I don’t recall what my username was when I first signed up to this message board probably 20 years ago (or more), but I was fairly active. Then there was a board change (oh, I remember now, they were going to charge a fee to post), and so I stopped posting.
But I remember I really enjoyed the discussions, and I recall a few usernames. I was looking for December’s posts, and that drew me to this forum. Then I saw the In Memoriam thread - wow, so many of these usernames are so very familiar to me.
if you have an “eternal” e-mail address (mine is a @yahoo.com from last century), check for “straight dope” mails … I managed to recall my forgotten username this way - in very similar circumstances.
ah… and welcome back…
ps: if you find your old username, i am fairly certain that mods will be outgoing to help (unless you had 26 mod-notes ).
The advanced search feature of this board is pretty good. If you can remember anything about a particularly memorable or unusual post of yours from the olden days you may be able to search it up and discover what your old username was.
ETA: Cecil is the god of our realm. Distant, unapproachable, effectively invisible, and equipped with powers unfathomable by ordinary mortals. As much a legend as a man.
With the sale of the Chicago Reader and the death of the Straight Dope column in 2018, Cecil retired. He made a brief return, but now lives on a farm, upstate, where he can romp and play with other retired columnists.
Ed Zotti was, last anyone heard, handling some administrative duties with the Board, but rarely makes an appearance unless something extremely out of the ordinary happens.
I don’t think the board ever charged (or required membership) for posting. Just for an ad-free experience. And when I was a mod, Ed Zotti was very active behind the scene.
Yeah. I remember panicking and borrowing money to subscribe for a bit. I then became confident the board would go back to being free shorty. I was right.
Is that right? I remember people could pay to not see ads and have Charter Member under their names whereas people who didn’t pay were just called “guests” but was there a time where you had to pay just to post? I’ve been a member for over 20 years now and I don’t think I ever paid for anything? Or maybe they made it really cheap like $5 for a year? I can’t really remember actually.
It was March 2004, as I recall. Something like $4.95 a year if you signed up and paid up before March 31, and you got the “Charter Member” tag. That price stayed the same for Charters in perpetuity. It would be $9.95 a year and a “Member” tag if you signed up and paid up after March 31, 2004. Members’ prices may have risen after that; as a Charter, I was unaffected, so didn’t care. At any rate, all members enjoyed an ad-free experience.
New signups got an ad-free experience for the first 30 days; after that, they got ads unless they paid up. I recall a number of complaints being posted about some of the ads that were served up—they were simply inappropriate for this board (i.e. porn sites or scam sites).
Just going on memory here, so I may have got a few things wrong, but I think I’m pretty close.
As someone who has been here off and on for over 20 years, I’m surprised by how many people haven’t died. I get the impression a lot of us were in our 20s, 30s and 40s when we joined about 20 years ago.
Nope, that came later I believe. The first model was in fact straight pay-to-post with a 30 day free trial. Here’s the relevant announcement. It didn’t kill the SDMB, but it did rapidly hasten the decline IMO. Said decline would have eventually happened anyway with the changing winds of social media, but this was a serious punt down the stairs.
In 2004 the board went to a pay to post model. You got posting privileges for 30 days. After that, you had to pay or you would not be able to post any more.
In 2008, this was changed to what you describe. Members and Charter Members would not be served ads. Guests now no longer had a 30 day limit, but instead they would be served ads.
The Membership system was completely broken in the move to Discourse. We managed to get it fixed to the point where Members and Charter Members don’t receive ads, but the payment side of things was never implemented. So now there is no way to pay for a membership, and there is also no mechanism to remove anyone from the Member and Charter Member user groups if they don’t pay. So if you were a Member or Charter Member when we switched to Discourse, you get the SDMB ad-free forever. But not the main Straight Dope page. That has always had ads.
Members and Charter Members also used to be able to buy custom titles for a small additional fee. That was also broken in the move to Discourse since it was tied in to the rest of the Membership system.
We’ve pretty much given up on getting the Membership system fixed. If you want a custom title now we’ll give it away to you for free. All you have to do is request it in the appropriate thread in ATMB.
We used to use some of the worst scum-of-the-Earth ad brokers back then. It made us more money, but they were horrible. We weren’t supposed to receive porn, but sometimes the scummy advertisers would switch the ad over to some sort of porn or scam (or worse, malware).
When Google changed their algorithm and we sunk like a stone into the murky depths of the search results, we got really badly dinged for two things. One was that the SDMB wasn’t mobile friendly. The other was that we served up scummy ads. So we changed the interface a bit to make it more mobile-friendly (which everyone complained about, but nobody seemed to realize that if we didn’t do that then Google would just pretend we didn’t exist), and we finally ditched the sleazebag scummy ads (and there was much rejoicing).
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