Serious question: Can someone (US resident) make a tax-deductible charitable contribution to the SDMB? Could it ever be registered as a charity? I’m guessing not – but I would argue that it brings community benefits not unlike a public library, say.
Not to beat the fossilized remains of eohippus, but it would be great if a gift subscription module could be modified to work with this version of vBulletin. I might even consider giving one out myself, based on demonstrated need with associated financial statements, credit reports, etc. furnished.
It does seem to me that it’s 2015, and the days of running your website from a server you keep in the closet are long over. It’s a lot easier to turn the hosting over to some cloudy-cloud type business rather than nursing a wheezing server sitting alone on a rack.
The trouble is that it would take some figuring to make that happen.
It may also be that hosting the site remotely will make the total costs of maintaining the site more transparent, which could mean it suddenly doesn’t seem worth keeping. Stuff that hadn’t been billed explicitly to the board–hardware, time and effort by people with other job duties, and so on–are now there in black and white as the monthly price for hosting the site.
If the users here generated enough money to buy upgrades… well, we still wouldn’t get them. It would just make the bottom line look a little better and the Sun-Times needs to show any profit it can find. There’s no chance that additional revenue from here would do anything but end up as profit for ST.
I was a Charter Member back when Charter Memberships started. It was a minor amount , I liked helping, and I renewed multiple times. One day, reading about someone who lapsed their membership and was complaining, I smiled to myself. I was expecting a renewal notice that month or next. Vaguely curious I checked my own status.
My membership had expired! I swear I didn’t get a notice. It was probably around when I got laid off and everything was attached to my defunct work email. So - I felt stupid; and annoyed; and because the hard-line was “no, you can’t get reinstated as a Charter Member” I didn’t ask for reinstatement and I just stayed embarrassedly mad. I didn’t rejoin [sub]That’ll teach ya![/sub].
Now, it would be even more petty and childish to come in here and comment about my guilt. And let my own annoyance run me - So I’ve gone ahead and just paid for a subscription again.
Now to the comment…
It amuses me how people talk about wanting to buy this or that (a mansion, a yacht, a car, an iPhone, etc.), but they never talk about the ongoing maintenance costs. Extra servers would require floor space, power, insurance, and licensing. Also maintenance and upgrades. Even replacing hardware requires the replacement effort recycling, and the other costs. Over time, replacing old hardware/software can be more cost-effective, but the replacement costs and ongoing costs have to be factored in to any decisions.
Show me the law that says I should pay for something that is free and then I might take your post seriously.
Well, thank goodness then that I am not one of those lowly plebes that you so despise.
Oh noes! Not the old “we provide the content for free” gambit. That’s so last decade.
If you kick in a million you get a “You’re ALL my bitches” T-shirt (the lettering is in gold thread). And our undying gratitude.
Oh, sweet!
Does anybody have some rough numbers* about the costs of running a message board?
At the forums of somethingawful dot com, there’s a huge, irritating ad at the top of the page that tells you bluntly…“please pay small fee ---- because it costs us $3500 per month for the bandwidth alone.”.
I know nothing about internet finances…
When the internet was young, there used to be chatter about, say, earing one cent for each click-thru on the banner ads, etc. But now, 10 or 20 years later, I’ve still never clicked on an ad , and never met anybody else who has either. Yet somehow the internet still functions and somebody must be making a profit somewhere.
I just want to be able to answer a simple question I heard from an elderly person in an old-age home about 10 years ago, who was thrilled when he learned how to surf the net:
He said “gee whiz—there’s so much good information out there!—Who put it there? And who’s paying for it?”
*(No, I’m not expecting you to expose the presumably confidential specifics about the profits of this site. I accept that it’s privately owned, etc,etc. )
Bitch, bitch, bitch.
By G-d, when I was a kid we subscribed to mimeographed newsletters, and we liked it!
:rolleyes:
No, that would be like making a charitable donation to Exxon. You can only deduct charitable contributions that are directed at 501-3(c) organizations. The SDMB isn’t one of those.
Also, this isn’t like a bunch of regulars at Ed’s diner. It’s more like the Martial Arts, Sci-Fi and Hip-Hop Film club meeting at the local Burger King every Thursday. Nobody in upper or even regional management knows whether we are a plus or minus for the larger group. They do know that the revenue involved is too small to care about.
The best thing to do is to pay up, sit tight, and not make waves. Someday the edifice will come crashing down; whether the final landing will be in non-profit status is anybody’s guess.
Here’s a datapoint though. Google has not purchased this message board. If an infusion of capital could easily turn this place into a money spinner, it probably would have happened.
It is interesting that no big Corp wants to pay $100,000 per year to add their name to the logo and sponsor this website. Or so it seems.
Hey gang, we could put on a show to pay for it!! Golly, doesn’t that sound like a swell idea?
We could use Ed’s Barn House!
I didn’t even know there was a buffering problem…
For a while, I thought it was my internet acting up. I’d click a thread link, and it’d begin to load.
Then, the loading bar would just stick there at like 10%, indefinitely.
Finally, I figured it was the kludge of shit hardware & software this board is hanging from by spit and bailing wire which was giving me this issue.
Now, 90% of the time I click on a thread, once I see it’s not loading, I’ll hit the cancel button, then reload immediately after. This seems to jog the buffering issue out of the way most of the time.
It’s been doing this so long now, and I’ve been using that lame work around, I practically just do it instinctually or out of muscle memory.
The raw costs really depend on the activity, both in terms of bandwidth as well as the amount of compute resources you need from your server to handle all the page requests and searches. Something Awful is at the far end of the spectrum: they’re quite a bit bigger than the SDMB in terms of traffic. For example, we have 5,282 active members (registered users who have logged on at all in the last month or two), they have 6,044 registered users online right now. They’re a lot smarter about monetization as well, selling the rights to give people custom titles/avatars and buy smilies, which I suspect makes them as much or more money than the memberships themselves (which are a one-time fee of $10).
A smaller board like mine costs almost nothing to run: I pay something like $350/year for the hosting (which is vBulletin-focused, i.e. not just some cheapo web server). We’ve ranged between 10x and 5x smaller than the SDMB in terms of traffic, but our performance has generally been as good or better, so we’re well within our server needs. If you archived all threads older than say two years, I suspect you could easily host this board for <$500/month including support and backups, but that is just a guess.
The costs are kind of secondary, though. A technically savvy person who wasn’t trying to make a profit could keep the SDMB running for quite a bit less than a media company is going to end up paying. They’re not a web company, so they have to pay for the expertise a hobbyist is going to supply for free. And they’re trying to make money: even if the board only cost $50/year to run, they’re not going to run it for free. Even making $10k/year in profit is still chump change.
I’ve been trying something like this, too, but it doesn’t work if you are doing a search. The “Search Flag” is set first, before any action is taken, so trying it again just gets you the “wait…” message and the search sometimes appears to stop until the time runs out.
And the notifications of thread activity arrive in my mailbox hours after the post they are talking about, rendering them pretty useless.
The ads unpaid guests were complaining about was malware from advertisers.