{Takes off sunglasses, squints, half-turns head} SDMB Miami: because we made a promise to a little girl’s mother. {Dons sunglasses again}
You got red hair?
Shouldn’t we have a SDMB Special Victims Unit?
OK, a serious answer. I don’t think this is the way to go to generate revenue. It’s the online equivalent of a free local gig guide, and I just don’t see the demand if it’s limited to one US city. This Reader’s based in Chicago, sure, but this board is now way beyong that in both American and international scope: how many posters are going to check in and hang out for good restaurant recommendations in Chicago? It seems to be to be going smaller and more insular rather than bigger and bolder: remember the early days of “home computers” when they were touted as being able to store recipes? That’s how it reads to me; an attempt to recreate a print medium of limited interest on computer simply because it can be on computer.
Most of the revenue generating ideas seem to miss what we’re actually good at generating: knowledge, information, wit, humour and sarcasm: there are some great writers on this board, but we essentially sit here, hope people will find us by chance, and be impressed enough to stay. We don’t generate content that people want and market it: sites like Cracked do, and in my humble estimation we are capable of being a lot funnier {and much better informed} than they are. I started this thread on ideas for generating revenue a while ago in ATMB, and I still think that many of the suggestions are eminently doable, but it sank without any official response.
Seriously, people. They added a couple of goddamn links at the bottom of the page. If we don’t want to play there, we don’t have to. Hell, I think the Barn House is dumb as shit but luckily I’ve installed the Firefox extension that prevents it from pissing in my eye upon loading. Maybe y’all should do the same.
And if it’s destined to be such a goddamn failure, then it won’t affect board performance anyway and we can all be on our merry little way.
Off-board, someone else went on a half-literate tirade about it being a “bad business model” and when four of us asked what the hell they were talking about we were accused (in true SDMB fashion, I must add) of drinking the Flavor-Aid.
This place isn’t perfect, but I swear, Cecil himself could show up at your house, hand you twenty bucks and give you a hummer and there’d be four fuckin’ Pit threads about it.
I coulda gone all night without thinking about that…all week.
If he stole them, damn right there will.
The fucking movie theater near my house not only keeps showing movies I don’t want to see, but they PUT THE NAMES ON THE MARQUEE NEXT TO THE ONES I DO WANT TO SEE! What the fuck? I’ve been going to that movie theater for years and not only do they want to piss on me by showing movies I don’t like, but they make me waste time every day when I drive by reading the names of all those movies I don’t like! God, why can’t they just list the good movies up there and if some idiot from out of town wants to stop and see a shitty movie, they can just go up to the window and ask? Is that so unreasonable? I mean , none of my friends want to see those shitty movies either! It’s a miracle that place hasn’t gone out of business years ago.
Thank god I don’t have cable. I heard there are whole CHANNELS of stuff I’d never want to watch. And the cable company keeps sending me ads trying to get me to sign up like I’d actually PAY to flip past those channels just to get some shows I might like to watch. Sorry, assholes! Good luck with THAT business plan!
Hey, check it out…
you can embed pictures in the Chicago fora.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=10540895&postcount=3
For now, at least.
Huh.
Did you see Ed Zotti’s response?
Bolding mine.
It seems to me that this demonstrates a certain amount of ignorance regarding exactly what is involved with the embedding of images.
The images placed in the post by pulykamell are hotlinked from a completely different site. When this happens, there are zero bandwidth issues for the SDMB, whether forum traffic is light or heavy, because the images are loaded from the host website straight into our browsers.
I don’t really care that we can’t link images on the main SDMB forums, but if the reason they’re giving for not enabling that feature is “bandwidth issues,” it’s a completely misguided rationale.
I’m having trouble deciding whether to picture Ed as the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert or as Dana Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man from SNL.
“You should pay attention to ‘bandwidth issues’ when ‘hotlinking’ pictures on the interwebs, otherwise the ‘bits’ might all get clogged in the pipes and we’ll have to call a plumber. A local plumber, by gum! Why in my day, the Chicago Reader served the City of Chicago, dadburnit, and Chicago was good enough! If you wanted to send over yer column to news-papers in other cities, ya had to transmit it with an old fashioned clickity-clack machine! We didn’t have these fancy-schmancy ‘servers’ and ‘blades’ and ‘T1 lines’: we uploaded our column from a floppy and sent it out by AOL dialup and we loved it!!!”
“Since forum traffic is light we shouldn’t run into bandwidth issues” seems to be code for “Well, we don’t really expect anyone to read or post there”: what kind of a revenue-generating model is this meant to be anyway?
Say, let’s expand the stadium to seat 20,000 people: we won’t need to add an extra carpark, because we don’t expect to fill the new seats anyway.
Is bandwidth the official reason why we cannot embed images? I though it was more along the lines of not trusting us with choices lest we make this place ugly.
Has anyone tried embedding animated GIFs?
Hows about Homers dad from the Simpsons?
Someone mentioned the “cluttering up” of the board. How is anything cluttered up. The new fora are at the bottom. If you don’t scroll down, you don’t even see them. Out of all the things in the world to complain about, this is what people choose?
Has there been a history-buff thread concerning the night Chicago died? Brother, what a night that really was.
(Agree, Zotti’s kind of an asshole, and certainly he owes me an apology personally, but I can’t get too upset about a few additional forums, as long as it doesn’t affect how the part of the board I’d ever use operates.)
Why wouldn’t there be? Chicago is where this whole thing started, and there are a lot of members. Still, it seems to me a bad move to thin the content elsewhere by starting geographically-centric forums. It’s sort of counter to the whole Internet concept thing, you know?