Will the last person to post please release the goat from its pen?
I just looked at recent posting traffic. At this time 3 days ago = 72 hours ago I posted #20247633. My post 3 above here is 20253869. That’s 6236 posts by everyone in 3 days or 2079 per day.
I think of myself as a heavy poster. Not that that’s a good thing.
I contributed 46 of that 6200. So 100 equally heavy posters would get us 4600 posts from them. So we’d need another 1600 from everybody else: the onesie-twosie posters.
Which says Ambivalid’s estimate isn’t too far off. Now that’s scary. It’s real brittle and could collapse (or expand) in a hurry.
I doubt the 100 estimate. No statistics, just a feeling as a moderator reading the Board.
Oh, goodness. Are people really shocked to hear that participation in a message board is declining?? I mean, really. In today’s world, a message board is so quaint. If I mention on Facebook that I participate on a message board, I get the most weird responses, especially from anyone younger than 35.
Personally, I would have assumed that the number of strongly active participants (at least three posts a day) long since peaked and went down, probably sometime in the 2000s. Part of why I stopped participating regularly in the late 2000s was because the number of people who participated strongly in General Questions and Great Debates was shrinking. Great Debates these days seem to involve about the same 50 people over and over and over (saying the same things over and over and over). Given that this sort of “computing” is going quite out of fashion, I don’t think we have that much longer to live (even without the sale of the paper taken into account).
I am big. It’s the board that got small.
And lock up the plane and turn off the treadmill.
EDIT: I initially misread that as saying something about quality vs. quantity, to which I replied that it sounds like a cliché but it’s really true – as long as good discussions from thoughtful and knowledgeable posters are forthcoming, that’s all that matters. Of all Internet venues for discussion of general topics, this board still has the highest ratio of informed posters to the inevitable gang of idiots and trolls that I know of. Too many active posters is actually a disadvantage at some point because discussions become unmanageable. It would be unfortunate if quality posters are leaving, but I’ve seen no evidence of that, and if a high proportion of the riffraff is being diverted to “social media” like Facebook, I’m not sure if much value is being lost.
If quality is indeed being lost, then I agree it’s a problem. I haven’t been around long enough to see that.
Probably. Someone did a survey over 10 years ago and posted the results here. I was surprised to find I made the top 200 most prolific posters, and you can check my profile to see my post count isn’t that high.
The real question is: How much does it cost to run the thing, and how many posters/members are needed to generate a small profit? Or are we losing money already?
I’m guessing that paid memberships are actually more remunerative than guest posters. Just because ad revenue requires a long time to accumulate.
That is where my curiosity lies as well; more the finances and the numbers from that side of the equation.
The best vBulletin hosts charge from $25 a month to $50 for shared hosting; and VPS starts at $109 a month with 1TB bandwidth. Plus 20GB space and 1GB RAM. All have hourly backups.
The $50 shared has 750GB bandwidth which would be probably enough, but the VPS would be surer. It’s certainly not as if this place runs like blazes, so some faint delay would be acceptable with shared.
The software ( now very aging, but I sympathize since change can be bad ) is long since paid for. There’s not that much maintenance needed the hosts don’t do, once set-up. Only when disaster strikes. And disaster will strike: it’s php.
Help me out, are you saying that the main cost of the SDMB is $109 a month?
Theoretically?
Presumably the board makes much of its revenue from people who find threads through google searches and view them without even signing up or posting. Those threads could be from this month or 15 years old. Ad-based revenue doesn’t rely on the number of active members here, just lots of traffic to the site’s existing content from random search engine users. These boards rank very high in google searches for practically any subject.
According to Alexa datathe entire straightdope.com domain (the main column, these boards, and the games site) ranks 7,261 in traffic worldwide and 2,280 in traffic in the USA. The site has an 88% bounce rate meaning that only 12% of those who visit a given page go on to view another page in the same session, which means that “active members” make up less than 12% of the board’s traffic. The average time spent on the site by each visitor is just over 2 minutes and 54% of all visits to the site begin with a search engine.
Getting google searchers to click a link and view one page that has ads on it is far more important to the bottom line than maintaining higher numbers of ‘active members’ who post daily and read lots of threads. At least for now. In the board’s heyday so many prolific posters created so much content the board can coast for years like this with no new posts at all. Of course that isn’t sustainable forever but for the time being I wouldn’t worry that a year over year decline in active posters makes much difference. Little Ed is sitting on a gold mine in terms of search engine/ad revenue for the foreseeable future.
Interesting search terms that lead people to view the site:
I just recently posted in a thread about the Sargasso sea so I like to think I’ve done my part to help the board survive.
Mods, really? You’re condoning this fat-shaming?
No, I’m not, because I have no information; I’m saying it certainly could be done for that.
They may have chosen a more expensive option, or be locked into some long-term deal for decades.
The bandwidth included in whatever plan would be the main criterion; this is a moderately popular board ( but there are bigger and more active boards ). The space on disk will be heavy since this is a very old board, but I would think anything over 20 GB would still hold that ( both files and database ) — there are no pretty pictures or attachments to swallow space.
A dedicated server goes from $269 a month to $1420 a month for the best; but this doesn’t feel like this is using that.
All these plans, shared $25 to dedicated $1420. include all care and maintenance; so there are no other expenses than hosting. Personally I don’t like advertising ( as a concept ) but that has nothing to do with it when I say they aren’t going to be making a fortune from advertising here.
SDMB dead by 2019? Thanks Trump.
Yes, I sure notice the lower volume and less discourse. It does hang over my use of the SDMB - that awareness of decline.
Since it is my understanding that this is simply the way online social interactions are going, it doesn’t feel like there is anything to be done. If that is incorrect it would be good to hear about it.
If you get tired of this place, there’s always Facebook.
I know that on my recent renewal I signed up for the one year membership instead of the two year. I figured, if it all goes down the drain why be out an extra $7.47?
Ambivalid is on the money about 100 people generating the majority of new posts. Of those 100, some fraction tend to post most extensively about some personal hobby horse. Those posts don’t necessarily add value to the board.
I agree that the place has an overall feeling of decline. Many people who made GQ a treasure trove are gone. People making the same points on the same topics for the nth time means not even opening most threads in GD or The Pit.
Fax is fax, though. General interest message boards are a rather quaint method of communications these days. The fact that this one is still even a little popular is remarkable. The only message boards I can think of that are still thriving are single topic boards.