You're holding another shiny new copy of our magazine in your hands, and I thank you for that. The magazine was produced with the help of powerful computer systems, the kind of machines that no one thought were possible just a few years ago. Yet, I am also very aware that these very advances in computer and communications technology will some day make magazines like this one virtually obsolete. I am not afraid of that. Progress is good, and we will be ready. However, what not all of you may be aware of is that computer technology has not only changed the way we work and the way we communicate with each other, but it has also already started to change the way people meet each other. (May 1994)
Should we operate the site on a subscription basis? I'd really hate to do that because half of the fun of the web is to share information with everyone who's interested (the flipside is that people expect to get everything on the web for nothing, a proposition that just can't work in the long run). Our plan was to do Dimensions Online basically to get people interested in subscribing to our incredibly wonderful Dimensions Magazine. Everyone'd be happy: We'd have more subscribers, and thus revenue, to do both the mag and the website. Readers would be happy because we not only offer the magazine but also the website. Unfortunately, we seem to be doing such a nice job with the site that most online visitors don't subscribe to the magazine as well. I am convinced that the future of publishing is electronic. The potential is totally awesome. (May 1997)
So this is our plan: we want Dimensions Online to be the biggest and best website for BBWs and their admirers, period. No matter what aspect of size acceptance appeals to you, we'll offer it. We'll continue to offer news, articles, hot stories and fiction, pictures, special features, morphs, fashion, bulletin boards, chat rooms, and lots more. And we have experts such as fashion editor Sandie Sabo, master story teller Wilson Barbers, and size acceptance researchers/experts such as Karl Niedershuh. One thing you won't find here is whining and backstabbing, and we'll never (ab)use this site to launch yet another new splinter group.... ;-)
We'll try to keep the site fast, friendly, and free of the tons of commercial banners and unwanted pop-ups peddling services. This doesn't mean, of course, that we won't have to try to make the site financially feasible. But we'll do it in a way that lets our visitors decide how they want to support us, rather than imposing an inflexible membership structure or something like that. (June 1997)
Bottomline is that the web (and its economics) continue to develop and change. Sites come and go, supersites like amazon.com rack up huge sales but even huger losses, people are annoyed at ever more ad banners and Java traps. And "keeping up with the Joneses" has become all but impossible as the corporate Joneses now have large programming staffs. The times where a clever computer whiz could have a site as cool as that of a big company are gone forever. We decided to just hang in there and see where things are headed. (December 1998)
Getting information is a cinch. In fact, there is so much of it that sifting through it is more of a problem than finding it. For example, when I entered the term "size acceptance" into the AltaVista search engine, it returned 2,855 sources. Our own Dimensions Online website lists what we consider the top 500 links to size acceptance resources, and we're constantly adding more because there is so much valuable (and entertaining) stuff out there. The Dimensions web boards have become thriving "communities" where people talk about whatever is on their collective minds. They also engage in heated discussions, form alliances, and do all the sorts of things people used to do in "real" communities. Distance and geographic location don't matter. Some of the most prolific posters are from as far away as Australia and New Zealand. (January 2000)
Dimensions has changed considerably over the years. The incredible growth of the Web has made available so many resources that people never had in the past. What that means is that much of Dimensions offered almost exclusively is now available in many places. While the website keeps growing and has become a vibrant community with lively bulletin boards, the publication frequency of the print magazine has been going down. While Dimensions once was financially feasible, it is now entirely subsidized by my other ventures, as is BBW. As you can imagine, after the kind of year we've just had, that raises some serious questions. (December 2001)
Personally, I am in sort of a down-phase these days when it comes to posting. There's simply too much crap that is being posted anonymously. There was a time when I believed in people's inherent goodness, but apparently as soon as there is the ability to be anonymous, some folks turn to ugly ogres (no offense, Shrek). That's not overall a major problem here, but it is something that currently disillusions me. I just hate it when people are mean to one another, and I have almost no tolerance for rudeness.
