It doesn’t help. In fact, it doesn’t make sense or contain any useful information.
If you are indeed a “computer guy” , why don’t you just lay it out in a format that everyone can understand?
Because I’m a computer guy - it’s not our style.
LilShieste
I swear this noob-can’t-get-a-break shit never gets old. Ever.
I’ll offer you some hope, now that I am over 1930 post, I get no flack, nor do people dump all over my posts like they used to… oh, that’s right, that didn’t happen either.
News to me. I don’t actually recall getting really upset here about anything more consequential than abominations in the matters of baseball and ice cream.
Refresh my memory, please.
ETA: And once a certain man in uniform whom I saw as besmirching it.
That’s probably because nobody notices you, or knows who the hell you are.
If you don’t think post counts amount to anything, then you are an ignorant jackass.
Why don’t you push for post count elimination, and see what you run into?
What’s the threshold we have to hit, in order to be noticed? I missed the thread on it.
You might just need 70 more posts or something, FordPrefect. I mean, VCO3 doesn’t have that much higher of a post count than you, and he’s pretty well known.
LilShieste
I don’t know why it is, but when I see FordPrefect’s name brought up, instead of thinking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide, my mind flashes on Andrew Dice Clay.
I mean, I remember about the Ford Fairlane movie (although I never saw it), but this Doper just makes me see a tallish guy in blue jeans and a leather jacket.
That’s because there are trolls, and then there are erudite trolls.
If I post: " i sez them thar negroes are iggorant". Then I get cashiered rather quickly.
But if I post: “It has come to my attention, after much research at the Library at Cambridge, that Black People, i.e., African-Americans do not rate so highly on the Stanford-Binet quotient, nor on the MMPI , that I must enlist your opinions on said matter.”
See? People are more willing to put up with you if you can speak prosaically.
**bbs2K ** likes turtles.
It was strictly an uneducated guess on his part made in post #32 of this thread. We bot independently estimate there are about 4,000 members (based on discussion elsewhere and elsewhen) and also assuming about half are Charter members paying half price, I would expect subscription revenue to amount to $40,000 - $45,000. That does not buy you much in the business world.
Can or will that number be validated? No and I do not expect it to be. But I firmly believe it is not far off the mark. Of course, you don’t have to agree with me. After all, I have less than 500 posts so I’m probably not credible. I get my money’s worth without any grandiose expectations.
Why do all these complain-about-performance threads end up being about what’s done with the money*, instead of this question:
What is needed to make this site run normally? Is the problem even known and would higher membership fees pay to fix it?
Some people say that it’s not that bad. I can only speak for myself, but this is without question the worst site I visit, performance-wise. Yes I know it’s the way you like it and I can fuck off to some of those fancy non-timing-out boards right now, but I just don’t get why you like it this way.
*Not this thread though, it started with “what’s done with the money?” and ended up… in… I have no idea at this point.
So, what you are saying is, is that during the 5 or so years that the SDMB was free, the Chicago Reader, a free newspaper was dumping 40-45K per year to run a message board that generated no revenue.
I find that hard to believe.
Please tell me he was singing the theme song to The Facts of Life. That would be awesome…
And if Mrs. Garrett’s freckled bosom was riding shotgun, that would be doubly awesome!
Disclaimer: I am not even remotely speaking in an official capacity. I know next to nothing about the actual details of the server setup and exactly nothing about the financials of this message board. I have exactly no interest in speculating about what they are or arguing about what they should be.
I was recently reading a thread in a tech forum about setting up a server for a site (social networking?) that would have a heavy database component. A knowledgable seeming IT guy was cautioning that once the database reaches a certain size, you’re likely to hit some serious performance bottlenecks. Setting up a server which can achieve good performance under this type of load is non-trivial, as the resource requirements for a web server are dynamic and can fluctuate quite a bit. Setting up a scalable server cluster is far and away the best solution, mainly to get the database on a separate machine where it can hog all the memory and not have to compete with the web server for resources. This is not a small undertaking. I myself have set up and sysadmined several Linux boxes, including a web server. The technical know-how needed to set up a reliable and secure web cluster, not to mention the increased hardware and hosting costs, are quite a bit greater than what’s needed for a basic web server.
This is not intended as a defense/explanation/whatever of the current situation. Just that it’s my understanding that the issue is not simple or linear. Sites where the database size and/or traffic is below a given threshold are going to perform significantly better than those where it’s not.
That’s your prerogative. I believe that it could and did happen in slow increments until someone realized “Shit, we’re spending a lot on this” and decided to assign part of someone’s wages to managing the Board. A computer person’s salary, including benefits, would eat up $40k pretty quickly. If they manage to make a little profit off it, great!
My understanding is that is exactly the case, minus the actual dollar figures. The board was free to use, and the Reader was operating it at a loss. They kept it up because it was so popular, but the lack of revenue from it made them reluctant to do more than the minimum to sustain it.
To truthfully answer your earlier question, a site like this has tons of money-sinks:
[ol]
[li] Personnel - even if they don’t have a dedicated IT staff, they’ll need at least 1-2 people available to jump in for immediate problems (e.g., the database just ate someone’s kid; or more likely, the database stopped responding.).[/li][li] Software - some software could come free, and some could cost some serious money. Software needed would include: operating systems, mail delivery programs, BBS software, database. Keep in mind that any costs incurred here would be on a per-server basis, so the financial burden can range from fairly small to ridiculously large.[/li][li] Hardware - web servers, load balancer, database servers, mail servers, additional servers to take care of things like automatic thread notifications[/li][li] Other miscellaneous - domain registration, ISP and bandwidth usage, data center costs, backup costs, etc.[/li][/ol]
When all is said and done, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if these costs totalled $100,000 a year. I was lead developer for a decently sized website a year ago, and I was astounded by the number of moving parts necessary to keep something like this going. And as you build more and more traffic, members, etc., it only gets worse.
LilShieste
So don’t resubscribe.
Maybe I won’t, if what you just posted is the level of supposedly intelligent rebuttal I can expect here.
Why don’t you go hang out in an AOL chatroom?
Maybe it’s just me, but tiresome as I personally find the planned Friday-night “let’s prompt a flameout in the Pit by baiting people” threads, at least they’re not usually this transparent. Learn some finesse, grasshopper.
(And yes, I realize it’s not Friday night, but it’s the end of the week for many Americans, tomorrow being a holiday, so I think this qualifies.)