If I had assurance as to it being spent wisely (and no, there is no hidden meaning or innuendo here!) I would contribute money to the board. I really like this place, and I have some good friends here.
Add me to this . I think this place is well worth some cash . Hell I spend more about £40-$50 on a night out .
I know this has been brought up before TubaDiva and it was dismissed but if the only thing that will keep this place going is hard cash then I think it really should be put forward to the people here see what happens . I think you’d be amazed ( or maybe not ) how much this place means to people .
Actually thinking of it I could do with a new T-Shirt and mug 
Quoth Falcon:
Well, for starters, you can send it to Cecil’s House o’ Values. (I think that this is what yojimbo was alluding to.) Plus, you not only get the satisfaction of helping the Chicago Reader support this board, you also get cool Cecilian paraphenelia!
To partly echo Anthracite’s concerns about how the money would be spent, do any of the Powers that Be know how much profit the Reader gets from items bought at that site?
I haven’t been here too long, but I think I can honestly say that this is the best message board I have ever been on. I would gladly pay to have the privilege of posting here.
Ditto. This place kicks ass.
But then we get into the “Hey, I paid good money, F***ing Mod, you can’t tell me what I can say…” kind of potential situation.
But I am surprised The Reader hasn’t got into banner advertising. It’s not great but they don’t have to be too obtrusive. With the SDMB level of unique hits and the economic ‘demographics’ of the members, it would be an atractive proposition. I guess it’s a trade off, what’s better really slow pages or a little commerce.
FWIW, I’d be tempted to redesign the top of the page, for example: move the icons (top right) down a tad, make the SDMB banner smaller and have advertising alongside it in a conventional Header ?
Or, maybe set a limit on the number of active users, then have some kind of waiting list - OK, that might be a little nuts but hasn’t something got to give pretty soon ?
My 2p-worth on ways to save some space…
[ul]
[li]delete any users who haven’t posted for, say, two or three months (but make it very clear up front, so that it’s possible to email a “stay of execution”).[/li]
[li]restrict the search engine to GQ, the Columns, the Mailbag, GD and maybe ATMB (since they’re the areas that have the most “this has already been answered…” posts).[/li]
remove sigs entirely. No real loss.[/ul]
But, then how will people know that
If you did this step, all the searches trying to “get the goods” on people would stop and half the Pit threads would never happen. Do you really want that?
Come to think of it, if you told people that a pit thread would only last a week a lot of them would never happen.
And some of the self-styled-“respected posters” would be stuck having to ask or answer real questions, and thus go away.
Say, I think we may be on to some real savings here.
I didn’t realize this was the forum for people who have posted to eight threads in GQ and four in GD to complain that “respected posters” never contribute anything of worth.
If you’re going to propose changes for the sake of making this place better for a small minority of posters here, at the expense of the “regular posters”, don’t be surprised when the general reaction is not at all sympathetic. The reason most of us are here is because we like the community here. We like the regular posters. We like the Pit. The administration probably likes having us (the regular posters) here more than the small number who only whine about how bad the regular posters are.
Sounds like wishful thinking.
“The Administration” is no more a bloc than the rest of us.
Someone likes you and your kind, that’s for sure, or you’d have been gone by now.
UncleBeer is obviously in that because he seem to like his reputation as an unpleasant wit, using juvenile bodily function references on any formum and getting away with it.
But I guarantee it’s a mixed bag with the others.
Some mods and admins never go into the pit, and never seem to respond to the mindless rants; they stick to actual information topics. Probably has something to do with an interest in the kinds of things Cecil writes about rather than the kinds of things you rant about.
This place started a place for fighting ignorance.
The Pit is the opposite. It promotes ignorance.
And if the role were up for casting, I bet UncleBeer would be a shoo-in for the Anti-Cecil.
The only reason I’ve ever seen Ed site as the excuse for the Pit is that it lets off steam. Well, it seems to create steam. All the people sent to the pit and banned spawn into hydras.
It’s ugly and it’s defeats the fighting ignorance concept.
Something is obviously wrong with this site, since the mods seem perpetually frustrated. To me that signals a need for some trials of new procedures.
I don’t see how trying a few new things would hurt.
TGIF, if you have a complaint about how any of us here do our jobs, you can take it to the Pit.
And please keep in mind:
The first rule of the SDMB is “Don’t Be a Jerk.”
The second (unofficial but obvious) rule of the SDMB is “Don’t Piss Off the Moderators.”
If you have a legitimate complaint about how we do what we do, we’re willing to hear it, but we don’t have to put up with gratuitous insult while we’re at it, either.
You may consider this a warning.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
The Straight Dope
This sounds like his suggestion for a default to “One Day Searches” would help.
I just checked, and the search is set on the most inclusive for all settings.
Search All Open Forums
Search Entire Message
Search Any Date
Since you indicate searches require the most juice, perhaps the defaults should be changed to:
Search Current Forum
Search Subject Only
Search Since Yesterday
At least it would be worth a try. Defaults seem to be the easiest of all things to try, and you say it paid off for the other non-search pages.
ROFL!!! I’m sorry waterj2, but I’m with Soupy on this one. Don’t be a post count snob. Surely you’ve noticed that some people post constantly and yet have nothing to say?
I could live without sigs, too, but I don’t know how much space it would save.
I can agree with you in theory, but if we start insinuating that indiscriminate posting is bad, I don’t want to be scrutinized too closely. Anyways, I can generally filter out crap I don’t want to read between screen and brain. And I’m no post count snob, I just find it amusing when people who rarely contribute to the “intelligent” forums complain about the regs not devoting enough time to those forums.
Oh, and TGIF, that was laugh out loud funny. You did mean it as a joke, right?
You like indiscriminate posting and you’re also a respected poster? Dubious.
Just Call Me Tech-Mex meet Surgoshan, Surgo this is Just Call Me Tech-Mex.
Talk amongst yourselves.
[/joke only I will think is funny]
Just my 2sense
When I refer to my 2sense, I’m actually talking about my weird fifth sense. Not sixth. By some tragic accident, I was born without taste buds.
- sig courtesy of Surgoshan
What if to save space and possibly combat trolls, once a poster is banned all the threads they started are deleted? Seems like part of the fun the trolls have (especially in Milk CD or whoever’s case) is showing the responses to their friends. This is assuming of course that the thread contains nothing of importance and is merely people saying “Shut up!” or “DNFTT!”
Amen to that. If Mark Serlin has a list of posts, and they are so offensive, whey let them stay as permanent trophies?
There was a list of anti-black jokes this week that should have been deleted once discovered, but the guy got banned and his jokes remain. I’m sure in his mind he feels he won that round hands down.