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And if, like you, they each post 2,000 threads a year, that is 8,000,000 threads a year. HOw long has the board been running?
Er, that would be 8,000,000 POSTS per year, not threads.
Let’s suppose all Board members are as prolific as I am, which I don’t think is quite true, but we’ll run with it. Eight million posts sounds like a lot, and I sure would not want to have to do a book report on them, but what is it in terms of memory? The average post is probably not more than one kilobyte of memory - it’s just text, after all, and most posts are short - making 8,000,000 posts equal to eight gigs of memory.
I mean, shit, that’s nothing these days. You can buy 300+ gig hard drives for a couple hundred bucks now.
Even supposing my memory usage estimate is wrong, and of course the board does have to save other sorts of data, do you think it’s wrong by a factor of TEN? Eighty gigs is not that daunting.
I’m not saying it wouldn’t cost some money to get 'em saved, but it’s something you can certainly do for far less money than we pay for the board.
Ah, sorry.
But it’s not just text files, it’s a database with indices, and searches made, inside each post sometimes. You gotta count and search the damn things. You gotta mail Plant and Jay when someone posts to a thread they posted to.
Okay, so it’s not eight gigs. It’s 800 gigs. There’s no way it’s that big, but shit, let’s say it is.
Again, that’s not THAT expensive to save up 800 gigs. Storage devices these days are quite affordable.
In a recent thread, it was made clear by the staff* that the SDMB only exceeded 2.4 Gig in December of 2005. The linit is apparently not harddrive space, but vBullentin’s indexing ability. So don’t worry about hard drive space. That is not the apparent limitation. I have no clue as to the speed problem.
Jim
- I believe it was Jerry Davis himself.
How many of us are logged on at the same time searching those 8E6 posts and being sent responses of our search?
I wonder how many resources the program uses. Does it write temporary files to the hard drive? They aren’t screwing with us to be mean. Take it from a network admin, they would love it if everything worked perfectly on a huge server with unlimited resources and we had nothing to complain about.
and I’ve got thousands of posts, yet very few threads started. I’ve paid to post since asked. offers of extra bennies have been made, all I’ve ever noticed is the occaisional “my bad” announcement when things fucked up.l
Looks like I was right about this being a familiar tune.
Why don’t we ditch the message board and start a phone tree?
Don’t have a heart attack-but I agree with you 100 percent.
I’m pretty sure this is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.
Fine then, don’t save the searches and notifications, bt for Gods sake save the motherfucking text of the posts!
And that, my friends, cannot possibly exceed a DVD’s worth of information. Just put it somewhere in a static file so that we’ll still have them if we figure out what to do with them later. I’d really, really hate to learn that large parts of the board, even leading back to 1999, had just been lost.
You didn’t actually believe that was coming, did you?
According to the info at the bottom of every page, we’re posting to vB 3.07. The latest version is 3.6.2, Updates are $30 per year. I don’t know if the latest version available is that much hotter, but it’s amusing that the SDMB isn’t even forking up $30 to have the latest release.
This horse has been flogged so many times that we’ve hit bedrock by now. Before we went pay to post, people came up with all kinds of ideas of how the Reader could make enough money to cover the costs, without resorting to P2P, but the Reader would have nothing to do with any of those. We were promised all kinds of nifty new things once we went P2P, including titles other than “Charter Member.” None of this seems to have come to pass as far as I can tell.
I wouldn’t mind a few new features, such as avatars, a couple of extra smilies (tinfoil hat and a puking one would be nice), but both of those things pale in relation having a better search function, faster boards, and a full history of the boards on tap.
Including free engineering, network, and web development support, plus the offer of free hardware to go with it, IIRC. All rejected.
Not that I give a shit really - the money we pay to post here is negligible. All I ask is that the thing be bit more reliable.
I’ll pay money to not have those.
I’d actually trade in any increase in reliability, for a bit of openness and honesty. It’s been made clear in the past that the money we pay goes into the Chicago Reader coffers, maybe, except if they decide to use it, but then again, it’s not really our money, but still we’ll benefit, but…
Please, no animations! And I have to say that avatars make some boards I visit move so slowly that I shudder to think what would happen on SDMB, which is already the balkiest site I ever have to use.
That is just ignorant. Of course it is not the $30 dollars. It is the work involved in migrating from the current version to the newest version. Have you ever migrated from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003, you would be amazed at how much more work is involved in this for only a 100 users than it sounds in writing. Jerry has mentioned that the SDMB is a minor part of his job. At an average of $11.50 per active member per year and at most 4000 members, we do not pay Jerry’s salary.
The most the Dope brings in from subscriptions is $46,000, I suspect it is lower.
We will never know what they make from google ads, but lets guess a few thousand?
**The Dope needs to pay for: **
- Part of Jerry’s salary.
- Apparently a small amount to TubaDiva, though that might be a Straight Dope cost and not a SDMB cost.
- The cost of bandwidth, I have no clue as to the cost, we obviously need more.
- The Server maintenance and upgrade budget.
- The Software upgrade and maintenance budget. {Operating system costs also}
- A small profit to the Chicago Reader.
- A small amount for Coffee mugs to the mods and the other small expenses.
- Whatever I am overlooking.
All this said, I hope that, as we should be making money for the Reader in theory that Jerry allocates the time to upgrade the server, software and find a way to get the archives back on-line.
Jim {on preview, Avatars suck!}