Possibility of Chicago Reader outsourcing this board

I love Cecil. I love the Chicago Reader. I love Jerry and all the other hard-working behind-the-scenes people here. I love the Mods and Admins and everyone associated. I got nothing but love. But let’s be blunt: This board just sucks in terms of performance. It just sucks. To a point where it’s completely unusable alot of the day, hardly usable most of the day, and rarely acceptably usable. Literally the only time it’s behaviour is what I’d quantify as acceptable is 12:30am to 1:30am PST, just before it goes down for backup or whatever, then 2:30am to 4:30am. Not exactly business hours.

Now, I know that a) it’s a very low priority for the Chicago Reader, and b) that people are working as hard as they can on it, and c) it makes almost no revenue for the Chicago Reader.

There are solutions to the performance problem that I believe can cost less than the Chicago Reader is currently paying. Which means everyone wins. And specifically that means outsourcing this board to someone who can give it the attention it needs. If the Chicago Reader pays someone else to run it who can do it as part of a larger oursourced or hosting service, it will no doubt cost less than their current spending on bandwidth, servers, and especially labor. In fact, I’m sure there are several users here (myself included) who would be willing to host this at a slight loss for the priviledge.

Also, I propose that a means be put in place to track merchandise sales against board membership. I suspect that there’s already at least a minimal revenue directly from the board. Obviously, there’s no easy way to track book sales against board membership, but I again suspect it’s greater than zero. At least some revenue is coming from this board, and it may even be substantial. I propose that an investment in this board will directly enhance revenues.

Finally, please reconsider the possibility of charging for membership.

Please make this better. Please?

Bill H., I’m sure we all give thanks for your vote of confidence, but if you check the thread archives, this topic has been discussed ad nauseum.

What I personally don’t understand is why the Chi Rdr won’t accept the many generous offers of donations – “If I left a big & powerful server on your doorstep anonymously, would you give it is good home?” is the sort of offers I recall hearing, but rejected.

I can only guess that the powers that be have their reasons, and I trust them at that. Hey, Cec’ ain’t got those impressive credentials fer nothin’!

We understand your frustration, Bill. The message board experience has been less than positive of late.

What I’m about to say here has been said before, but bears repeating.

Pointing out the obvious, we are a victim of our own success; everybody digs us. Well, maybe not everybody, but more than enough to overwhelm the resources available to us.

Demand far outstrips supply. It’s nice to be popular, but man oh man, is there a downside!

As for the Reader’s attitude, you have to look at it in the bigger picture. We are not their main chance here and never have been; the tail does not wag the dog. They have stuck to their core business over the years, that is, publishing.

They have migrated to online slowly over the years; their work with the Reader personals (something that does money for them) shows that. Over time they have integrated this into their business . But even the popularity of the personals has never taken away from what they do every week.

Originally we were only going to be a placeholder for them in cyberspace while they figured out if they were going to do anything online and if so, what. The popularity of this community has been a surprise to all concerned and we have been most blessed that the Reader management has been charmed at how their little experiment has worked out.

Because this is the property of a corporate owner, we have not had the flexibility to let you PBS us, nor have we been able to pass the hat by the usual and accepted online ways of allowing volunteer payment programs. The accounting and tax headaches would make us more trouble than we are worth to the Reader and I hope you can see that.

Outsourcing has been discussed before. The last time Jerry looked at a company that offered its services to us, it would have cost the Reader more than it does now and they would have had more security issues and so they decided against it.

I wish I had some better answers for you. All we can do is the best we can and hope for better times.

your humble TubaDiva
Administrator

Oh stop whingeing and come down under. The board is mostly quick as a whippet down here. You just live in the wrong part of the world!!

Dunno about that, kam.

I tend to post on here in the evening, Sydney time. This means I have to go outside and play for an hour while they do the back-up (6:30pm AEST is the wee small hours of the morning in Chicago). So, I’m posting either side of the back-up, and the board should be lightning-fast. Sometimes it is, other times it ain’t. Then again, I’ll also post before lunch in Sydney, when it’s the previous night’s supposed peak load time in the United States, and sure it can be slow, but quite often it’ll be surprisingly good.

