Forum Moderators: open
How did I figured it out:
Every morning by 5.30 (7*7) I update my news and then take a WebmasterWorld tour
Same by 7pm when I powered down my machines
I feel that often what was there previously is still there half a day later
Any input or stats?
Regards
Henry
I guess this is an attempt to make people search more.
Perhaps this would be a good policy if the internal search engine were better.
I completely agree. There do seem to be fewer new threads than in the past ... but I have attributed that to several criteria:
1) The Google update used to be a huge drawing card. Since Google went to the rolling updates, fewer newbies visit and comment.
2) Google algo changes have so upset some people that they are spending much more time working on their sites rather than reading about the day to day stuff about webmastering or SEO.
3) There are finally other search engines delivering a decent amount of traffic and many webmasters who have learned a lot from WebmasterWorld are busy doing business instead of reading WebmasterWorld, trying to figure out how to be a better webmaster or how to get more traffic. They already have some of the more important answers!
I still visit WebmasterWorld every day, but I don't always have time to post because this is my busy season and I expect it is the same for many others.
4) Many, many posts are to do with adsense or adwords or cloaking or other subjects I (and many others) could care less about.
5) Many senior members (who used to post often) have seemingly disappeared. My guess is that they became tired of the same conversations and topics being discussed over and over again.
I can't say I blame them. Some things get old pretty quickly. However, I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. New blood is good too and keeps the forums from becoming stale.
6) I won't deal with rudeness (which I have encountered several times here) and I simply leave a conversation when it arises. I do make a point of saying I'm leaving and why ... because I think decorum is very important in all forums if a board is to survive.
7) Unfortunately, the members forum has become remarkably similar to the outside forum, but has a great deal less structure. That's both good and bad. No real solution to offer at this time.
Its great that people support WebmasterWorld, but there is less appeal to take part in the members forum than there was in the past because the "brain trust" of days gone by seems to have dried up and the members forum is full of people (like myself) who are not what anyone would describe as "professional webmasters" and quality posts are becoming few and far between.
8) The site search tool for WebmasterWorld is greatly lacking in accuracy, so finding things can often present major problems. There is a veritable gold mine of info here ... but finding it is next to impossible ... even if you know "how to search". Newbies have no clue! As a result, I think people just give up and go away.
Its only a suggestion, but I think the admins need to set parameters for all membership levels higher.
This is very presumptuous of me, but I'm going to do it anyway ... If I were running WebmasterWorld as a business, I would set it up as follows:
500 posts or less: Guest
500 to 1500 posts: Junior Member
1500 to 3000 posts: Intermediate Member
3000 to 5000 posts: Senior Member (qualify to be a mod)
5000 posts or more: Lifetime member (qualify to be an admin)
I would also make it mandatory that mods would have to have contributed a minimum of 3,000 posts.
"Me too" posts in premoderated forums should be automatically deleted and never counted towards a member's post tally.
Only those who have exceeded the 500 posts level would qualify to become a "member". Guests and members could remain participants for as long as they wish ... on the outside!
IMHO, what drives "senior" members away is trying to deal with instant pros who claim to know everything while clearly knowing nothing. Its frustrating! Why should anyone try to help somebody who portrays themselves as a professional when in actual fact ... they simply are not? I'm as guilty of this as anyone else and promise to stop as of now.
Senior and Lifetime members should have an option to "allow" or "disallow" input from lesser qualified members in any threads they start. This way, everyone gets to read their posts, but may not be allowed to post within the thread. They should also have the option to allow or disallow sticky mail.
The info would be in the posts for all to see, but the senior & lifetime members wouldn't have to read dozens of posts full of garbage or have their threads hijacked by someone with 4 posts to their credit.
These are just observations & suggestions ... I hope I haven't upset anyone or made anyone feel badly. If I have, my apologies. That was not my intention.
IMO, WebmasterWorld is at a place which has got to morph itself in order to serve everyone at every level and keep all of us happy.
There is a huge disparity in "knowledge" amongst "members". I am not a stupid or unintelligent person ... but there is no question that the majoity of members know more than I about SEO or webmastering in general. I am a yacht charter broker who happens to be webmaster for my own site. I am NOT a professional webmaster or SEO. Many (perhaps most) here are! In my mind, that makes almost everyone else more qualified than I to comment on the majority of subjects.
Those subjects I do feel qualified to comment on ... I will jump in with both feet. Business structure, marketing and sales are my baliwick . I'm very good at what I do ... but I am a "so-so" webmaster and have managed to attain a respectable amount of success doing my own SEO. Anything past that, I am a babe in the woods.
I think WebmasterWorld has been experiencing growing pains for quite some time, and though it may have become a little ungainly of late ... I have no doubt we will see some positive changes coming up.
CIML (an excellent choice BTW) has been culled from the pack as an admin and there are several other mods who bring great value to the team. Together, I am sure they will come up with some stimuli which will produce positive and valuable change here at WebmasterWorld.
Dave.
p.s. This post shouldn't count towards my total because it is pure silliness :) *sarcasm over*.
p.p.s. I don't think post count has anything to do with how seasoned a veteran you are. Some people are "seniors" here at WW and have fewer than 1000 posts yet have been around for years. They just tend to have less "written(verbal) diahrea"...
