Outside the Beltway

OTB Status Update

James Joyner · Tuesday, March 19, 2024 · 5 comments

The response to Sunday’s post on OTB’s Future has been helpful.

First and foremost, my thanks for the kind words about the site. While it sometimes feels like this is a conversation with a relative handful of regulars, it’s clear that far more people regularly read and enjoy the posts and comments. There’s a genuine sense of community here and it’s bigger than is apparent from the daily interaction.

Seven folks, a couple of whom either aren’t regular commenters or whose names I don’t recognize, have signed up for the OTB Patreon membership, and nine current Patrons upped their contribution level. Two others made one-time donations through the PayPal link. My sincere thanks.

We’ll have to get over the squeamishness about reminding readers of these platforms. We’ve been adding reminders to the daily open forum posts and will likely run a more prominent fundraiser on, say, a quarterly basis.

In the longer term, we’ll decide whether retaining the site in its current form is sustainable. As @Andy and a couple of others noted, it’s quite possible that we simply have too many posts, comments, images, and the like for WordPress and the supporting backend (Apache, PHP, etc.) to handle efficiently. A significant redesign and server configuration may be able to make that work while also allowing us to shed the second server for images.

If that proves either technically or financially unfeasible, we’ll explore other options. Most of the regular commenters seem not to care as much about the header images, Related Posts, Popular Posts, and the like as I do. Ditto, for that matter, the site archives. (And, yes, as @Andy also reminds us, we really should do something to preserve the 21 years of content regardless.)

It’ll probably be June before we have time to really dig into all of this but we’ll likely do whatever we’re going to do over the summer. By then, we should also have a better handle on the revenue stream.