It’s way more than 30 bucks. Last time we had a software upgrade it took babysitting by two techs for nearly a month to stabilize the system afterwards . . . so add in all of that intensive system support for 4 weeks to the tab, please. Turned out to be quite a schedule changer for Jerry and took a bite out of his budget too, so much so that he’s not real enthused about doing any more upgrades anytime soon.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Good point - I should’ve said 30 bucks for the software (for a new subscription to the vBull members area).
Costs involved in the upgrade itself are no doubt another story.
Word™
*Originally posted by Mike Lenehan *
Slight hijack here, but for people who weren’t aware of it, Mr. Lenehan was Cecil’s original editor, starting back in 1973. And, if I’ve done my math right, he was the one on duty when Cecil’s (in)famous “Caloric Content of Sperm” column appeared. I always feel honored when this grizzled veteran of The Master’s early years makes an appearance, apparently none-the-worse for the time spent communing with Unca Cece.
I’m afraid I have to take issue with this, Mr. Lenehan:
It seems to me that trying to curb growth is pretty counterproductive in most business models. Growth should be an incentive to expand. I understand that you haven’t yet found a way to turn a profit off of this board, but if the first method you try is going to curtail the board’s growth, you’re dooming any other attempts to make money off of this potentially lucrative marketplace.
The plan as it stands seems to have been conceived without any sense of the current scale of the boards, or the dedication and loyalty of the users. It definitely isn’t taking into account the fact that you have a huge user base, eager to throw money at you if you simply give us a chance to. Membership is the only thing that will kill off this board; unless that is your stated intention, it should be the last thing you try. Please note that as of yet, we haven’t had any other opportunities to contribute to this board’s financial wellbeing.
I’d like to refer you to this thread, in which I propose that the reader establishes a classifieds section for the SDMB, which would allow users here to buy advertising, at reasonable rates, voluntarily, using infrastructure that the Reader already has in place. If members bought one ad per year, that’d be equivalent to the membership fees being proposed, and it would not necessitate any changes to the structure of the board. Market it right, and it could kick the stuffing out of your membership plan. And it has no chance of killing off the board. Why not try it first?
It may not be a new and interesting business model, but I think you’ll find that classifieds provide a major source of revenue for the Reader; what could possibly be wrong with trying the same business model out for the boards? Besides which, that new and interesting business model is failing miserably on a lot of message boards out there. You already know how to make money off of classifieds; why not try to apply that here?
If you meant $100 per week it would be $5,200 per annum.
I think everyone now agrees that any workable solution will must allow newbies to participate for free, otherwise the board will die.
Mike Lenehan,
Straight Pay To Post isn’t a new business model. It’s an old one that doesn’t work and will kill the board as it has killed many others.
Pay To Post won’t really cut down on traffic except to the extent that it kills the board completely. As evidenced in this thread aproximately 99% of bandwidth is consumed by people reading the boards.
You don’t really want to eliminate the “half-hearted” users (by which, I assume you mean occasional posters) because newbies are the life blood of the board.
You don’t really want to slow the growth, you want to start paying for the growth!
Therefore, let’s think of some creative business models. If asking people to pay for access will kill the board, get them to pay for something else.
Creative Business Model #1: Keep the current system allowing free registration and posting. However, make people pay for an identity. In other words, people can post questions and responses on the boards but the questions and responses will be entirely anonymous until they pay a subscription fee. (This idea was also posted in the Pit.) This should be technically easy to implement. It won’t deter newbies and I’d bet that it would actually generate more revenue than a straight subscription fee because more people will get involved in the SDMB. Once people get involved in the board, lots of them will want to pay for a unique identity as one of the main attractions of this board relationships you create with other posters and the reputation you develop. In any case, something like this is worth a try as an intermediate step before implementing a fee that everyone agrees will drastically reduce participation in the board.
Any thoughts, kabbes, L_C?