So where do we go from here? Hopefully we'll go on pretty much as we have. At this point I have no grand plans to reshape Dimensions. I have always believed in the power of longevity and steadiness. Many fancy sites come and go. I'd much rather have Dimensions be a place that's always there, one that you can always recognize, one that people know and love to come to. I leave the fancy stuff to others, and I never even advertised for Dimensions anywhere else. Those who are interested in the Dimensions community will find us. (December 2004)
I think what thrills me about our community is how all-encompassing it is becoming. Sure, people initially come to Dimensions for size issues, but for most the experience quickly becomes much more than that. Politics (not my favorite) are heatedly discussed in Hyde Park. Social bantering goes on in the Lounge, a lot! The library is amazingly active. The new health forum is flourishing, and just a few days ago we added a special forum for super-size issues.
What I did not expect was that blogs began springing up in the Clubhouse. First just a few, then more and more. That's Web 2.0 in action. People create communities. All guys like myself are doing is perhaps having a vision (well, mine goes back to 1984 or so) and then creating some sort of vehicle to spread that vision. With Dimensions it was a print magazine for many years, and now it is this huge community. But now it is people who shape and direct the community, and that is just wonderful. (December 2007)
For Dimensions, it was a good year. Members of the worldwide Dimensions community started 15,000 new threads with almost 350,000 posts. According to big-boards.com, Dimensions has almost 6,500 unique visitors every day, and about a hundred thousand page views per day. Dimensions remains in the big-boards top-100 forums worldwide. During this past year, we added four new forums (FA/FFA, BBW, GLBTQ and a dimensions Market Place) and each got off to a good start.
2009 also marked the 25th anniversary of Dimensions, which means the community has been around longer than a good percentage of our younger posters. 25 years is a long time, and overall I am pretty pleased with the way things developed. We saw CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL come and go. We saw Yahoo groups and MySpace go up and now come down. Facebook is a wonderful thing and I use it to stay in contact with many friends, but increasingly it seems to become just another place to play addictive games. So there's probably always going to be a need for a place like Dimensions, a community where likeminded people can meet free of spam, trolls and commercial messages. (December 2009)
Should we operate the site on a subscription basis? I'd really hate to do that because half of the fun of the web is to share information with everyone who's interested (the flipside is that people expect to get everything on the web for nothing, a proposition that just can't work in the long run). Our plan was to do Dimensions Online basically to get people interested in subscribing to our incredibly wonderful Dimensions Magazine. Everyone'd be happy: We'd have more subscribers, and thus revenue, to do both the mag and the website. Readers would be happy because we not only offer the magazine but also the website. Unfortunately, we seem to be doing such a nice job with the site that most online visitors don't subscribe to the magazine as well. I am convinced that the future of publishing is electronic. The potential is totally awesome. (May 1997)
So this is our plan: we want Dimensions Online to be the biggest and best website for BBWs and their admirers, period. No matter what aspect of size acceptance appeals to you, we'll offer it. We'll continue to offer news, articles, hot stories and fiction, pictures, special features, morphs, fashion, bulletin boards, chat rooms, and lots more. And we have experts such as fashion editor Sandie Sabo, master story teller Wilson Barbers, and size acceptance researchers/experts such as Karl Niedershuh. One thing you won't find here is whining and backstabbing, and we'll never (ab)use this site to launch yet another new splinter group.... ;-)
We'll try to keep the site fast, friendly, and free of the tons of commercial banners and unwanted pop-ups peddling services. This doesn't mean, of course, that we won't have to try to make the site financially feasible. But we'll do it in a way that lets our visitors decide how they want to support us, rather than imposing an inflexible membership structure or something like that. (June 1997)
Bottomline is that the web (and its economics) continue to develop and change. Sites come and go, supersites like amazon.com rack up huge sales but even huger losses, people are annoyed at ever more ad banners and Java traps. And "keeping up with the Joneses" has become all but impossible as the corporate Joneses now have large programming staffs. The times where a clever computer whiz could have a site as cool as that of a big company are gone forever. We decided to just hang in there and see where things are headed. (December 1998)
