Nowhere have I seen mentioned that the yearly fees, or a portion thereof, will be put towards a server upgrade. I would have considered this a major selling point of the membership, and can (in my own mind) not expect any of the money collected this month to go to such a thing.
I’m sure the money’s going towards something useful, and I don’t particularly need or care to know what. $5 was cheap, in my opinion - and from what I’ve seen of other members sponsoring, I’m not alone.
I would be willing to put another one-time fee (for sake of argument, let’s say another $5) specifically towards a server upgrade - specifically to facilitate a speed increase when surfing the browsers.
The admin have said that its bandwidth that is a major concern, not server speed. Any monies recieved would most likely go towards a larger pipe in the short term. In the mean time, start shifting your sleep cycle over to Australian or British times. It works wonderfully for me :D.
Bandwidth is a concern, but that doesn’t change the fact that the SDMB could use a new server. Various features on the board are turned off due to load on the CPU.
At no time was it mentioned (except by hopeful Dopers), that any revenue derived from subscriptions would go towards a new server.
The server currently in use is all of 2 years old and was hard come by to begin with. The fact that all excess capacity on the server when we got it, got eaten up in less than 90 days, that was surprising to us. (Well, not to Jerry the Tech God; he said “the more we get, the more they’ll use up. We’ll never get ahead.” I hate to admit it, but he was right.)
Once again, I need to point out that the Reader has spent in excess of $100,000 American on our behalf and we have generated very little in return. We have had a tiny bit of ad revenue in that time and even less from the sale of books and shirts and mugs.
Not that the Reader ever saw us as any kind of profit center, but it would be nice to pay our way, at least.
Due to the fact that a corporation cannot accept nonprofit-style donations, we couldn’t solicit funds for specific purchases. We also did not have anything in place that would make handling money feasible and did not want to burden the Reader with the intensive chore of handling money. (I know this is perhaps weird for most people to understand, but it costs money to get someone to open envelopes and etc. to process transactions and the Reader runs pretty mean and lean as it is, like most other companies, nobody’s sitting there with nothing to do.)
Now that we do have a process in place for handling transactions, perhaps the situation has also changed. I will start a query to management to see what might happen here.
What we really need is our own separate T1 line, we’re sharing one with all the other Reader stuff, including their in-house use and online pay sites. Whether that’s a possibility at this time, I couldn’t say, but I’ll ask about that as well.
TubaDiva i’ve read all the posts about this, but I just don’t understand where this 100,000 dollars comes from. Are they running a Cray supercomputer back there?
According to shopfort1.com (maybe this link will work) it would cost circa. 500 bucks a month for a T1 connection. Are we really sucking up 1.5 mbps?
Thanks for the update, Tuba. (do you really play?)
I’m still willing to fork over some more cash, with the primary objective being a speedier forum, whatever the behind-the-scenes details to that end may be. Keep us posted and keep up the hard work.
The tab for the operation of The Straight Dope online includes hardware and software purchases and licenses, tech time and labor, and ongoing charges for stuff like the phone lines.
I have been told that 100K+ over 5 years is a lowball estimate.
When we were on AOL, they paid the Reader for the privilege of carrying The Straight Dope online and there were little to no technical costs involved; AOL paid for and handled most of everything. When AOL decided they would no longer pay for proprietary content, the Reader could have just called it a day and ended things, but since then, we’ve been on our own and on the Reader’s nickel. The Reader’s been very good to us.
What started as a temporary online experiment has turned into a pretty cool thing. You hanging with us through all of our changes is cool too.
I don’t want to speak for TubaDiva or the Reader, but I don’t think you understand what the real costs are associated with running something like this in-house for an extended period.
Let’s make some estimates:
We’ve had at least 2 servers (the original server, and one replacement or major hardware upgrade). Lets be very conservative and say those cost $10,000 for hardware alone (I’d actually be very surprised if it wasn’t significantly more than that, but lets go lowball for now). That 10k does not include installation and configuration, just hardware.
You say bandwidth can be had for $500 per month for T1. If I understand correctly, the message board shares its bandwidth with the Readers T1 line. So we should allocate part of the monthly cost to the board. Lets say half, or $250 per month, or $15000 over 5 years. Note that this assumes that the cheapest connection would be ok, and that bandwidth was just as cheap 5 years ago, both of which are probably wrong, but again, we’re lowballing. My WAG is that that figure could easily be only a third of the actual cost. It seems to me, for example, that bandwidth costs were much higher 5 years ago.
Assuming our guesses to this point are in the ballpark, that leaves $75000 out of our original $100k estimate for labor (tech support, moderation, backup & restore, upgrades for software and hardware, etc.), software licenses, supplies (tapes, CDs,), etc. If you assume it goes all for labor (and I imagine the lion’s share does), and we assume that the average cost of labor for the people who spend time on this are billed internally at about $40 per hour (a very low estimate in my opinion, but again with the lowball), that gives you 1875 hours to spend across 5 years to keep the board up and running.