#1: Why would anyone care about setting up an identity in this schematic? After all, if you just sign your post, add in a descriptive sign, or whatnot, everyone knows it’s you, no fee necessary. If I sign every post with “JMCJ”, then eventually people will make the correlations. I don’t have to sign up for a name, because now everyone knows me. Unless you’re thinking about having the mods go through posts to edit out names, signatures, or anything qualifying as “descriptive”, which would be incredibly time consuming.
#2: Welcome to TrollandSpamville, population: Everone but you. If there is no association with a screen name or such, what’s to stop the more juvenile posters and drive-byers from taking full advantage of the system by posting whatever they want, responsibility-free? At least with our current system, you have to go through the hassle of creating a name and having it identified with you- by adding anonymity to the posting procedure, you’d almost guarantee that we get hit constantly by trolls and spam because there wouldn’t be any filters at all. It’d just be the mods running around and deleting posts left and right.
Well, having a verifiable and unique identity would give you lots of advantages as a poster. True, you could sign every post with “JMCJ”, but so could I! People making an occasional comment or posing a question won’t really care if they are properly attributed. For people trying to seriously participate in MPSIMS or Great Debates (or even the Pit!) a verifiable identity is essential. Otherwise they’ll get spoofed and their reputation ruined. In addition, people with an identity would also have the current profile page associated with their name, they’d get a sig, e-mail notification, etc… Moreover, the number of their posts would be tracked, a point of pride for many serious posters.
You misunderstand. People would still be required to register, provide all the information they do now and log on to post. The only difference would be that their posts would not be attributed to them until they paid. (The Current Screen ID field would say something like “Anonymous” and the “Registered” and “Posts” fields would be blank.) Once they paid, you could either “turn on” the identity fields for the posts they made or only attribute new postings, depending on whichever is technically easier.
You would, therefore, have at least as much control as you do now.
Don’t know how that double post happened! Mods - feel free to remove one.
I’d go for that. I’d buy two or three. My charge card is in my hand, and I’m ready and willing. Why not give it a try?
I like the classifieds idea, too. I hope TPTB at least consider it.
If PTP does turn out to be the only solution, would it be possible to have a two-tiered registration system? Give free membership for a set amount of posts per month (maybe 10 or 25 posts a month, or what have you) and with paid membership, the subscribers wouold get unlimited posting. That way, newbies and near-lurkers could participate for free, and those who can’t afford to pay could also still participate, too.
I have a question for the moderators. How’s the poll going? Are most people in favor of pay to post? I’ve thought about it, and I’d be willing to scrape together 20 some odd dollars if there was a way that we could pay by money order. For the amount of time that I spend here and the fun I’ve had, it would probably be worth it. Or we could just pimp out Uncle Cece for money as somebody else said. 
Btw, when would this whole thing go into effect, and, more importantly, will we get first choice on our usernames? Like suppose somebody signs up for “xanadu”, and I come along a month later to find that my user id is taken?
*Not to be the Pied Piper, but this perspective on the subject is worth looking at, IMHO.
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I did consider your issues with the “guest”/“anonymous” route, JC. But Truth Seeker has well identified how you can deal with them.
Also, on the troll front consider this: many trolls do it for the attention. They like the fact that we know their mighty name and talk about them. Well if they have NO name then this fun is taken away from them. One less reason to troll.
You’d still make them register, so you’d still have the same ability to spot IP addresses and they’d still have the hassle of registering accounts.
As for the signing of names - since even “anonymous” must register, simply make signing your name to an anonymous post a bannable offence. Easy.
pan
eulalia – You’re quite correct. It should read either:
$100 a month = $1,200, or
$100 a week = $5,200
Hi Kabbes – Yep, I do understand the weighted model approach and I can see that it is valid. I thang yew. I guess I’ve been a little reluctant to accept it’s the best model on a largely irrational basis i.e. it concludes that there are I,000 currently posting at 1+ per day – not the best basis on which to question a statistical analysis 
The point is that someone would seem anonymous to the Teeming Millions, if not to the moderators. So Poster A would say something, Poster B would respond, and Poster C could come along responding to Poster B pretending to be Poster A. It would be a huge mess.
