What About a Fund Drive?

About This Message Board
1

Coming back after a long absence, so please forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere and my search didn’t pick it up…

I’ve been reading about “game threads,” reviving old threads and a few other things that are deemed a drain on limited resources. Come to think of it, as long as I’ve been on this board, there has always been concern about giving the hamsters a fatal coronary.

I’d like the powers that be to consider that the boards have always seemingly been ‘underpowered’ with respect to supporting the kind of traffic the SDMB typically gets and in supporting the needs of those users. Given the guidelines for game threads, limits on post parties and such, I can only guess that there is some need to conserve bandwidth or lighten the load on the servers.

If I’m correct with that assumption, what’s the long-term solution? We know that the ad model doesn’t work well here. Members would hate the ads, and the SDMB is unlikely to find a long-term, sustainable sponsor that can provide enough ad dollars to provide a comfortable revenue cushion.

Doing some quick math here, I’m also assuming that subscription revenue doesn’t adequately cover costs. There’s servers, bandwidth, the regular cash-stuffed brown envelopes slipped under Jerry the Tech God’s office door, etc.

The following are just ideas. (Please don’t drag me in the Pit if you find them offensive, stupid or both.) What about a fund drive?

Right off the bat, there should be some sort of link to a Paypal account or similar mechanism, where Dopers can donate some cash to the Hamster Preservation Society or whatnot. Sometimes I’m in a good mood and have a little extra money in the kitty, you know. Sometimes I get some great advice from folks on this board. And I’d be happy to make a donation from time to time. I suspect I’m not alone in that regard.

How about an auction? Perhaps you could allow members to bid on things like custom titles. I’d pay some moolah for “Chief Animal Handler” or “Associate Vice President Overseeing Quality Control of Caffeinated Beverages” or something like that under my name instead of “Charter Member.”

Then again, there’s the whole tchotcke thing. Maybe sell some mugs from CafePress or a similar company with The Straight Dope logo on one side and some of the wittier catch phrases and such that we’ve popularized on the other (“Ask the [insert thing here]” or “I Know the Third Word Ending in -gry.” and stuff like that.)

I dunno. I’m just throwing out ideas here. It just seems that “limited resources” keeps rearing its ugly head from time to time and I thought that maybe it would be nice if we could take a few steps to maybe make resources a bit less limited.

Thoughts?

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Like these?

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Kinda. But more specific to the culture of the SDMB than that.

4

I favour charging members 10¢ per spelling error or grammatical mistake.

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Uh, we went pay (for long-term posting members) over eight months ago, and we physically moved our systems to a dedicated hosting company (rackspace, assuming I recall my traceroute experiments correctly) not long after. The boards have rarely been faster, especially compared to some of the more famous slowdowns.

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“Per” should be italicised. Nice to see you about, Noodles. Your current balance is $-0.10.

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If we had the 10¢ rule, I’d be bancrupt in no time :stuck_out_tongue:

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Then the price needs to go up.

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Yes, the boards are much faster, but that’s not what I’m referring to. Since coming back from my break, I’ve noticed that post count parties are now a no-no, and there’s a call for restraint vis-a-vis game threads. Unless I read something wrong, the reason behind both of these guidelines is a strain on resources. Maybe I’m making the wrong assumption insofar as I’m assuming that’s a strain on things like servers, bandwidth and the database. (If so, someone who is in the know should correct me.)

Given that there’s subscription revenue coming in, but there are still resource problems, I thought I’d suggest some ideas for generating some additional revenue.

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Noodles?

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For tax purposes, corporations and other for-profit entities cannot accept charitable donations. That’s the major obstacle cited in the past for not doing this. The opportunity cost of proposing, implementing and paying for a new marketing campaign that would reach a relatively small population with a product that will be of limited appeal to that small population would also be fairly cost-prohibitive (or so I would guess).

Could you imagine the meeting with the Chicago Reader executives? “You want to spend how much money to make and sell coffee mugs that can’t be marketed outside of a message board just so that people can type posts beginning with consecutive letters of the alphabet?!? And then allow them create more threads that celebrate the amount of posts they’ve spewed out, most of which were generated in the alphabet game thread?!? You’re fired.”

Another perfectly acceptable reason for banning post-count parties and game threads is because they’re obnoxious.

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It’s our loving nickname for Arnie Winky.

As for the subscription costs, remember, the price has gone up. For a while, a year’s SDMBing cost $5, and after a certain point it rose to $15. I suspect that next April (a year after the first subscriptions started), there’ll be a decent influx of $15 subscriptions heading toward Chicago. (Not to say that this’ll solve all the world’s problems, but it’ll still be nice.)

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Just get all the Mods and Admins to clean out the cracked and stained cups out of their cupboards and autograph them with a permanent marker. I’d buy one.

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What they said.

Our parent company the Chicago Reader is a corporation. Like all corporations, there are strictly defined rules as to how they handle and process and report on money they receive. There is also potentially a lot of hassle and/or expense involved; for example, we don’t take cash or checks or money orders for subscriptions because the cost of processing them is actually more than it’s worth being open to such methods of payment.

Fund drives, while very commendable (how can you not appreciate someone who wants to throw money at you?), are hard to handle under those conditions.

We’d rather you invested in us through our subscription and Straight Dope store offerings, of course reserving the right to change our minds should the Reader decide to do so and we figure out a way to make it happen.

your humble TubaDiva
Administrator

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Cite please.

Thank you.

I’m a moderator and therefore get a free pass. Ha!

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From the OED (which I can’t link to):

That’d mean I’m wrong, then. The dozens of citations the OED gives are spotty in their italicization over a very long period (even for uses like per diem).