We know there have been 2 major hardware installations (the original and at least one major upgrade), and it seems safe to assume they took a few hours each. Let’s call them 30 hours each (probably low, but lowball, blah, blah, blah). We’ve had hardware failures to recover from (or partially recover from, as in Our Winter of Missed Content), we’ve had database rebuilds, database changes, software upgrades, and misc problems that had to be dealt with. Be real generous and call these another 120 hours.
That leaves about 1695 hours across 5 years, or 339 hours a year, 6.5 hours per week, or a little over 1 hour per weekday to do paid moderation (Ed’s time), manage backups, regular maintenance, etc. IMHO, that’s not much, and the real figure is probably somewhat higher.
Given all that, I don’t think the $100k figure is at all out of line, and is very probably a very conservative estimate, just as TubaDiva said.
RJKUgly I can and have pointed out hosting solutions that would run the board 5-6,000 dollars a year that would bring a bountiful booty of bandwidth. However you add it up, it does not equal 1/10th of one million dollars, unless of course someone was giving money away. I could argue the opposite of your position and say that hey, this is 1 piece of software, and if done right there are actually lots of savings to be had from doing it in-house and alongside another setup already in existence. Also, moderation is free, as i’m sure the moderators will attest.
I may have misunderstood, but It seemed to me when you said:
it appeared you were saying that you couldn’t understand how they could have spent so much money on the board over a five year period. That has nothing to do with speculating on what it would cost from this point on to outsource it, but rather is about what it has cost to run it in-house in the real life past, given the situation at the time and the decisions made. Two completely different questions.
My reply was my opinion of why the $100,000 figure for actual costs spent so far is not only not farfetched, but is could easily be conservative, just as was reported to TubaDiva and relayed by her to us.
Perhaps, there are all kinds of ways we might postulate that things might have been done, and how money might have been saved. (Personally, I don’t think you could get it down quite as much as you seem to think when taking the real world in to account, but who knows. I do know from first hand experience that people often have little grasp of what the actual costs of various internal projects are until some strict cost-accounting adds it all up.)
But even so, that wasn’t what you objected to, and was not the point of my post. You said “I just don’t understand where this 100,000 dollars comes from” and I outlined what seems to me to be a very plausible scenario that fits with what we know about the board’s actual past, and where it would cost that much.
Also, Ed’s time is not free, as I’m sure he will attest to. And since I specifically referenced Ed’s time when talking about the cost of moderation, and not the volunteer administrators and moderators, I think this fits in with my comment that often times people don’t understand the real costs associated with projects until you add them all up.
Unless I’m mistaken, I’ve heard Tuba and the other mods talk about involving Ed in various decisions. We’ve also heard many times that there is a lot of interaction between the staff members over many issues that we never see. Based on this, I’m guessing some non-trivial amount of Ed’s time is spent on board matters, and therefore must be charged to the board. Is it an hour a day? An hour a week? 10 hours per week? I have no way of knowing, but I guess it’d be pretty easy for him to blow two or three hours per week without trying very hard.
Add in an hour here and there to manage backups, perform routine checks and maintenance, and check on the odd little problem, and it’s pretty easy to get six to ten hours per week invested by people who draw a paycheck from the Reader.
Those hours count, they don’t come for free. And I’d be surprised if my estimate of $40 per hour as an internal charge for those people is way out of line. Anybody who earns even $50k to $60 a year is going to cost you around that.
Lets ignore all hardware costs, all software costs, all bandwidth costs. Ignore everything except time spent by people who get paid by the reader. Even at the (unrealistically low, IMO) cost of $30 per hour, an average of only 10 hours per week costs you $78,000 over five years. Given that, why do you think $100,000 is so incredible?
This isn’t the first version of bulletin board software we’ve used. It’s not even the first BRAND we’ve tried. We used to use UBBS, which we paid for. This message board software was good, as far as it went, but we could rely on it to crash EVERY DAY at about 3 PM, US Central time*. It just couldn’t handle our volume. So the Reader bought the vBulletin software. We don’t just buy this once and then own it…we buy the software, but then we have to keep a subscription going in order to get updates and patches for it. It’s sort of like anti-virus software, you have to have keep paying for it in order to keep it updated. Or this is my understanding, anyway. We’ve bought two and possibly more upgrades to the vBulletin system that I’m aware of. So this isn’t a one time expense, it’s an ongoing expense.
Ed spends quite a bit of time on Straight Dope stuff. I don’t know how much time, but he does spend some time every week, and that’s time that he could be spending on other business. I THINK that Ed’s the one who decides which questions to pass on to Cecil and which to dangle in front of the SDSAB to see if one of us will answer. I do know that Cecil gets some truly weird questions, and lots of them. Sometimes the more…interesting…letters are passed around in modmail.
Most of the moderation time is done at no cost to the Reader, it’s true. However, it DOES cost us moderators quite a bit in time which we could use to earn money or go play video games, according to preference. We don’t just spend time reading the boards and issuing warnings. We have to document warnings and other moderation business, and we have to answer letters from posters and act upon them. We get a LOT of aggravation from this job. I really don’t think that anybody would do this sort of thing for money alone. I get all kinds of pleading and/or threatening letters. I also get letters that I just plain don’t understand.
