SDMB Charging for Access - Comments

About This Message Board
101

If the SDMB starts charging, things are likely to change. I do not like change.

      A few of the Clique posters have already said that they won't pay.

      I don't know whether I can pay. Considering that I'm living on SSD, it doesn't seem likely I can. (If yer wonderin' I got this computer free when a friend upgraded. My folks pay for my ISP.) I spend a lot of time here. The board is not a part of my life I want to have to give up.
I agree that the SDMB is great. I feel, at present at least, it's worth $50 annually. But what will it become when it starts charging?
102

Jesus Christ!!!

What exactly do you do at work Ms 4000 and odd post? :slight_smile:

103

Sorry, forgot to add my own comments.

I’ll pay…

But not $50 a year, maybe $20 though.

104

Before I ask my question, I have two sorta preemptive “warnings.”

  1. This may or may not have been asked before. Probably has. I’ve read about 9 pages about it in the pit, but I haven’t read this thread yet.

  2. I’m asking the question out of curiousity. I have no ulterior motives behind it, I just want to know the answer.

Gosh…um, enough setup

Moderators and Administrators, if (when) the SDMB goes to a pay site, will you also be required to pay?

105

Name: Andygirl
Reason I want to be a moderator: Because I’m a cheap bastard who doesn’t want to shell out fifty bucks.

:wink:

106

I did register, but realistically I won’t be able to pay unless my situation changes dramatically. Last month I wouldn’t have been able to get my bus pass without help. I do work two jobs, but the Zoo is partially volunteer. I only get paid for certin things. My telemarketing job is 20 hrs per week at minimum wage. Mr zoogirl gets odd window washing jobs and the rare band gig. We don’t even get the paper, let alone magazines. I take my lunch in a bag and my coffee in a thermos. Of course we can’t even THINK about a credit card! We do have a car, an '86 Hyundai Pony. We paid $100.00Cdn. for her, in installments! My rings have been in the pawnshop so long I really can’t remember them clearly and paying the interest every three months is a major expense. The only way we justify the 'net is that we have kids in school and it’s my main source of entertainment. We run through the phone line on the cheapest plan available.
Heck, I can’t even pay off my library fine so I can use the computer there! I pay for my pet food by selling mice to the Zoo.

107

I’d like to comment on something Ed said in his proposal form, namely

Well Tuba - you questioned the use of my analysis of posting habits and I think you now have your answer. We know that about 2/3 of registers never post more than 10 posts. Almost half never even post once. If these posters have a mean of 2 posts each, the total posts for these 12,000 easily dropped posters is 24,000. Handy, tracer and Coldfire have more than that between them. Dropping these registers will make a negligable difference to board speed.

Ed seems to think that these are the only people who won’t register. If this is true, then we won’t see any change in board speed without big up-front spending. On the other hand, I think that we’ve seen here that Ed is wrong - we will lose valuable posters.

And I still think that there is no chance that anyone will ever register again once we go PTP, unless there is some kind of hook’em system.

I’ve extensively posted before about my feelings on the difference needed between the way one must treat customers rather than guests, so won’t rehash that. Obviously the authorities don’t agree. We shall see.

My opinion? I question the financial acumen of those responsible. I suspect that there is no project plan, no cost analysis, no projected income, no spending plan and no capital assessment. I’d be very suprised if they’ve identified any goals for the project other than “let’s try to make some money out of it”. Prove me wrong. Identify the annual income you think you need, together with the breakdown of costs. Show me the research you’ve done about retention/cost trade-offs.

Is there any chance of speaking to the financial people you’ve consulted about this? There are many people on this board who charge triple-digit figures per hour for financial consultation. Who have extensive experience and years worth of post-graduate qualification. We are all willing to look at your proposals for free. I simply don’t think you realise the resource you have here. There are people here who would charge a company thousands of dollars for the same analysis that they would look at for you for free.

Just to round off my financial musings: I estimate that there are about 3,000 regularly posting members of this message board. If they all paid $50, you’d be taking in $150,000 per annum. There is no way you’re telling me that the board needs that kind of financial commitment. You’re running it now for free!

Please, please do this properly if you’re going to do it. Don’t make a half-assed job of it. Too many people have their happiness in your hands.

pan

108

Can’t we just pimp Cecil Adams?

I mean, I know plenty of women who want smart children for a change.

109

If I recall correctly, you folks were playing around with this subscription idea a few months back. I say this because in the threads that popped up then I made a few suggestions, you know like letting people have a trial run with like say fifty free posts (one time or monthly). That and someone here said that stuff like GQ should be free since that recieves its benefits mostly from the freelancer astronomer or mathematician who could help with one guy’s query, but doesn’t care for MSPIMS or Inane Debates.