In case I’m not perfectly clear with my above post, let me present an example.
Anonymous: Is the story of the russian sniper at Stalingrad shown in that movie “Enemy at the Gates” true? - AWinkelried
Anonymous: This website (link) says it’s probably not true. - JCorrado
Anonymous: Thanks for nothing doofus. I know how to use Google too. I want better information than someone’s stupid website that looks like it was designed by a drunk chimpanzee. - Awinkelried
Anonymous: I don’t think you’ll get a lot of help here with that attitude, putz. - JCorrado
Anonymous: That wasn’t me, that was some other moron. - Awinkelried
Anonymous: Do I smell a troll? - DDGoose
etc…
Exactly! So Poster A, who has, in the meantime gotten hooked on the board, says “I didn’t say that! Here’s my $20, turn on my identity so I can really participate in this discussion” The sad alternative is that, with straight PTP, Poster A, having been a lurker up to this point, never posts at all.
I, therefore, disagree that it would be a “mess.” It wouldn’t be as clean as the current system, but it would generate revenue for the Reader while preserving the interaction among the large, varied and talented group that make this board what it is.
kabbes, L_C
Any thoughts on the financial side of this? My initial thoughts are that you’d probably have a lower price point but that you’d have much greater uptake initially. Nor would the revenue curve drop off as fast as it would with straight PTP.
Okay, how about instead of all unpaid posters getting “Anonymous” registration, how about they all get unique, but very boring names, like “Guest #26534”. We could keep track of who says what if it’s really important, but it would be very hard to distinguish yourself in the SDMB community with such a name…
Hey there. I will certainly miss you my dear…how could I not, after that wonderful time we had in the haunted thread [sub]thought I’d forgotten about that eh?[/sub]
I am against “me too” posts, but since I am responding here to multiple posters I think it is ok. So, me too, squared and cubed.
Well I’ll be dipped in shit, fried in butter, and served on a plate. He’s real. And in some wonderful alternate universe (not in this one of course) he will respond to my post by saying "Of course I’m real, you doofus. And don’t call me “Shirley”.
Big 'ole whoosh.
And when he does, his identity gets turned on in all his previous posts, thus vindicating him. This can be done with vBulletin, can’t it? If it could be worked out, you would wind up with a strong incentive for people to register. This seemed like a really good idea to me, I wanted to contribute to it.
I’ve read a lot of good suggestions here about ways to get people “hooked”…free trials periods, keeping certain forums free, etc. To this I would like to add, make posting free at certain times of day, say at typically off peak hours. Is this technically feasible?
If it isn’t, and none of the other schemes are, then I just want to express my very strong conviction here that there simply must be some way to accomodate the “impulse buy”. The simplest thing would be to sell subscriptions in increments of less than a year. Even better would be to sell the right to make a limited number of posts for some very small, nominal fee, even if this has to be done at a loss. But if new users have to pay $50 up front to make their very first post, well, you might as well shut the place down right now.
Related to the impulse buy issue, is there any feasible way to set up a micropayments system, where people could pay a cent or a fraction thereof for each post? I suspect there isn’t, but I gotta ask.
I think one of the main issues among people who can pay, but might not do it, is the fact that they don’t really know what they will be paying for. Think about it. Once ptp is implemented, the board as we know it will cease to exist, and be replaced by something else. Will it be better or worse? Better is concievable. The signal to noise ratio would certainly improve. Perhaps some people we don’t like will be gone. But I think the downside potential is much greater, for reasons others have pointed out in great detail. This uncertainty is going to keep a lot of people holding back, I suspect.
I would also like to know, have the powers that be here investigated how other free boards of comparable size deal with the problems we have, and also, how other similar boards who have converted to ptp have fared (if any such thing exists). I would be very interested to hear about it.