Yup, I want cool stuff. In particular, I want private messaging.
From this thread (sticky) from last year:
As it stands now, all we really got is posting privileges and search access. No extras. So, will we ever get more?
You get the whole list as Ed enumerated, which is more than you stated. Not a huge amount more, but more, just the same; more than guests get to see.
As for the other “cool stuff” on the list, we’re still studying the issue, but certainly anything that adds to the already heavy load on the server (like private messaging) is probably not going to be implemented anytime soon.
We have been very careful in all our statements on this issue dating back from before we went to subscriptions that we would love to give you more and hoped to give you more and especially to give you some bang for your buck . . . but we specifically stated that asking you for money did not mean you were going to get kicked-up service. Your original question is really not well posed, as we have never made such promises.
Hell, we’d just like to be online and available for you; anything more than that will be a bonus.
Watch ATMB for further developments.
your humble TubaDiva
I agree with the absence of avatars, images, signatures (we don’t have that, right?), as they add nothing useful to members.
But let’s be honest, Ed’s ‘you-get-all-this’ list doesn’t contain much. Right now I can envision Ed at the moment he made the list (I picture him as a timeless man with white beard reaching down to his toes, walking aimlessly around in his office, humming ):
‘…hmm, how can I sell nothing to the brightest people in the world?..’
So let’s have a look. Any member of a board needs a user name, and posting, well, that’s kind of what a board is all about. The post count and view member profile features come with the software, and is part of creating a community.
This leaves searching (very useful!) and the cleverly devised ‘Charter Member’ title, which I suspect was Ed’s brilliant solution to his stark challenge. Except that many of us doesn’t care that much about the title.
I don’t want to reveal myself as an ungrateful bastard nor am I bitching about the money (which is next to nothing), but as a member of various boards I speak of useful features which are lacking on SDMB. The most basic one is the option to send an email message directly from the board or have onboard private messaging, possibly with auto deletion after x days. In my experience, these are features not used very often but they are handy to have on occasion.
The line ‘we’re still studying the issue’ has been the standard reply for more than a year now, though I read in you reply that it’s not going to happen. 
I don’t know what to tell you here, obviously we’re not making you happy and I apologize for that.
We’d love to be able to have this board do all kinds of fabulous tricks, but it takes every bit of capacity we currently have to get it to just be a message board – and people are bitching about performance on that as it is.
We have also had to disable features such as email because of abuse of the system by others. . . it’s the classic case of a few wingnuts that screw up the deal for everyone else. (We used to also let you put images on the site too, you can just imagine the abuse on that one.)
It has been damned difficult to steer the SD ship between these two rocks and not have some paint scraped . . . at the least.
I’m sorry that it’s not the perfect experience you envision it to be. I’m sorry it’s not the speedy, spiffy board everyone craves. It’s the best we have to work with right now.
your humble TubaDiva
Don’t worry, I am happy. See → 
?
It’s more of an annoyance really, when I want to bring up an issue that is related to, but off-topic, to a thread, or when a thread has died or outlived its usefulness, but I want to check up on something. An example is my post (#9) in this thread.
Btw, just discovered the ‘how-many-paying-members’ thread, talk about timing. :dubious: Nevermind.
I was just happy becoming a charter member, I guess some peeps won’t be happy till the Straight Dope is presented in 3D smell-o-vision 
I thought that charging for subscriptions was supposed to help solve this problem.
I’m just musing, since I really have no complaints.
Capitalism has failed. We now have subscription fees and lousy service.
Actually, that sounds like capitalism as usual…
::: sigh :::
No, charging for subscriptions was supposed to help us SURVIVE.
From the original word on the subject:
The Straight Dope is switching to paid subscriptions
>http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=253315
FTR, there was a theory in play when Ed wrote that original post: The belief was that as soon as we got to the point where the only people who could make posts and search were paying customers, there would be excess capacity, as the usage numbers would drop. To our everlasting surprise, this turned out not to be true and usage numbers post-subscription stayed the same or rose even higher than pre-subscription levels. So much for that theory.
your humble TubaDiva
Hell, maybe we SHOULD offer tote bags.
I’ve never complained about the service, the speed, or the subscription fee. But. . .could I have a purple one?
Well, as others have mentioned capitalism, sounds like you have a classic supply and demand problem - too much demand and too little supply. Maybe you should raise prices?
One thing I’m curious about - you seem to retain all the messages since The Dawn of Time. Does the actual size of the message board have any impact on the speed?
Yes, it absolutely does.
However, the alternatives to keeping them all have unclear tradeoffs.
Deleting old messages means, of course, that parts of the knowledge base are eliminated. However, one can also argue that since people seem to be completely freaking unwilling to use the Search function, especially in GQ, there’s little point in having searchable threads. On the other hand, it is not known how many times a query has been answered by a successful Search, as, of course, if that is the case then no thread is posted. Then there are those who bring up the issue that the Search engine database seems to be more and more corrupted as time goes by, and needs rebuilding. On the other hand again, it does work fairly well for many people.
But still, the same questions keep being asked, again and again. And it doesn’t matter if someone goes through the work and effort to do a Staff Report on it, or if Cecil does one himself, people skip over those and post in GQ anyhow. What’s really stupid is when someone posts a link to a column, or posts a complete answer to the OP with cites, and yet, for some reason, people feel compelled to come in up to several days later and post the wrong answer, or “I don’t know, but I think it’s this”. So does keeping the old posts matter, when people act so stupidly?
I’d still have to say yes, because I’m sure a lot of people don’t act stupidly, and do gain from it.
Some Members have a huge stake in keeping messages. Sadly, post counts are still a “fad” thing, and people will most certainly complain if their post counts drop because old threads are deleted. Also, there is the emotional investment people have in seeing old posts by departed (meaning, left for elsewhere) Members.
However, it is true that there are an enormous number of threads/posts that do not belong on here, and which could easily be deleted with pretty much no one caring.
So there are a lot of issues at stake in this, and everyone has a different opinion. I’d give mine but it’s meaningless.
To say nothing of its use as an “ah, but a year ago you said…” in GD.
Regarding the huge archive of threads and its relevance/irrelevance…would it be possible to somehow separate the bulk of old threads from, say, the past month’s, so that the server would only be having to perform searches on the whole lot of them when people specifically choose to do that? I imagine there’s a lot of wasted energy in performing searches on many years of threads, when all somebody’s doing is trying to find a thread they saw three days ago.
That’s the premise we all work from. With thousands of people reading this board, why would we delete posts just because an incredible minority act badly?
When I do a search, I limit it to the time frame in which I am reasonably sure the post will appear.
Doesn’t everyone?
However, if a thread/post doesn’t appear in that time frame, I’m likely to search a larger time frame. (Although I can’t recall this happening to me a lot.)
I guess it evens out, huh?
No - and why is that surprising, when that necessitates choosing the ‘advanced search’ option?
I choose Advanced Search beacuse I care.
I care about the SDMB, I care about server load, I care about downtime, I care that everyone is critical about the boards and how they are run.
I’m just trying to do my small part to keep this place alive.
If I know a post I am searching for was made in the last year, WHY would I search all the way back to when this board first went online? I’d just get more false hits. I restrict searches all the time with Google Groups on this logic.