And see, the only other one that I spend much time on is ENWorld, a D&D fansite with traffic that may be comparable to this site (it’s probably about half as much). You can buy a $35/year membership, which allows you to modify your user title, search the forums, and do a handful of other niggling functions; most folks just do it in order to support a site that they enjoy. There are animated banner ads across the top of every page (all for gaming-related products, usually from small publishers). There’s a small e-press associated with the site that brings in some income. And still, last year they did a fundraising drive to keep the site open, and brought in over $10,000 in donations from members, as well as hundreds of prizes given away by publishers to folks who donated.
This site is pretty conservative in how it handles revenue streams, from what I’ve seen.
Well, yeah, exactly. If I scrawl in a magazine, I don’t get to communicate with anyone. I can type the word “fart!” here, and hundreds of people read my brilliant prose.
Okay, the ads are annoying. But I don’t object to the ads on principle that we already pay - yeah, we’re paying members, but I always figure I’m paying for the content, and as this is the busiest board I belong to, I think we’re getting a good deal. I’m a member of another board that’s more than the SDMB every year (for me, about $12 more), and we have the Google ads at the bottom of the page, as well as a few banner ads up top. Those don’t bother me.
So WHY don’t they bother me?
Because they aren’t placed at the bottom of a thread making it look like an additional post ABOVE the ‘Post Reply’ button! I’m not annoyed by the specific ads, I’m just annoyed by the fucking placement of them.
Do they HAVE to be smack-dab in between thread and reply button? Holy shit. Maybe if they were in a normal place, there wouldn’t be such an outcry about them.
Honestly, if there’s something interesting, I’ve been known to click on it. Hell, I’ve even bought items from a couple of sites. But due to the placement of the ads, and their intrusiveness, I’ll make it a point NOT to click on them.
Childish? Sure. Obnoxious? Sure. But so is the placement of these ads.
Yeah, and did you pay to expose anyone else while you were at it? (that doesn’t sound quite right somehow). Do you want quick weight loss schemes following your posting in the diet thread? How about mortuary services in your thread about your wife’s miscarriage?
With this post, Left Hand of Dorkness has abandoned the heights of imaginative style and creative thought that have characterized his recent work. This pedestrian post is disappointing, nay, disenchanting. One can only hope that in future, LHoD will return to form.
Oooh. That’s sneaky. You can bitch because they look just like another post (making them blend in to the board better), and if they change them you can bitch about the obnoxious ads that scream at you from the bottom of every page.
I agree that they’d be less annoying if they were someplace else. I think there should be a link at the top of the page on the ‘User CP/Rules/Subscribe/FAQ, etc.’ bar that says, ‘Banner Ads’. Then if anyone wants to see an ad, they can click on the link to see it. That would be better.
Personally, I never click on banner ads. For one thing, if I want to buy something I’ll go out and look for it. If I don’t want to buy something, I don’t want to be bothered with ads. For another thing, who knows what malicious cod might be hiding in the ad? Codes have been known to have been hijacked. I have enough aggravation deleting stuff from my spam folder. I don’t need to worry about possible trojans. Small threat from google ads perhaps, but I’ll still not click on them.
And speaking of not clicking… What if all of the SDMB members decided to not click on the ads? If we ignore them will they go away?
I’ll speak for my place alone, since that’s all I can.
Private membership by reference only, and requiring a work, government, or current student/academic e-mail. This is the key thing.
No big celebrity draw like Cecil or Left Hand of Dorkness.
No corporate ties and not being part of a corporate framework (like the Reader).
Me - it’s pretty safe to say anyone that dislikes me isn’t going to be signing up.
Lack of coverage area of topics. For example, aside from cricket, pretty much no sports discussion happens recently on my place.
Strict rules on content, profanity, post count parties, etc.
“Draconian” rules on behaviour and decorum so people post in debates under an assumption of mutual respect, etc.
No advertising; that is, no advertising of the Board’s existence, other than occasional mentions on here (my sig doesn’t even have a link to it, although the “www” does, so sue me). I also actively remove my place from all search engines I can, and I even try to ban the Google bots, although they keep moving them around.
I said at least 10; I was mistaken. I could likely think of more if I really tried, but hopefully the above reasons are ones which give some indications why a place could be as well run, or better run, and still have substantially less traffic than another. I’ve never been hacked no matter how many times people or automated scripts have tried, my uptime is running more than 99.9%, my bandwidth is rarely above 50% of my maximum, my server is at least as powerful as the SDMB’s server, if not moreso, and like the SDMB I’ve got a dedicated Staff that I trust.
Thanks for the list; it definitely helps me see what you mean. And I’ll concede that sheer numbers of posters does not automatically equate to quality.
Some of your points are more significant than others. I’d be astonished to find out that many people post here in the hopes of seeing Cecil (and my fans go with me wherever I go, so I can’t take them into account). Others of them, like the “private membership”, describe boards very significantly different from this one.
But I do think that one run by a business is likelier to be run well than one run by a hobbyist. The business will probably have more experts involved in it, will have people who spend more time thinking about what makes a good messageboard, and so forth.
Of course, that’s not always true. Blizzard’s messageboards (they’re the folks that make blockbuster computer games like World of Warcraft) are infamously awful. They’re bad partly because the mods aren’t very restrictive, partly because they have an interest in not pissing off their fanbase, and partly because there are so many cretins and assholes among their customers.
But overall, the SDMB is one of the best-run messageboards I’ve ever seen, and I suspect that its ties to a business have something to do with that.
Speaking of game forums, Bioware’s are pretty good. They’re really restrictive in that to get into most forums you have to have entered a valid CD-key for whatever game you want to talk about, though they do have an open general discussion forum. Most of the people posting are pretty good and the mods do a good job.
Sounds good! I know a fellow who works at Bioware, and when he got the job, I seriously considered killing him and assuming his identity. It’s pretty much a dream-job for a gamer-geek.
I guess you could consider gaming forums to be gigantic ads for their products. The Blizzard ones at least close down topics that aren’t related directly to the game in question; if they have an off-topic forum, it gets almost no traffic (or at least didn’t get much when I was visiting their boards).
