One other problem with pay-to-post: Some of the people who are paying will develop a sense of entitlement. Abusive posters will become even more abusive, and will raise holy hell if you cancel their membership without crediting them back.
I happen to know a bit about this stuff - I ran a company for 8 years that developed BBS software, and I ran a commercial ‘chat’ system that whole time. We experimented with every possible pricing model, and because the software we wrote had to support all the various accounting practices for discussion boards, I had to research them all very extensively.
One thing became very clear in that whole time - if you do not offer at least some level of free participatory access, your board will die. New users have to become addicted to posting before they’ll pay, so if you don’t let them post without paying, your user base at best will be frozen at the level it was at the day you went ‘commercial’, and then will slowly die.
I don’t know if vBulletin supports it, but if you were going to go to a pay-to-post model, you should should have a ‘freebie’ mode that allows you to post say, once a day whether you’ve paid or not. Or ten times a week. Or something like that. There’s nothing like being in the middle of a hot debate and suddenly not being able to post to get people to pony up a membership fee. But you have to hook them first.
I also don’t understand why the performance here is so bad. I just build a similar message system from scratch for GE, and I’ve got it running on a crappy old 266 mhz desktop PC. Even so, there are no appreciable delays as people are using it. The application is a simple ASP/SQL Server database app.
I don’t know how much of an IT staff the Reader has, but perhaps part of your problem is that the software just isn’t configured very well? Or perhaps vBulletin just doesn’t scale very gracefully.
Fact - The Chicago Reader is losing money on this site.
Fact - Some people have said they will stay, others say that they won’t or can’t, accusations have flown, vicious fights have started, claims of possible liability and lawsuits, suggestions that would be an accountant’s nightmare, pissing, moaning, more accusations, more fights, more lawsuit scenerios.
The owners have more patience than I. I would have just said “fuck it” and pulled the plug days ago.
I’m curious why you think that the poor performance is mainly server-driven when you say:
Does it get a million page views a month, as TubaDiva said the SDMB gets? Have you observed how large the thread views here are, in bytes? KellyM has been making some good estimates of bandwidth requirements over in the ATMB thread I started; that might be a good place to look as well.
The short answer is “no”. The long answer is "yes, if they are willing to spend a large amount of time and $$ in custom code. And the SDMB Staff seem to not want people to donate custom work either, to modify the code further. Although I never posted about it before, I did re-write the Search for the SDMB to make Searching easier for Mods and Admins, and to block hacks - this was actual working code, not an off-the-cuff “it ought to be easy to just have someone convert the SDMB to Mac OS X” sorta thing. However, my effort was politely turned down. And that’s fine, I understand why they did, even if I disagree with the reason.
There are a lot bigger and busier vBulletin Boards than the SDMB, that run very smoothly.
Oh, God yes. The worst thing about that place (well, other than CF and LOOTP and LBYM) is that whatever hijacks happen . . . become the thread topic. You know those nitpicks in GD? Those become the thread topic. It’s one of the more exasperating things I’ve ever had to deal with.
It’s why I’ve posted there ten times in the past three months. I went back for a bit and just. could. not. stand. it.
BTW, Stoid, who are you at TMF? I have the same SN here as there, FWIW.
The question I have about all of this what does it cost to run the board? This board isn’t using the current version of vBulletin and I’m assuming the administrator chose the “owned license” option which costs $160, a one time fee. I understand that hosting does cost money, but the question is how much? I pay $7.77 a month for hosting, which comes with 100 megabytes of storage. Additonal storage which would accomodate a site such as this wouldn’t be that much more expensive.
The central questions are these: What’s the cost to run the site? What went into determining that $20 to $50 would be required from every poster?
Nobody, since I posted there exactly once, embarked on a campaign of harassing the administration to change the software, and received the ** profoundly ** unhelpful suggestion that I should take it up in one of the forums.
I am a pretty intelligent woman, with 15 years of computer experience, but I found their software so complex and useless that I just didn’t take the time to try and puzzle it out. As I said, vBulletin has it exactly right. If you have to take a course to figure out how to post, fuck it.
As an incredibly broke college student, I have to say that I’m gonna miss you all. All good things must come to an end, I guess. I’ll just have to settle for the [sarcasm]oh so enlightening [/sarcasm] Yahoo Chat rooms. One question, though. Is Fathom affected by this? I’ve lurked there a couple of times, and would gladly sign up for a user ID if it isn’t affected by this proposition.