Well, you will notice that I said mostly…just to cover my butt from naysayers like yourself Loaded.

Ah, ignore him, kam. That’s only Sydney. Auckland doesn’t seem to have many probs with the hamsters at night at all …

And once again, I feel the need to suggest my solution to the whole thing…

SDMB Classifieds.

Just give us a place where we can pay to put up advertisements. They’re the one thing we can’t do on the boards, and there are a lot of us who would pay to get our products out in front of this community.

Also, personal ads. Board-related greetings. Make it a tradition - instead of post parties, buy an announcement. Or better, have people buy congratulatory ads for events in posters’ lives.

Then there’s the tremendous block of people who would buy ads just to support their favorite boards.

The problem of taking charity is avoided; you’re selling ad space. The boards don’t need to go to subscription, or outsource, or anything. The Reader gets a new revenue stream.

The Reader is already set up to do online classifieds.

Low-risk, low investment, high return potential, and no impact on the current, highly successful structure of the boards.

Why not try it?

I recognize that y’all tend to think of The Straight Dope as the glittering diamond in the Reader tiara, but I got to tell the truth, we are small stuff. Too small to fiddle with classifieds geared just to us.

Yes, the Reader does classifieds. Online ones as well as in print; you can place ads online and they show up in the Reader. Same with personals.

We stand alone and as such, are not part of that system. I suspect to tailor the system to accommodate this board would be less income for more trouble than it would be worth.

Remember that all of this work done is handled by one staff; the Reader does not outsource any of this. So it’s Jerry and his already overworked crew, many of whom have labored for multiple hours on a site that’s not making them anything but goodwill.

I recognize this may sound awful to some of you, but it is, indeed, the awful truth.

your humble TubaDiva
Administrator

No, it doesn’t sound awful. It sound pragmatic.

Which is excellent. As long as these boards are going to be approached pragmatically, there’s hope that none of the harebrained “let’s make money off this potential revenue base quickly by destroying it utterly” schemes will make any headway.

Personally, I’m tremendously happy with the way the boards work. The Reader is doing me, personally, a tremendous favor by having these forums available and free, and I’m brimming over with gratitude. They have, out of what I can only assume is an endless supply of magnanimity, created an astonishing community of boundless intelligence and enthusiasm. They’re responsible for all of the education, the entertainment, the support, and the weirdness that goes on here, and I salute them for it. Really. No sarcasm here; that’s how I feel.

I’d like these boards to stay just the way they are. If there are slowdowns, I go do other stuff, and come back relieved when the boards are back up. I’m happy to put up with slow response times, if that’s what it takes to keep these boards running and free.

If the Reader believes that they can’t make any money by offering our 40,000-user client base the option to purchase classified ads, then they certainly don’t believe that they can make any money by going to the subscription model, where only those who pay can contribute content. So, for now, we’re safe.

It may be a shoestring operation, held together with tape and baling wire, continuing only because Jerry the Tech God has astonishing server maintenance abilities. It may be dependent on the tender mercies of overstressed and unpaid mods and admins, who spend an inordinate amount of time keeping the boards policed, safe, and happy. But it’s a unique place, a community that’s influenced the minds and attitudes of thousands, a community which I believe is helping to make the world, at least incrementally, a better place.

Sometimes shoestring operations are the best kind.

You should all be very proud of yourselves.

According to Alexa this website is indeed small fish. Not letting supply meet demand is a good way to keep things that way. Letting supply meet the demand would be a far better example of pragmatism then that described by MrVisible.

I do not know the current cost of hosting the board, however I do know that with The World’s Smartest Human Being on staff it should be quite easy to implement a facelift (chireader.com could use one too…), take advantage of free or simply cheap server offers, and add strategic advertising without succumbing to poor excuses such as being part of a corporate entity.

Idea’s such as implementing SQL caching could also greatly reduce server load, though vBulletin tends to have a very low load compared to other script based boards.

Not taking advantage of the Internet is not pragmatic.

My .02€

My link above is incorrect, this one is.

I do not understand how you guys are able to give the excuses you give. It would be a simpleton’s job to take a website that was at one point in October the 5000th most visited website on the entire Internet and turn it into profit. Especially with such dedicated visitors.

