No one said they weren’t. No actual numbers or even that the SDMB is running in the red. Just that they want more money.
"*It’s obvious we can’t continue as we have; that’s not profitable for the owner of this site.
To strain the metaphor to the ridiculous place, with your help I believe we can turn this boat around and make this site profitable."
*
See that implies the site isnt profitable but does not say as much. My WAG is that there is a tiny profit but that for the Sun Times is so small it may not be worth it.
We need to encourage participation. Perhaps offer contests and small prizes?
For example, in the Fall Thread. Encourage people to link personal photos of Fall colors and photos of them hiking or camping. Any photo of an activity related to the fall season.
Create a poll for the four best submissions. 4th prize gets a SDMB coffee cup. 3rd gets a packet of coffee and a cup. 2nd place a T shirt. 1st gets the T shirt and Coffee cup.
It’s all about bringing fun to the board. Make it a place people want to visit. Give them a reason to visit.
Little contests with inexpensive prizes would drive more people here. That increases ad revenue and pays for the small additional cost.
The issue with this fixation on so-called trolls, racism, sexism, stereotyping in general is that no one is in favor of a general ban on all types of that language. People pick and choose with all sorts of ad-hoc rationales what sort of language they want moderated.
Another problem is that legitimate discussion on topics such as gender gap, immigration, cultural appropriation, how sexuality is determined, genetics etc are impossible to have if people are afraid of a loud, organized mob clamoring for bans due to a false accusation of bigotry.
I’m not a marketing specialist. I was making the point that the board needs promoted threads. Perhaps offer contests and small prizes to encourage participation.
Put some excitement into coming here. Give people a reason to login.
I’ll defer to people in marketing to recomend how that’s implemented.
I see far too many new posters that lose interest and leave after a few months. That needs to change.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Stack Exchange / Stack Overflow as a reference / competitor. In my view, it’s become one of the most credible Q&A sites on the Net for IT and programming, of course, but also sci-fi, maths, and several other broad subjects. It’s certainly more credible than Quota and Experts-exchange. There are important differences with the SDMB, of course, but it’s consuming the same demographic of people with questions.
One thing about the Mods is that they are volunteers. Moderation will be inconsistent. Different mods will have different priorities. Different mods will have different amounts of time to spend on the board. I worry that all this griping about mods is just going to serve to make them quit. Who wants to put up with all these headaches for a coffee cup? Who would want to spend their free time on a task when it’s just means endless griping about what you did and didn’t do? Especially when the nature of this board means having spirited, contentious debates is the norm. It makes the pool of potential volunteers that much smaller.
I think we’d all be better served by realizing that they are volunteers giving up their free time to do this. It’s not going to be perfect. They won’t be able to make everyone happy. I think there’s too much focus on “mods aren’t perfect” that we’re going to end up with no mods at all.
And I don’t even HAVE my coffee cup anymore. Damn kids.
The griping and such really isn’t that big a deal. We do our best to deal with it and let a lot of it roll off our backs.
I am always curious, though. How does anyone think something like this is sustainable without ad dollars? Ad blockers and such are real problems. I’m not privy to the financials of the SDMB but I was in publishing for about 20 years, man and boy, and membership drives and sales won’t bend the curve. Without ad dollars it’d be difficult to make it work.
I keep an ad-blocker on by default, but I’ve turned it off for the dozens of sites that have politely asked me to–and that serve only non-intrusive ads.
Some sites (I’m looking at you, kenken.com) serve literally hundreds of “ads” per page that get blocked by Adblocker; if I leave the adblocker turned off, the single page will freeze my browser, and occasionally deliver me some faux ransomware. No way am I turning it off for those sites.
Straightdope isn’t as bad as kenken. But it’s probably the second-worst site I’ve visited in the past five years for serving intrusive ads.
Get a better handle on how more professional websites serve ads, and be a little more aggressive at detecting adblockers, is my suggestion.
I’m in the same frame of mind here. ProBoards and all the other free boards (basically without ads) were so common that I never thought of the SDMB as being much of an expense. To go further I figured it was actually turning a profit just from the various subscriptions and all that the paper was using for other things. From my Ecunet time I know this isn’t always the case but this was enough bigger that I figured it had to be close to a wash at the worst on what we paid for membership and all.
Like I mentioned before, when I was working at a school district it cost us literally nothing to set up a WordPress multi-user server. We already had a domain, a connection and public IPs. I was on salary and set it up in slack time, so no extra labor costs. It took less than 30 minutes to download and install. vBulletin isn’t free, but the latest version is only $249. Without existing network infrastructure vBulletin Cloud is under $800 a year for the highest tier of service. At $20 a year it would only take 40 paid members to cover that.
Could a mod or someone ask TubaDiva to drop by this thread when she has a chance? I’d like to see what she thinks of some of the suggestions made on the last couple pages.