I’m assuming you’d pay online with your credit card, money order, PayPal, providing they offer these options.
And then at the library, you’d have to log into the board, post, and then not forget to log out before you leave. I think that’s all there would be to it. (Am I forgetting something?)
Is it just coincidence, or is it the case that every person who’s insisted they’ll leave on principle is someone I’m happy to watch the screen door slam on?
I’m not referring to people who say they don’t have bread. I’m referring to people who say “I’ll leave before I pay a nickel!” or “I better not smell profit here!”
I’m just quoting Shayna here, not to single her out, but because I see a lot of people jumping to conclusions here. Let’s look at the naked facts.
Note that Ed doesn’t say these are all the alternatives the SD Staff or anyone could possibly think of. Nor does he claim there aren’t any other possibilities. He simply states the most likely scenario as we see it now.
Note the last sentence. And note that the Boards will not be shut down under any but the most dire circumstances.
Look, people, it’s plain and simple. We’re trying to run the best damn message board on the net. It IS the best damn board because of the diversity, intelligence, and wit of its participants. We realise that.
But there’s a practical side to it as well. I’m not going to repeat it all here, but the bottom line is: the Boards cost money to run. One of the options to cover costs is a membership fee. This option has a lot of advantages from a board management perspective. We’re fully aware there are some downsides as well.
The Boards also cost time to run. As you know, the moderator staff is unpaid. Your fee won’t be going into my pocket. You paying a fee does mean, however, that my colleagues and I will have a lot more time to devote to actual moderating instead of chasing around the same problem children for years.
So there’s advantages, and disadvantages.
But no matter how you look at it, an exercise like this is necessary to see where we stand.
And we appreciate your opinions very, very much. All I ask of all of you is not to turn this into more than it is. Read the survey page, and discuss. Don’t put more into it than it says right there.
You know, that’s about the fifth time I’ve read that line, in one form or another.
Now I know it costs money to operate this board and that that cost must be recouped in some way, at some time down the road, but seriously, how much weight is being put on the fact that you believe that PTP will cut down on trolls?
Because, as far as I can tell, I don’t see where trolls will be completely whipped out with this plan. That is, obviously, if no thought is going into the idea that the board should make allowances for first time posters and encourage that kind of thing. It seems to me that if you encourage new blood and new views, and make it easy for these people to come on board, that you’re bound to get a few bad apples buried in the bunch. It seems to me your opting for a system that discourages that notion.
I mean, call me suspicious, but when I read that line coming from a couple of different moderators, it immediately gets me thinking that that reason alone is playing a big factor in how the PTP is being put together.
This is not a joke. We know this place can sell itself. New blood won’t be a problem. Will we have less new posters per month? Yeah, absolutely.
But at the very least we won’t have to ban a shitload of the newbies within the first week. Some even without having posted. So in answer to your question: the fact that PTP basically rids us of the troll problem is not the main reason we want to do this. But I can’t say it’s a negative side effect either, you know?
(And of course, I realise that there will still be bannings. But we’d pretty much eliminate the chances of someone coming back. Unless they’re dumb and filthy rich, of course. ;))
I have a feeling this will come of different from how I intend it, but I truly intend this as a serious question- is there a precedence behind your and Ed’s notion that getting people hooked on this place will be easy even if it goes PTP?
That is, if most sites out there have been hurt substantially when they went to PTP in both staleness and overall posters, what’s to stop that from happening here?
Just how much does it cost to run this place? In the announcement about the PTP plan, Ed says:
It sounds like they’re expecting at least 500 people to sign up, if not a great deal more. Charging 20 bucks a month, 500 users would contribute about 800 bucks a month to keep the board running. At $50, it’d be over $2000 per month! And this is only assuming that 500 people fork over the cash. The administration is obviously expecting a lot more people to subscribe.
My website isn’t close to the traffic that this one generates - at most we have around 40-50 people online at a time, and about 800-1000 posts per day, which generates about 15-20 gigs of throughput per month. This usually costs about 50 to 100 bucks a month.
Can the SDMB really cost so much more? I realize I’m looking at apples and oranges here, but I’ve never seen more than a few hundred active users on here at a time, so it seems like a stretch that this place could cost thousands per month to operate.
FTR - I’d probably stick around is the price per year was much less - like 5 bucks.