That said, I’m having hard enough time paying for stuff that I need for survival. College students aren’t the wealthiest folks on this planet. Especially those who are still paying off the medical bills for a parent now deceased. I’ve dropped in and out of school so many times, I’m known as the yo-yo. Hell, I’m allegedly working to raise enough money to inter my mom at the graveyard of her family. “Allegedly” because it seems that I’m writing more checks to repair my car and buy school books than to my savings account.

Do you know how bad you have to be doing when you can’t afford to bury the remains of your parent? And we’ve been holding on to her ashes (in a box on top of the counter) for two years now. Most of the family doesn’t know she’s been creamated. If they should find out, I’ll have hell to pay.

And given the unfortunate fact that my dad works in the hospitality industry in Washington DC at a time where people are too frightened to come to town (Well, I should say ‘worked’ – he’s been laid off and is looking for employment. Hopefully, there’s good news since he’s been getting interviews, but I can’t be overly optimistic.), you can understand why I’m rolling pennies to stay out of the red.

Hell with all of that to worry about, maybe the SDMB is too much of a distraction, and the user fees are a blessing in disguise.

110

Mornin’ Kabbes. Interested in your numbers…

I know you’ve done some interesting analysis of the membership but that did strike me, albeit instinctively, as being high.

However, maybe a way to confirm it would be to look at the average daily total of posts – I recall quite a lot of data about who posts most often from about eight-twelve months ago. IIRC, once past the top 300 hundred or so (currently posting) members, the average daily post average was below 1. Of course, that may have changed as the membership rate has grown faster but I’d be quite surprised if the number of posters whose current posting average was greater than 1 exceeded (maybe) 500.

From there, one has to think the take up rate of PTP will be significantly lower amongst those posting less than once a day than those above – this is all terribly arbitrary but nonetheless fascinating in a morbid culling kind of way…

Of course the other factor is what difference will be made at different cost thresholds – it seems that, for a significant number of people, $20 is a whole lot easier to justify to oneself than $50

You got anything in your existing Excel data that’s worth looking at with regard to average number of daily posts ?

111

Speaking as one of those people you mention who charge triple-digit figures per hour for consulting…

One problem with your analysis, however, is that you are only seeing posts. This is a common belief that has become pretty much a UL, despite my efforts to dispell it. One thing I have posted about on Board performance several times before is:

Which of these is responsible for the most bandwidth use?

  1. Posting.
  2. Reading.

On my board, the bytes transferred due to reading is well more than ** 100 times** that transferred by the posts made per day. That’s right - more than 100 times.

Think about how the Board operates - you get on, and how much actual data do you read, per every post? A really long GD thread can run 200 kb per page in total data that is transferred - if you contribute one long post, you are sending perhaps 5 kb. Scan through 3 pages of a Pit rant, and post once? Maybe you are at ratio of 200:1. I did a quick study, and found out once (about July of this year, when I was posting more) that on a typical day I had a read:post ratio of about 300:1. That’s right - 300:1.

Now, it takes somewhat more CPU power on the server to handle a “post” as opposed to a “read”, but the high ratio is still there.

Now, if PTP drives away a lot of readers, because people no longer want to read if they can’t post, then one can expect that the Board may see a huge increase in bandwidth.

112

vBulletin is a pig on CPU, too. All threadviews are php-scripted, so it takes a server-side script to show any thread. An alternative would be to use either an Apache extension module or a custom-written server executable (e.g. something in the realm of Slashcode, which is a full-blown webserver in its own right). Unfortunately, there aren’t that many people who even know how to write Apache extension modules and they’re considerably more effort to maintain. Even fewer people understand Slashcode.

Slashdot, which is probably the highest-traffic site of its type, uses ten servers in a distributed arrangement (see their FAQ for details. The SDMB probably doesn’t need this level of processing power, but moving the database engine to a separate machine from the webserver engine would not hurt at all (provided the two are connected by a fast pipe).

113

I have two points I’d like to make regarding…
a) SDMB responsivness
b) special username “tags”

Re: Responsivness. I believe Anthracite is correct in his hypothesis of the impact of reading being greater than the impact of posting.

If as a consequence of paying a fee there are fewer posters, it would be irrelevent to the responsiveness of the SDMB.

There is also a somewhat hidden assumption that if the number of members is reduced then the number of readers will also go down… in other words, if they can’t post they won’t read. I don’t think this is true. Based on my personal experience as a lurker for a couple of years (and I’ve seen other confessions of similar behavior recently), I don’t believe that a culling out of member will have any appreciable difference in responsiveness. I will be just as voracious a reader whether I pay to be a member or not.

Re: Username “tags”. I’ve seen an idea suggested in this thread advocating special member usename tags for dopers who pay extra (or sponsor others). I don’t have a problem with providing special privleges to certain people, but it’d have to be confidential and invisible to the rest of the doper population. Doing anything otherwise would create a very visible class system of “haves” and “have-nots”. I will definitely not be a member of a “club” that practices a class-like system.

