” shakedown many commercial software companies have also abandoned their products, but the risk is even greater with an individual doing it for free.
Well, I guess here would be the fundemental difference. I don’t propose dropping or making any changes to the existing sofware. It would be simply adding a “secondary” way to access the board that would be hugely less work for the server, especially in the case of high usage users (and it seems there are LOTS of those). I don’t think there would need to be any changes to the board at all. The only administrative item would be adding a database user to mysql that has read only privileges to the required tables. (For security reason, I have already decided I would right an applet to emulate a browser for the actual posting)
It would be one of those things that could be written and tried without altering anything. If you didn’t like it, chuck it in the trash. I would also be willing to supply the complete source code. It would be very maintainable.
I can see the danger of doing performance mods to the software you run today, if things go bad, you are in trouble. But this is a different solution entirely.
Well, it would work on ANY OS and browser combo that supports java applets. If someone didn’t have that, they could go through the board as everyone is doing today. That capability would be untouched. The relief on the server of moving even 75% of the users to a smarter client would still be significant.
For example, I can pretty well rule out people using webTV or something similar from using it. That doesn’t take away its overall utility.
I can write and document code well enough that even if I keeled over dead the day after it was implemented, any competent java head would be able to handle most if not all maintenence scenarios.
Some back of the napkin calculations.
This type of client would use roughly 80% less bandwidth to support. High usage users could get as high as 90% reduction. This is a pretty high confidence number.
Reduction in processing for the server. I would put that around 50%. This is a fuzzier number. I am not entirely sure about the method php makes database connections to mySQL in your installation. If it is making and dropping database connections on a per page hit basis, that would really make this type of client look good. If your php installation can make and hold of pool of shared database connections for the php processor to use, this would be harder to compete against. Also, I am not entirely sure of the memory requirements to hold a database connection open in your system.
Having tried my hand at a few java applets, and talking to other developers who have written java applets, I feel confident in saying that this statement “it would work on ANY OS and browser combo that supports java applets” is overly optimistic without some rigorous testing on the original applet, and also on any subsequent changes. In any case, in my experience, the maintenance/upgrades on any piece of code turn out to be far greater than the development costs.
For those reasons, in addition to the reasons I mentioned above, I would not think it advisable for a commercial website to implement donated “hacks”.
I can certainly understand why you might be risk averse on this one. But, it has given me another idea. I might could develop it to a solid beta design and pass it on to the people who make vBulletin. The could then put their “look” on it. And it would be a supported upgrade to vBulletin. This would probably never happen, but its an idea.
Arnold, I don’t disagree with your assertion that Java code isn’t always “write one, run anywhere” in reality, but if I might nitpick, lots of commercial sites run with “user-donated hacks.” Linux, for example, is a grandiose “user-donated hack.” The whole concept of open source software is based on those hacks.
Granted, the development community to support this hack would be small. But I’ll bet other sites running vBulletin would be interested in lowering their bandwidth costs, too.
So don’t think that just because something isn’t proprietary or developed by Microsoft, it means that something isn’t appropriate for a commercial site.
Well, it isn’t like this would really be a “hack” anyway. I do this for a living. Not just kinda either. Lead developer type on multi mil projects. And I have written several database clients as applets already.
