jbe,
Thanks for highlighting some additional issues.
jbe - You didn't mention what I would have expected to be your major reason for not wanting to keep up the old SI site, which is, that it does not accommodate advertising.
I'm glad that you think it's reasonable that we generate revenue (although I'm not sure that every member would agree with you <vbg>). For the record, however, the old SI handled advertising just fine. In fact, ad banners showed up on all of the pages if a non-member was viewing the site. With the new SI, members will still have the ability to turn-off ads in the StockTalk section. Check out the following page for details on the SI advertising policy:
beta.siliconinvestor.com
It *is* true that with the new SI, it is easier for us to sell ad "packages" since the new SI is organized more consistently, i.e. if someone wanted to "sponsor" the Portfolio Tracker pages, it'd be technically easier for us to integrate advertising components specifically into portfolio tracker with the new SI.
And yes, the advertising revenue that we generate from non-members is an important part of our business and one of the main reasons we can continue to offer SI to the lifetime and grandfathered members. Speaking of members, you also asked...
...you wrote that paying members would have the option of turning off the advertising...there is a rumor circulating that in the future, access to SI will be free (which would mean, of course, that there would be no category of "paying member" with "special privileges")....please record straight on this one?
Gladly. As mentioned above, the advertising policy details can be found on a page that we've created for this purpose. Furthermore, we have no intention of making posting on the SI message boards free to the general public. Other parts of the new SI are free, i.e. quotes, news, portfolio tracker, etc. And, of course, you can "lurk" for free. So, perhaps that is how the rumor started.
We will probably make some adjustments to SI membership fees (i.e. I think we gotta raise that lifetime membership - it's too cheap <g>), and we'll run specials from time to time, of course.
You did not address the special concerns of the BrowseMaster folks.
Just to clarify, although I think most of you already know, BrowseMaster is not our product. It was created by a stand-alone guy - Craig Richards - who charged for the product as an add-on to SI. btw - I read in a recent post that Craig has decided to "throw in the towel" on Browsemaster. I can't confirm that, but I think I saw that in the Browsemaster thread.
Since we have no affiliation with Browsemaster, we could not "integrate" it into the new SI. Several members have suggested that we incorporate certain features from BM into SI. View 10 messages was the first. Ignore will be the next. And it won't be the last.
Once you do restore the "lost" features, and add improvements that I would like to see (extended search functions, for example), I personally will probably start using the New SI on a regular basis. But not before!!! :-)
Glad we have at least one potential convert. :-)
Finally, you had some concerns about a "rankings" feature that I mention in a previous post. First of all, I agree that giving each member a "ranking" based on some type of popularity system would be far to open to abuse, and would create quite a bit of unnecessary turmoil on the threads. This won't happen (at least not as long as I'm at the helm).
What I said in my post was that we were looking into a variety of ideas for creating interesting ways to indicate the popularity of a thread, a message or a member.
Looking back, I can see how you inferred an impending "popularity contest", so let me clarify what we're thinking. Right now, we basically have the Hot Subjects List and New Subjects List as the two components for indicating areas of "activity" on the site. The kinds of things that we're thinking about would be new features like multiple hot lists, i.e. a hot-list within a forum, like the hot threads in the bio-tech forum. Perhaps some kind of "cool posts of the day" feature. Those sorts of things.
In short, I think that members will find these components useful, but not controversial.
jbe - I have a confession to make: I was briefly addicted to playing online Hearts. The addiction (fortunately) lasted only about a month.
I hear you on this one. For me, it was othello. I still lapse once in a while, but I've learned to control my need. Really. I'm better now. Anybody want to play?
Thanks,
Bryan |