Getting information is a cinch. In fact, there is so much of it that sifting through it is more of a problem than finding it. For example, when I entered the term "size acceptance" into the AltaVista search engine, it returned 2,855 sources. Our own Dimensions Online website lists what we consider the top 500 links to size acceptance resources, and we're constantly adding more because there is so much valuable (and entertaining) stuff out there. The Dimensions web boards have become thriving "communities" where people talk about whatever is on their collective minds. They also engage in heated discussions, form alliances, and do all the sorts of things people used to do in "real" communities. Distance and geographic location don't matter. Some of the most prolific posters are from as far away as Australia and New Zealand. (January 2000)
Dimensions has changed considerably over the years. The incredible growth of the Web has made available so many resources that people never had in the past. What that means is that much of Dimensions offered almost exclusively is now available in many places. While the website keeps growing and has become a vibrant community with lively bulletin boards, the publication frequency of the print magazine has been going down. While Dimensions once was financially feasible, it is now entirely subsidized by my other ventures, as is BBW. As you can imagine, after the kind of year we've just had, that raises some serious questions. (December 2001)
Personally, I am in sort of a down-phase these days when it comes to posting. There's simply too much crap that is being posted anonymously. There was a time when I believed in people's inherent goodness, but apparently as soon as there is the ability to be anonymous, some folks turn to ugly ogres (no offense, Shrek). That's not overall a major problem here, but it is something that currently disillusions me. I just hate it when people are mean to one another, and I have almost no tolerance for rudeness.
So where do we go from here? Hopefully we'll go on pretty much as we have. At this point I have no grand plans to reshape Dimensions. I have always believed in the power of longevity and steadiness. Many fancy sites come and go. I'd much rather have Dimensions be a place that's always there, one that you can always recognize, one that people know and love to come to. I leave the fancy stuff to others, and I never even advertised for Dimensions anywhere else. Those who are interested in the Dimensions community will find us. (December 2004)
I think what thrills me about our community is how all-encompassing it is becoming. Sure, people initially come to Dimensions for size issues, but for most the experience quickly becomes much more than that. Politics (not my favorite) are heatedly discussed in Hyde Park. Social bantering goes on in the Lounge, a lot! The library is amazingly active. The new health forum is flourishing, and just a few days ago we added a special forum for super-size issues.
What I did not expect was that blogs began springing up in the Clubhouse. First just a few, then more and more. That's Web 2.0 in action. People create communities. All guys like myself are doing is perhaps having a vision (well, mine goes back to 1984 or so) and then creating some sort of vehicle to spread that vision. With Dimensions it was a print magazine for many years, and now it is this huge community. But now it is people who shape and direct the community, and that is just wonderful. (December 2007)
For Dimensions, it was a good year. Members of the worldwide Dimensions community started 15,000 new threads with almost 350,000 posts. According to big-boards.com, Dimensions has almost 6,500 unique visitors every day, and about a hundred thousand page views per day. Dimensions remains in the big-boards top-100 forums worldwide. During this past year, we added four new forums (FA/FFA, BBW, GLBTQ and a dimensions Market Place) and each got off to a good start.
2009 also marked the 25th anniversary of Dimensions, which means the community has been around longer than a good percentage of our younger posters. 25 years is a long time, and overall I am pretty pleased with the way things developed. We saw CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL come and go. We saw Yahoo groups and MySpace go up and now come down. Facebook is a wonderful thing and I use it to stay in contact with many friends, but increasingly it seems to become just another place to play addictive games. So there's probably always going to be a need for a place like Dimensions, a community where likeminded people can meet free of spam, trolls and commercial messages. (December 2009)