Whether or not the Reader got a good deal on bandwidth and software and other expenses is pretty much a moot point now. The fact of the matter is that they DID drop a big bundle of money on the SDMB, and they’d like to see some of it back.
*This meant that someone had to call Ed or Jerry and bug him or them into resetting the board, daily. So we had a daily expense of an hour or so of tech time.
Lynn what does the time moderaters lose from playing video games have to do with this ridiculously large number? vBulletin liscences cost 85 bucks a year. I’ll pony it up if need be, and its definitely not worth a paragraph!
A moot point? We are all paying customers with a vested interest. The board is now a money-making entity and if it continues to be slow over the next year, how much money do you think its going to make when the 15 dollar charge comes around next year?
The bottom line is that the Reader need not spend 20,000 bucks a year on us for the next five years, especially when the job isn’t even getting done correctly. Say the words and I will research and write a column about the number of ways the Reader could save thousands upon thousands of dollars hosting this messageboard (so long as it gets published). You can trust that more curious people are going to come along and ask the same valid question, and when you throw that number at them they are going to be thinking just what i’m thinking. “something’s not right here”. This isn’t the first thread, after all.
Let’s say you write your column about how to save “save thousands upon thousands of dollars” and come up with some great savings. In fact, lets say you find a way to get a free server, free dedicated T1 line, and free software. In other, absolutely no cost for hardware, software, or bandwidth.
Amazing savings you say? You saved the board and made it free for the Reader you say? You’ve solved all the problems you say?
No.
You’re overlooking what is probably the single biggest expense: time spent by people on the Reader’s payroll. These are real expenses, and can’t be wished away. They don’t go away because the server and bandwidth are a lower cost, or even free. They don’t go away because you got a good deal on a web hosting service.
Again, 10 hours a week spent by people who cost you $30 per hour costs you about $15,000 a year. How do you intend to reduce these costs? And if you don’t, then the Chicago Reader will in fact “spend 20,000 bucks a year on us for the next five years”, despite your superior knowledge on web hosting.
If someone costs $30 per hour, in reality, they’re being paid about $18-20 per hour. The rest is workers comp, payroll taxes, etc. Where are you finding qualified techies for chump change? I’m quite sure Ed is earning more than that. <genuflects>
I also have an idea of how much effort goes into a venture like this, supporting a small army of database administrators, programmers and so forth. Beyond that, I spend close to an hour a week maintaining my department’s website. It’s a dreary little thing - 15 static pages, but keeping after changing links to other departments and updating request forms keeps me busy. I don’t have 3500 active users and untold thousands of visitors to keep happy. Unless Ed is exceptionally good, <genuflects> I’m guessing he’s working more than 10 hours a week on our behalf.
Just out of curiosity, what sort of iron is the SDMB running on? As said somewhere above, it’s about two years old. Are we squeaking along on a Dell PowerEdge with a single 200 MHz Pentium proc and 256 MB of RAM or a pair of Sun Fire servers (one database server and one web server) with multiple UltraSPARC procs and multiple gigs of RAM? I’ll assume we’re not looking at a Fire any time soon - the CHEAP ones start at over $300k. :eek: What’s really staggering is you can order these things online.
I started by using a $40 per hour figure and saying that was probably low in my estimation.
I threw out the $30 figure just to show that even at a rate I consider to be way below the market, you can still rack up $10,000 to $15,000 per year without breaking a sweat.
… and the Board can be run at NO COST WHATSOEVER by simply closing it down. If we just ignore the next crash, we can save a bundle. Or, if we didn’t allow people to post, if we just ran the Columns and Archives, the READER would save a bundle.
“Cost-savings” as an ideal, without considering the other consequences, can be illusory.
Look, the READER tech folks and decision-makers do look over some of the ideas that are generated here for saving money. But they don’t post on the boards. An idea that you’ve generated might have been considered and rejected (for whatever reasons) without anyone posting to tell you so.
If you want to throw out money-saving ideas, by all means do so. It would be FAR more effective if they were all in one thread, rather than scattered about. The READER big-wigs don’t read the boards thoroughly, they do sometimes take a peek here and there. If the ideas were all in one thread, it would be easier for the READER decision-makers to find them.
But, please, don’t get all hot and bothered if your ideas seem to be ignored. Just because you don’t get a posted response doesn’t mean that you’re being ignored. It only means that the READER big-wigs don’t post. If they saw your idea (or a similar idea) six months ago, and rejected it (remember that saving hard costs is only one aspect of decision-making), they aren’t going to bother to tell you so.
You sound like the guys I used to hire when I was trying to get my business off the ground. All catch phrases and empty promises. They were essentially the same guys that a few years prior were trying to pass themselves off as Super-High-Tech-Hacker-Teens, and flaming everyone who crossed their path in AOL Chatrooms.