Why are you strawmanning?
If we have tech problems they’re not because we don’t want to spend the money, it’s because I wasn’t aware we had problems. Reading through this thread and some others I see we have multiple reports of slow loading; I sent a note to Jerry asking if something’s up. I’m touched (seriously) by the thought that people want to help out, but we’re not without resources; if something major is broken we’ll fix it. (Minor broken things we sometimes let slide.) I’ll let you know when I hear more.
Well, in any case, Olsen Johnson convinced me that **August West **is right about LSLGuy being right. So I am now a paid member. I don’t want to be one of those freeloaders I hear about.
Unfortunately I’m unemployed at the moment but as soon as I’m employed and back on track financially I’ll convert to a paid membership even though I mostly lurk. Overall this is a great community with interesting discussions and I would hate to see it go away.
I too have encountered slow loading when I click on thread titles and the like two or three times in order for them to load but I thought maybe my computer was to blame so I didn’t think much about it.
Please don’t go anywhere SDMB. I would miss *most * of you terribly.
Wow, that’s fantastic! Thanks!
That hanging problem has been happening so long that I don’t remember it not happening in the 9 years I’ve been posting here. It would be so great to have that fixed. Thanks for looking into having it fixed.
Freeloaders schmeeloaders. If the Dope’s in financial trouble, it would fix that Paypal-only payment “choice.”
Since it won’t or can’t, knock off the freeloaders insult.
Srsly, Ed, there’s some related problems here.
We have several current threads here, discussing (a) speculations about financial problems amid fears that TPTB might just pull the plug ; (b) complaints of long-standing board slowdowns amid fears that TPTB won’t want to invest in fixing it ; © exhortations from user to user urging us to cough up some dough ; and (d) problems paying with PayPal, which some users just don’t want to do, or aren’t able to pay without making a PayPal account. (ETA: And (e) new advertising protocols for non-members to raise more money that users are having problems with.) We have users saying they would pay if it weren’t for that.
TPTB need to be open to other forms of payment. The money will still be good.
At least you get those emails. My ISP started blocking emails from the SDMB when it started serving up malware with the ads, regardless of the fact that I had it white-listed and I wasn’t getting ads. I can’t seem to get them to stop blocking them.
Let me address these separately:
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The Straight Dope as such doesn’t have financial problems - we’ve been in the black for the past few years, due primarily to ad revenue. I’m not at liberty to discuss the financial situation of our parent company, but it’s no secret the newspaper business has been struggling, and every effort is being made to maximize online revenue. Thus the more aggressive ad schedule implemented in the past few weeks.
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The perception that SDMB performance has been uniformly terrible forever isn’t accurate. Performance sucked years ago, but we upgraded around the same time we started running advertising (we’ve been hosted on a server farm since around 2009) and service quality improved markedly. Things break occasionally and Jerry has to buzz the server farm to get them fixed. We may have such a problem now; I haven’t heard back from Jerry, perhaps due to the holiday weekend, but we’ll figure out what’s up in due course.
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Some board functions don’t work well due to limitations or bugs in the commercial software we use. The code is open source and long ago we used to modify it occasionally, but this was always a pain. The IT department has concluded the non-modified software version we’ve got now is stable and secure and we’re not messing with it, so that’s that.
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I realize some people would like different payment options, but the decision was made that PayPal was a reliable, low-maintenance solution. Apparently the PayPal screens currently shown by some browsers don’t give U.S. users the option of making a credit card payment without opening a PayPal account; I’ve asked Jerry what’s up with that. As far as I know guest (non-account) payments via PayPal remain an option for U.S. users.
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If you don’t want to see the new ad series, log in. If you don’t log in, you won’t see the new ads often; the frequency cap has been set low. I purposely don’t log in so I see what casual visitors see and frankly the ads are a lot less intrusive than on many major newspaper sites.
To summarize, we’ve chosen to do or not do certain things for business reasons, not because we’re broke. We’ve tried to be reasonably forthcoming about what those reasons are. That may not be the answer you were looking for, but it’s the best I can give.
It’s the other way around, unless it happens to users in the U.S. too. I’m in Canada and cannot buy a subscription without opening a Paypal account (which I won’t do).
If I change the dropdown on the payment page to United States, payment choices appear. Changing it back to Canada removes all options but Paypal.
This is the case whether I use Firefox, SeaMonkey or Safari on my iMac and whether I use Safari or iCab Mobile on my iPad.
Well, I can tell you why you see this long time regular appearing as a guest. Last year I set up a separate email account on Google and listed it for my email address here at the SDMB. I did this to keep any email activity from the Dope apart from my other email. Due to inactivity with the new email account I forgot that I’d changed it, and therefore I didn’t get the annual notice alerting me that my subscription was due. After renewal time had past I discovered that I was showing up as a guest so I did some checking and discovered that I’d overshot the subscription deadline by a week or ten days or so. I wrote and explained the situation and asked that I be allowed to pay my subscription fee and have my Charter Membership restored and my request was ignored.
So, I didn’t pay and now I’m showing up here as a guest. On the other hand, I’ve never been one to bitch about board performance or ads, and as a matter of fact where the ads are concerned I don’t even block ‘em because I don’t like the way ad blockers interfere sometimes with loading of videos and so forth on other sites’ web pages. So I just ignore 'em and scroll past 'em. It’s become automatic and I hardly even notice them anymore.
That’s what I was trying to say. All non-U.S. users, including Canadians, have to set up an account to use PayPal. Some U.S. users aren’t given the guest payment option, but that evidently reflects some limitation of the browser they’re using, not a PayPal policy decision.
It just becomes unresponsive. You should just go ahead and finish.
I see what you did there.
Thanks, Ed, for the update. Good to know.
Wow. It’s getting really bad. I thought my Wi-Fi had gone out. But then other sites loaded just fine.
And at 2:30 AM, too, so load isn’t an issue.
(Note, that 2:32 edit took until 2:35 to load.)
In the years that I have reading the Dope, with different internet connections and different computers, I have never - not once - had a thread load slowly. Maybe I am just lucky, but I’d love to know why.
I used to be a member when I contributed frequently. Now I am mainly an observer I am a guest. My conscience is assuaged by the fact that, if I understand it correctly, the advertising that is presented to non members generates income. My memory isn’t what it was, but I am sure that there was a lot of discussion about whether membership or advertising generates the most income.
I don’t know if it applies in the SDMB process, but when making purchases in Canada over the internet from the USA, I’ve found that Canadian VISA DEBIT tends to work when Canadian VISA will not work.
A few minutes ago I tried to get on and after Xing out of two pop-ups I lost the whole screen, but I’m just a guest.
I’m sorry I’m one of the freeloaders. But since I’m not even always sure we can keep the internet (or even have a place to plug in,) now does not seem like the time to subscribe although I think the fee is very reasonable.
Until our finances are more stable please try to tolerate my freeloadiness. The SDMB is an important part of my on-line life.