Poor excuses…

My .04€

I’m just a simple doper I enjoy the boards and would hate to see them scrapped. But all this talk lately about money for upgrades and schemes to acquire it. Wouldn’t it help if every member would just go to the SD-online store and spend $20 on some stuff once or twice a year? A T-shirt or a mug…maybe a book or whatever.

How many/much? Let’s say 1/4 the members at what? Maybe $20 bucks/year?

What’s that come to…

You are absolutely correct and I’m with you all the way! Know what we should do? We should ask for a refund and go to a better board where they put our Euros to good use by making a profit.

Who ever heard of a popular, free board with bandwidth problems? Who, I ask? Such poor excuses. . .

Well, heck Tuba what’s Jerry’s address? I’ll mail him few bucks to buy stuff with. I dunno what kinda stuff he needs to take care of us the way he’s been doing. It won’t hurt me much and it might help him keep the board going.

or like I was saying earlier… 40,000 members if only 1/4 would spend $10 at the store a couple of times a year. An extra $100-200K annually should help a little, huh?

Hey, I’m not complaining now. But if there’s some way WE can help…just speak up. I think a lot of the folks here would be willing to do something if asked. Especially if the alternative was to ** go to some other board** :eek:

If the SDMB was to close shop…That’d be it for me. I don’t visit other boards unless it’s a thread link. Not before, now or later. They just don’t quite fit. Ya know what I mean. Most of the ones I’ve ever even checked out seem to be one sided or whacked.

Anyway, beebda-beebda-beebda that’s all folks g~nite

Yes, if you want to help, go to the “BUY STUFF” section and buy stuff. Holidays are coming for Christians, Jews and Muslims (alphabetical order) so buy lots of gifts from the “BUY STUFF” area. T-shirts, mugs, books, etc.

High level of sales might attract some notice. And it would give us some indication of how many people really are willing to cough up something – our earlier surveys about that topic lead to the conclusion that a few people are willing and eager but that most people said not one cent.

Note that he says “high level of sales”; one or two people buying a mug or t-shirt each won’t do a thing. You’d need to convince your local rotary club to buy en masse in order for some kind of effect to be seen.

So Dex, can I quote you on that?

To give an idea of the scope of the situation here, I recently received a conservative estimate on what it costs the Reader to run this board.

Not counting salaries of employees such as Jerry, it’s in the neighborhood of 20-25K a year. That’s a minimum figure. This does not count anything that would maybe improve service, like more servers, more bandwith, etc., which would up the ante.

That’s a lot of coffee mugs and tshirts, wouldn’t you say?

The Straight Dope Store is offered as a convenience to our members, but I doubt seriously it makes any profit at all to the Reader as well, once the costs of handling these items is totted up.

We know you mean well – the very best, in fact, and we appreciate it so much – but given the reality of what it costs to keep us going, are y’all willing to dig that deep?

The Reader also has a right to recoup what it has spent on us, which, again, by my rough estimation here, don’t have all the figures, don’t have all the facts, but just taking the time we’ve been here times the estimated costs per year, that’s over 100K right here and now. There’s a long way to go to even start get to earning our keep, let alone any extras for upgrades.

This is why every time someone here on the board talks about how much we bring to the Reader, someone over there chuckes. We have never made them a profit and chances are we never will. We’re not even paying our way.

Y’all need to get over the idea that our board problems are fixable by a couple of people sending a couple of bucks. It’s much bigger than that. It also does not necessarily follow that if you did send us money that it would all go to upgrades. We’re pretty deep in the Reader’s pockets as is.

your humble TubaDiva
Administrator

[major-league (but honest) suck-up]
Given TubaDiva’s statement above, I think Dopers should raise a glass and toast the Reader’s incredibly generous management this upcoming Thanksgiving:
PUBLISHER
Jane Levine
EDITOR
Alison True
MANAGING EDITOR
Kiki Yablon

…and all the rest of the Staff

What better thing for us to give thanks for? Ok, there are some better things, but we too-often forget that we’re here on their dime and their goodwill.

Thanks very much.
::trundles off to “Buy Stuff”::

[/major-league (but honest) suck-up]