If Ed clearly does care about the board, AND has connections to the Sun Times (used to or still works there?), might it be worth emailing him directly to ask about this situation?
What situation? We are currently cruising under the radar, apparently, and yes, while we cannot know the future here, might raising our hand here attract attention we currently enjoy not having? Is there risk being noticed may hasten what we all fear - do we need to have a plan? I don’t know what the right thing to do is, tho.
There isn’t really a situation. This is a minor hysteria. He has been @'d, that should be enough if he thinks anything here needs addressing.
I don’t know if it even rises to the level of “minor hysteria”… it’s just a concern/deliberation.
I for one would be sad to see the SDMB disappear, and would appreciate reassurances or a specific plan to help prevent that.
If we hear nothing and nothing gets done and it all goes poof one day, well, I’d be sad, but life would go on. But if there’s anything I/we can do to help prevent that (however unlikely) possibility, I’d be willing and eager to pitch in, that’s all.
No sale is pending, no bankruptcy is pending. Neither Tin soldiers or Nixon are coming for the SDMB. The fact there are 4 threads active in ATMB on this subjects feels like a self-generating minor hysteria or choose the word that you feel better fits it.
I fear if inquiries go to far up to the parent company and they notice we’re here, they might wonder why we’re here and if they should keep paying for us to be here.
Contacting Ed Zotti is fine, but bothering the Chicago Public Media or Chicago Sun-Times may do more harm than good.
That was my sense as well.
Well, I guess let’s hope he sees the @ mention and has the time to offer a few words here.
Edit: PS It’s not that I’m worried about a sale or bankruptcy per se, but that the Straight Dope (as a column) is an already-small part of whatever outfit happens to own them at any given time. Of that, the SDMB is an even smaller part. Either or both could be shut down even without an ownership change, for all the reasons you and others already said. Hopefully we’d get some warning in that event.
It’s suspicious that you left off the next line: “We’re finally on our own.” What isn’t said is always important!
Haven’t read the whole thread, just the first dozen or so posts, so the following might’ve already been confirmed, refuted, or whatever already. Anyhow:
I doubt that money would be an issue. I’d personally contribute a couple hundred bucks a year to keep this place alive, and I rarely post outside the Wordle threads anymore. So I’m sure there are others who’d chip in.
I can see whoever is buying whatever package that includes this board not wanting to pay anymore to keep it alive. But if they didn’t want to pay for it, it’s hard for me to see why they’d have a problem with cutting it loose and letting us keep it going if we could. They might want us to strip any references to the Straight Dope in the headers due to copyright issues. We’d probably need to create a nonprofit to be the actual owner, so there’d likely be some legal costs upfront unless we’ve got lawyer Dopers who’d be able and willing to handle that.
Maybe we could have a volunteer store all of the email addresses for all of us and send out a group email to discuss future plans. If and when the worst happens. I’d really miss you all.
As of now, the user page tells me that 583 people have posted at least once in the last 7 days. Roughly half the posters have 4 or less this week and half have more. A small minority have lots more.
There’s about 1100 people who’ve read at least one thread / post this week. The median is about 14 threads visited.
If we gathered the same weekly data for a month and combined them, I bet we’d see a small increase in the headcount for the whole month. But not much. 10% tops.
That’s out of a lifetime user community of almost 133,000 Dopers. Less than 1% of all Dopers ever created are reading this week, much less posting. 99+% are not. That total of course includes trolls, socks, and the folks who joined to post, but quit shortly thereafer. I’ll WAG the number of true, interested participative Dopers over all time is half that total, or about 65K.
Even in our current shrunken state, gathering the info on the ~1-2K recently active folks by hand would be a prohibitive job. Not too hard to scrape the data out of the site for somebody who knows how to use site scraping tools. Which is not me. IMO anyone using the greater powers of a moderator or administrator risks running afoul of TPTB. The TOS doesn’t seem to explicitly prohibit scraping tools, and their use for content other than the posts themselves is an even grayer area.
But by default ordinary users can’t see other user’s emails. So one of us ordinary schlubs volunteering to scrape won’t get us the data we really need. We’d need help from a higher power to do that.
Thank you!
Thank you for doing the research. My gut feel, simply based on how low hosting and internet costs are, whether self-hosting or using Discourse hosting, is that we could very easily be self-sustaining based on very minimal membership fees. I would happily contribute to that, and I’m sure so would many others.
We would get the fees together in less than a day from the community. I would gladly contribute.
I’ve been an (unpaid) member for over 25 years now, I think. Maybe less because I lurked for a long time, first reading Cecil’s columns, then realising there was also a forum.
I don’t post too much but I read, voraciously every day. I guess it is time to become a paid member, though I’d also donate time, effort and money to move the site onto AWS or GCS (Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Service respectively) as I have experience with both.
Because, in my estimation, this is a fairly low traffic website - I have not seen the logfiles - this could be hosted in the cloud for around $200 a month. I mean, I could find even cheaper hosting here in the third world - US$200 is waaaaay more than I pay for hosting about 15 websites, although they are all very, very low traffic.
But let’s face it. As beloved as this forum is to us members, we are gently aging out, and new users tend to be trolls or trocks. Together we could contribute like US$5 each and that would easily cover hosting.
This is the kind of expertise we’ll need if and when we go it alone.
Earlier I cited the hosting rates here at Discourse. The most popular plan is $100 a month, then there’s a big jump to $500 a month for the “business” plan. It’s not clear which one we’re on, but I’m pretty sure that the membership here would step up to cover reasonable hosting costs just to keep the place alive. Being hosted at Discourse is a big plus in terms of ongoing support. Despite all the whining when we first made the change, our late beloved TubaDiva made the right choice.
As I also mentioned earlier, aside from the matter of intellectual property rights, the administrator panel has a means of readily moving the entire site from one Discourse instant to another.
I still dislike discourse, but I have the technical ability to move the entire database and website elsewhere.
I mean ideally a SQL database (MySql is fine) but if necessary it could be ported to Postgres or event to a NoSQL db, but that would be really complicated. The website itself is trivial to move, as is the domain hosting. The database is the hardest thing to move.
If all of that is nonsense to you… don’t worry. I am a nerd, I know.
The standard implementation is PostgreSQL.
If we do someday self-host, we’ll definitely need a tech team, so the expertise is very much welcome and appreciated!
Luckily, Discourse can be Dockerized and hosted anywhere, and probably for quite a bit less than $200/mo (especially if we leave images disabled). Nobody has to install or maintain any database manually; the initial setup happens automatically in the container, and then Discourse can self-update. At most somebody clicks the upgrade button every few weeks.
That said, though, it’s all a bit premature unless we can get through the bureaucratic uncertainties… unless Ed jumps on, we might be kind of stuck in a holding pattern for the time being. And if we’re lucky, “time being” might be another few decades…
There have been many, many times where experts have volunteered to help. There have been many times where people have offered to donate, including to avoid that idiotic pay to post debacle. For some reason Ed likes to keep things very close to the vest and has steadfastly refused. He’s an outstanding writer/editor but his business/management skills are lacking.
I tried to figure that out once. I don’t know if the pricing has changed since then, but when I looked, based on the number of page views we get, we were up in the “contact us for a quote” range of the price options. I have no idea what we actually pay, but I guarantee you we’re not on the $100 per month plan. We get far too many page views for that.
Agreed. She definitely made the right choice.
Seems to me like a bit of major hysteria over something that isn’t really a situation.
I wonder what our contingency plan is for when the animal king or sentient cloud takes over?
(this is a Portal reference, for those who haven’t played the games)