Slashdot Mirror

What ever happened to hunger is a disease, treat it like one? That was too hard I guess:
http://www.goofball.com/photos/thing_Paris_France_vs_Paris_Kentucky

https://www.goofball.com/news/trek_star_Stinking_Klingons_Like_Cats_in_Kansas
Echoes of the older news items.

https://www.goofball.com/news/trek_star_Stinking_Klingons_Like_Cats_in_Kansas
Seems to be remnants of the fallout.

What person has to review the transaction?

if the 99 cents shows up, the account is legit.

Of course, nobody ever got a credit card for their dog, did they?

And we have a tradmark on the phrase "Give the Gift of ..." (Goofball). Ok, no we don't. Just trying to feel what's it's like to be insert-your-Bezos-or-McBride-reference here ...

If you're going to charge people for online only content, it's really got to be more that just what's available in print. Slashdot is not available in print and it is more than just news, it's an experience of discussion with a great deal of other like-minded people. I am part of a group that runs a successful non-porn (well maybe some) pay website. In talking to our members, the main reason people subscribe to our site and keep renewing their subscriptions is the experience, not just the content. The experience being the activity in the various message forms, the ability to rate and comment on every piece of content, the ability to parametrically search and access all content for the past 6 years (online publicaitons rarely offer that), the ability to see who's currently online, etc.

Sorry for the shameless plug, but it illustrates the point that you really can't charge for *just* content presented in the same way as print. I don't believe Salon executed successfully using this model, and I can't see how anyone else could either.

Just my 2 cents ...

Our site, www.goofball.com (shamless plug too), was doing close to a million pageviews per day in 1999. All the content was free and given that it has always represented the largest database archive of funny/filthy/crazy videos (and anything else funny), people loved coming in and grabbing it for free - much like they probably do your games. We got paid CPM advertising rates, so we were able to cover our huge hosting/bandwidth costs.

Times changed and we had to switch to a different model - membership fees. Yes, our traffic is now a quarter of what is once was, but so are our hosting costs and we're still in the black. Not dominating for sure - but slightly profitable (or even just breaking even) is far better than what we've seen with some larger sites (massively in debt / shutting down).

I guess the point is to keep your site alive, particularly since you're obviously passionate about the subject matter. Maybe offering a preview version of the games for free and having people pay for a more full version might be one idea you could try? I do not mean to oversimplify your situation of course ...

The full story is here if anyone is interested ...

Our site, www.goofball.com (shamless plug too), was doing close to a million pageviews per day in 1999. All the content was free and given that it has always represented the largest database archive of funny/filthy/crazy videos (and anything else funny), people loved coming in and grabbing it for free - much like they probably do your games. We got paid CPM advertising rates, so we were able to cover our huge hosting/bandwidth costs.

Times changed and we had to switch to a different model - membership fees. Yes, our traffic is now a quarter of what is once was, but so are our hosting costs and we're still in the black. Not dominating for sure - but slightly profitable (or even just breaking even) is far better than what we've seen with some larger sites (massively in debt / shutting down).

I guess the point is to keep your site alive, particularly since you're obviously passionate about the subject matter. Maybe offering a preview version of the games for free and having people pay for a more full version might be one idea you could try? I do not mean to oversimplify your situation of course ...

The full story is here if anyone is interested ...

There is a simple web based front-end that allows users to add and modify rules for accepting or rejecting mail based on a variety of factors - all saved in the datbase. Things like checking the subject, to, from, or the body of an incoming email for the presense (or lack) certain strings is a simple example.

All of this is done is Perl using Mail::Audit of course. I know there's Spam Assassin, but this was a little more fun (and customizable) for us.

The final check is the Realtime Blackhole List. When we first implemented this solution, we noticed in the logs that almost everything was on the RBL (even mail from yahoo.com). In fact, our own server was on the RBL. We'd never sent spam before, but I'm sure our relay was open at one time or another.

Since the system is configured to look for "accept mail" rules first, the solution came down to adding "accept" rules for pretty much everyone we knew, so that mail from known parties would be accepted even if on the RBL.

So now I get no spam at all - ever. I get very little mail at all in fact. It's really analogous to having an unlisted phone number. It's not the perfect solution by any means, but I'll take it any day over slogging through literally hundreds of spam mails every day ...

It was particularly interesting to me since we at Goofball.com went through the exact same process a while back ourselves. We initially were a free site and at our peek were doing close to a million pageviews a day - not including the Apache requests for video downloads (that amount to like 500 GB per month in bandwidth). We were actually leasing 7 Linux boxes (3 running HTML::Mason dynamic content servers, 3 plain Apache image servers, and a MySQL DB server) and paying through the nose for them due to the bandwidth. However, back in the good old days of the CPM advertising model, we were making plenty to afford the costs.

We were of course f----d when the "new economy" came to bear and we suddenly had no income for close to a year. Good thing we saved all that money we made on ad banners. We were eventaully forced to either close it all down or move to a payment model. We polled our viewers and decided to try the payment model based on their feedback.

The site is now 80% pay / 20% free. We're not just charging for access to specfic areas of content, but for the actual utility provided for by the site's various personalization services. We also decided that micropayment were not feasible. Can you imagine the headache of tracking pennies for pageviews and the associated overhead of dealing with people's questions/complaints about charges to their credit cards? A yearly fee of $19.95 (or a nickel a day) was the way we went and you know what - it actually saved the site.

Granted, traffic is at 10% of what it was, but that allowed us to drop off a few machines from the server farm and thus reduce costs further - keeping us slightly in the black each month.

HTML::Mason is the key to the site's success for sure. We can provide dynamic content on the fly pulled from the database, but a key element of the delivery machanism is Mason's built in caching. Only the first page request for a given URL (that uses the DB) actually requests the data from the database - subsequent requests are pulled from a GDBM replica of the DB's content that was cached by the first request. Mason also provides us with the ability to maintain a persistent DB connection during the life of the Apache daemon. Additionally, the same Apache/mod_perl/Mason binary also listens for requests on port 80 and 443 for SSL requests. All credit card transactions are handled through a Mason enabled API gateway. All of our back-end tools are HTML::Mason as well.

I didn't really get the part about "needing Java/JSP" in the Salon.com story. It sounded to me more like the author was not really in touch with the particulars of the technology at hand and was just repating what reasons he may have been given by the development team (who may have been looking to learn something new for the sake of it). I just came from a job where a decision was made to "go with a Java solution" simply because of the name of the programming language more than any other factor. I have nothing againsts Java believe me, but I'm so tired of buzzwords being used to influence decisions that are actually in dire need of pure business and software logic instead.

I'd encourage everyone - if they haven't already - to have a look at HTML::Mason. And also, for a good diversion, take a look at Goofball.com.

Well now that you mention it, a few years ago someone got near enough to Bill to slap a creampie (almost two) into his face.

Here is a web page about the dude responsible for the Bill Gates pie-facing.

Here is a video of the incident.

OK, it's moderately offtopic but what the hey?

Check out a site I go to often for better humor:

Goofball.com Your portal to Stupidity.

Not bad but alot alot of these have been shown on Goofball.com - Your Portal to stupidity