114

Anthracite - yeah? Well I charge triple digits too :stuck_out_tongue:

Whilst I have no issue with your figures at all (and indeed I hadn’t considered it from that point of view so I owe you many thanks for giving me food for thought) I actually think that they strengthen my case. That is, lurking will still be free of charge! Those who post <10 times will barely change their habits - presumably lurking in exactly the same way before disappearing. What’s more, I’m guessing that many regs who choose not to register will lurk in order to stay in touch. Creating a subscription service will barely help at all in terms of easing the load. So money will urgently need to be spent of upgrading before subscription comes into effect, because noone will want to pay for two hamsters in a wheel.

London_Calling - I’d love to have more figures to hand. But Tuba comes down pretty heavily on anyone trying to harvest data (understandably, since it creates a load on the server). She calls it “silly games with numbers”. As such, it is rather hard to formulate facts rather than opinions.

If anyone is in doubt of the value of knowing these statistics, I’d merely point to Anthracite’s post above. She clearly knows far more about server loads than anyone else and so can tailor her bandwidth strategy appropriately.

Anyway, from the figures I already have in Excel I’ll see what I can come up with. But bear in mind that someone may read the boards once a week, posting three or four times in that session and thus staying below a once-a-day average and yet still enjoy their experience sufficiently to want to continue. Also every time we go on holiday our average drops. So it’s hard to determine a “critical” posting level that would indicate a determined future register.

pan

115

As you can see by my name and my post count, I lurked for a long time, and I rarely post. I can go back to doing that, without it making a difference to 99% of the people on the SMDB.

It certainly wouldn’t be worthwhile for me to pay to help out the perhaps five people to whom my replies have made a real difference. It makes me sad though, that those five will now have to go without answers to their questions.

I am pretty confident that I’m not the only poster out there, with a low post count, that actually helps people sometimes. I am just as confident that those posters, like me, will not pay, and that will indeed change the character of the boards.

Just when I was thinking about posting more often too…

116

I believe that the numbers being discussed $20-$50 are far too high considering the costs required to maintain a site like this. As I posted here the Reader could get this board hosted by Dell at a cost of between $3,000 and $6,000/yr on dedicated equipment.

The Reader would need that robust a system only if the board was as active as it is today. My guess is that we have between 2,000 and 3,000 active members. If that were to drop to, say 500 - 1,000, this board would not require the bandwidth or hardware it needs today. Not only would the number of posts drop, but the number of readers would too. We get our massive lurker population because we are an interesting and diverse crowd, drop off 2/3’s of our posters, and we become less interesting, thus fewer lurkers.

If the goal is to maintain our 2-3 thousand active members, and pay for the hosting, I believe that $5 per member per year is more than enough. If the Reader honestly needed $20/yr to keep the site running, I would pay it. I do believe in supporting this site, but I’m not eager to line the Reader’s pockets with profits.

At $5/yr we won’t lose many members due to financial difficulties, and lurkers/newbies will be more likely to register. $20/yr will strangle this site and make it a dull, uninteresting place to be.

I will also second (or third) the idea of a premium membership for the more social forums. This will give outsiders the ability to interact with the group in the Comments and GQ forums, to pique their interest in joining.

117

Eh, Algernon, my suggestion for a different title besides “Member” was based on the assumption that the only people who would be posting would be those who had paid a subscription, or who had been paid for, and that both categories of people would be considered “Charter Subscribers”.

Not a “have” and “have not” situation, in other words. Unless you really thought I was being serious when I was talking about the socks paying extra and getting a better title, in which case, dear, you need more help than we can give you here in ATMB. :wink:

118

Incidentally L_C…

500 subscribers x $50 is still twenty-five thousand dollars per year. Does it really cost even that much?

And that’s using your lower end number.

FWIW, I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least 3000 subscribers at $5 a pop - and it wouldn’t dissuade newbies too much either. That’s still $15,000 worth of income per year.

pan

119

If a membership becomes necessary, I also like the idea of having some fora free and some available only to members. However, I was thinking about this and I came up with an alternate idea:

What if anyone could read or post, but only members could start threads? Seems like this would allow people without funds to participate on the board extensively, but there would still be an incentive to register. 'Twould also cut down on trolling. Is this possible with board software?

I’ll add that I’m a little uneasy about creating second-class board citizens, but if it’s a choice between 1) different levels of membership, or 2) no board at all, or 3) full payment from everyone (and losing far too many people), I’ll opt for choice 1.

120

LOL. While I often have difficulty recognizing sarcasm or irony in this board… this wasn’t one of those times (and while I’d have to agree with your attribution that I need more help than can be given in the ATMB, it’s irrelevant to this topic :)). I was actually reacting to a post by Nostrodamus who had the same reaction as I did to an idea of identifying “classes” of posters, but I was too lazy to try to find the post where this suggestion arose. Mea Culpa.

::lowers eyes and shuffles feet embarrassingly::

PS - I like your analysis in the first page of this thread where you end with “let the experiment commence”.