The Question and Answer Board

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

It's also the way it works, sure. But the way it works is based on a bug.

I believe a bug is an unintentional error in the way a program works. This does not qualify. It works *exactly* as it's intended to work. There are (little-) known bugs in the software and this isn't even close to being one.

What you want the software to do is a bigger inconvenience to far more than one person.

Having a button to mark the last actually read, in itself, is just a workaround, and not a fix for the bug.

It's not a workaround. It's an extra feature.

SI doesn't have that feature. I'm pretty sure RB and Yahoo don't either.

And I'm pretty sure those sites handle unread messages similarly to this one. If not, that doesn't bother me. I think our way is better.

If Matt wants to increase the number of messages for all free members, to double the number they are now, that would make sense. As the site becomes more active, there will be more threads in which most people will want to participate, and the 18 limit will become more constraining for all free members. I believe that limit also constrains the service from growing, so it would be to the advantage of iHub to increase the number of messages allowed because the site is growing now and there's more of interest.

Now that you mention it, I forgot that I was going to reduce that number to 10 at the end of the year. I need to have a look and see if I should do that.

We don't make money from posts. We make money from subscriptions. We sell cows. It's not in our best interests as a business to give away unlimited free milk. Or an amount of milk greater than what anyone would want daily.

Matt and I are both very aware of the dynamics here and how it all relates to our paychecks, and we both know that increasing the number of free posts people have will not increase our paychecks. Quite the contrary. It will make the site even more expensive to run (the computing power and bandwidth used by free members isn't free) and will make it more difficult to run as a civil site.

We allow a little bit of posting for free. But we're not going to use the RB model of giving effectively unlimited (which 36 would be) posting privileges to everyone who comes by. We run this as a business. RB doesn't.