How does this MB exist? I mean, it takes some money to run the SDMB. It’s address has dot com, not dot gov or dot edu, so it’s “commercial”. I do not see any sponsored ads here. Who is paying? The moderators (at least some of them) are volunteers. All the staff are? The site is run too good to believe.
Is membership info secret? How many posters are there? Total/by board? The average number of posts per poster? How long posters stay? Who is the oldest? Most active? What are seasonal/diurnal patterns? TIA, mods.
The board is paid for by the Chicago Reader out of the goodness of their heart. This is why every now and then Dopers talk about making it a subscription site in order to secure its future – there’s no guarantee the Reader won’t decide to pull the plug on a loss-making venture.
Membership details were available en masse when the software changed this year, but this was disabled to help ensure some privacy. I guess it would have been as bandwidth-hogging as the search engine, too.
**Membership details were available en masse when the software changed this year, but this was disabled to help ensure some privacy. **
I’m not sure it’s considered “loos-making”. Perhaps there should be prominent links to the Reader website/subscription info.
I do not understand what membership/post info has to do with privacy. Whose privacy" Media always proudly boosts the “readership” numbers. My personal privacy is not affected at all. Even if numbers like: “The avarage posting rate is 2/mo for OP, 5/mo for replies”. Etc.
C’mon, mods! Teeming millions want knowledge!
Okay, l’ll spill what I know. It ain’t much.
This message board currently exists through the benevolence of the Chicago Reader. They hope to one day make a few bucks off it, but right now, it loses money. Occasionally, you’ll see a paid ad on the homepage, but rarely on the MB itself. The current poop says we may have some paid advertising in the works. Stay tuned.
The moderators, and administrators, are all volunteers. There’s a tech staff behind the scenes that you rarely see. They are employees of the Chicago Reader’s IT department; running this board is only one of a myriad of functions they perform.
Membership info isn’t “secret” per se; it’s just not generally available to the MB participants. The MB software has a function that allows visitors to sift through the member profiles. We’ve turned it off for two major reasons. One, it takes up too many valuable and scarce system resources; our server is way overtaxed. Second, if this info were easily accessed, it’d be possible for spammers and their ilk to harvest e-mail addresses. We do not wish to subject you to that type of harassment.
As for how many posters, that’s available on the MB’s main page, the counter currently indicates, 11,192 members. Of these, I’d guess there are probably only about 500 to 1000 really that are regular participants. Some are also, of course, banned and some of that number is names that have never posted. The 11,192 figure is just the total number of registrations requested. You are also asking for a couple averages. The first one makes no sense. Any member can post to any board at any time. You can, however, see for yourself from the total number of threads and posts, which forums are the most active. How long do they stay? I can’t answer this; there are people that have been here since day one, and there are others that have made a single post and disappeared. It’s impossible to put a figure to this question. Who’s oldest? Check the user profiles, the lower the ID number at the end of the URL, the longer they’ve been here. Most active? Look around and see who has the highest post count under their name. There are quite a few of us that are right around 5000 posts.
Seasonal patterns? I’ve no idea. Day/Night? Well, the vast majority of our members are from North America, so the boards are probably busiest during the daylight hours here. Meaning, of course, that many of us are wasting our employer’s time reading the boards.
TIA? WTF? I’ve no idea what your acronym means.
Beer, TIA=Thanks In Advance
I’ll spell it out: thank you, Uncle. You answered most of my questions. As far as membership: I understand the concerns about email, etc. I was intersted in statistical numbers (no personal info). Besides, email addresses are available by clicking on the icons, although, searching profiles is easier. Most (all?) of my questions are out of sheere curiosity, as is this one: how do you rate (11,192) among similar “general interest” MB? Are you “big”?
peace said:
I dunno about UncleBeer, but I hear Silo is pretty “big.”
I’ve heard (but not substantiated) that of all message boards using the vBulletin software, we’re the second-largest. Considering that the reason we switched to vB was that we were too big to use the popular UBB software anymore, I’d say that that means that we have to be one of the biggest boards on the Net.
In terms of sheer traffic, some of the financial boards definitely carry more. In terms of useful discourse, what most financial boards carry varies from marginal to undeniably worthless.
Jelsoft lists SDMB as one of their four “featured” forums on their info page. The other 3 are gameplay.com, infogrames and VB-World, and they have a long list of other customers.
There’s still a lot of boards out there that are custom jobs, rather than using a commercial solution like this one does. Most aren’t as good (I’m speaking in terms of the mechanics of the board itself, not the content).
I think the best designed HTML based boards I’ve seen are the Motley Fool boards, which is a custom solution, to the more useful end of the financial board spectrum, and very big. Like most financial boards, you have to consider that they have hundreds of forums because they have ones for specific companies as well as general purpose subjects. A lot of those don’t carry a lot of messages, but it adds up.
And, of course, no single site message board is anywhere near the traffic level of USENET, which is a store-and-forward model (try to calculate the collective space used by all the USENET servers in the world - it’s staggering, even considering most of them expire the stuff quickly). SDMB is very large for something which is actually moderated well, rather than just being allowed to be an open floodgate.
I would still like to hear from anybody who has had a membership on The WELL.
If you care to know my opinion:
Of course, it tickles to be #1, but this board is probably as big as I’d like to see. I visited several others which appearead to be bigger (for my limited brain) and it was easy to be lost there. This one gives a good mixture of stupid (ignore), entertaining (enjoy) and serious (whatever) stuff.
I am not compeducated enough to understand the difference between HTLM, Java, USB, etc., SW. but this MB gives email notification and has other convenient features. I’d did some changes (eliminated confusing “Clear Fields” button, and other changes), but they are minor and I’m happy as is.