I think you would change your mind about that if you got checks Fedexed right to your door
I agree ;)
3000 to 5000 posts: Senior Member (qualify to be a mod)
eeek! That would mean I would have only qualified as a mod last week. I am fairly certain there are at least a few are happy I have been a mod here for the past 14 months, regardless of whether I met the 3000 post count or not.
With a forum this size, it can sometimes be difficult to find the gems, but it doesn't neccessarily mean there are fewer of them than last year. But you just might have to hunt around a bit more to find them as the membership grows. And you can always jump start your own quality threads as well :)
Don't count this to my total but that must be the worst attempt at spelling Dieoreea that I have seen in some time ... BTW don't ask me how to spell it either :)
[added]Diarrhoea[/added]
I looked it up ;)
I concur with most of Liane comments although I cannot say if I agree or disagree about the number of post requirement for I really do not care too much about labels.
Post quality is really a qualifier
I hang often in the PHP forum and I have seen new posters becoming quickly senior due to post number although post quality and help offered was outstanding which in my mind should be a good base for senior qualification.
On another hand I understand that in a forum environment everyone will start complaining against what could be perceived as some sort of segregation leading to: “Who are you to judge me?”.
Back to main topic:
If really less interest is generated then how to fix the problem?
Regards
Henry
<edit> Typo </>
Now, does this thread need to go in Foo?
If you look at the top of the active list, you will see the number of active threads per day. We have been stable for about six months after increasing monthly for five years. There are ways and means to hold down the new post counts and the growth of webmasterworld, and I have used every one of those ways to accomplish that over the last 6-9 months. It took 3 years to get to 100 active per day, and then 1.5 to jump to 300 active per day. Our growth was just too fast - so I applied a bit of brake this year.
Some sub-forums, such as Directories, have been languishing. That could change but it will take some work ;0)
Other sub-forums, such as technology topics, have some very bright posters however they are competiting with outside forums that are topic specific and therefore far more active. It gets down to quality: If you post and get an answer in a reasonable time I don't care how 'active' the forum is.
The CSS forum is a wonder. It's busy. People get answers. The helpfulness of the souls found in the CSS realm is very encouraging. The world may yet work for everyone.
I've made many attempts to draw people into discussion about business models, business procedures, web trends, etc. Likewise, I admire Martinibuster's and rogerd's efforts to draw people into a dialogue about the abstractions of the WWW - those forces that, if you grasp or anticipate them - will enable you to position your business to succeed where others who grasp the issues too late either fail or flounder.
I'm always happy to see thought balloons floated discussing cutting edge, emerging technology issues and trend, considering how they may impact the commercial downstream.
Yes, there's redundancy. That goes with the territory since WW - as I understand it - is about education. Therefore, there will be a steady stream of newbies in search of old lessons, ergo, the same questions revisited. (A better organized/publicized library might help on that score, eh?)
There's a number of very bright people here with very diverse interests and talents - who also (no surprise) - happen to be friendly, kind and decent people. I'm not the easiest person to engage. I suffer from a deep distain for 'fluff'. No quality content? I'm gone. No effort to inform or share? I'm gone. No willingness to be questioned, to have your conclusions or assumptions challenged and to respond with data and intelligence? Adios.
I'm still here. You guys and gals are doing a great job and I thank you for that.
my only comment i notice more and more 1st or under 10 post posters who post pure spam often under multiple sections i.e. " have you seen this or tried this etc. promoting something or other" usually when mods are not around to delete possibly there should be a period xx that if someone joins a cooling period to stop joining and posting c?
My only other comments
Better search functionallity with the functionallity to specify posts to and from date
one other feature i would like to see but don't know if technically possible with forum software is date thread started together with the date of latest post
steve
Perhaps this would be a good policy if the internal search engine were better.
Go to control panel -> System Preferences -> Custom Code Insert Top:
<center><form method="GET" action="http://www.google.com/search" target="_blank"><input type="hidden" name="domains" value="webmasterworld.com"><input TYPE="text" name="q" size="25" maxlength="255" value><input type="submit" name="btnG" value="Google"><input type="radio" name="sitesearch" value="webmasterworld.com" checked>webmasterworld.com <input type="radio" name="sitesearch" value>www</form></center>Tadah... a Google search box, just for Webmaster World.
My only question is: why doesn't it get prominently promoted more? If there's not going to be anything done as far as enhancing the search capability here, then why not offer a viable alternative?
Speaking for myself, but I think it's because the accusations would start flying that Google was paying WebmasterWorld to have the search box on the site. Why not Yahoo? Why not bakedjake's super nifty search?
bakedjake's super nifty search?
I don't care what gets offered, but something is better than nothing, IMO.
Show me a product that will work and I will use it. At this time, the only suitable product that is even remotely applicable is a google search appliance - even that would not work as well as google.com currently works. So, why would we spend and estimated 40-50k to get a second rate search appliance/system operational?
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 4:52 pm (utc) on Dec. 22, 2004]
I visit WebmasterWorld for 2 sections:
"Advertising Sales and Affiliate Programs"
"Professional Webmaster Business Issues"
Usually, when someone does post, it is more (thought provoking¦interlectually stimilating) than other some of the posts in similar forum sections at other webmaster forums.
Unfortunatly, there is not a great number active threads, usually only 3 or 4 a day for the advertising section, and 1 or 2 for the business section :(
I havent been a member for long, so i dont know what this sections were like in comparison in the past.. but anything that can be done to make these a little more lively would be much appriciated :)
Oh, and I keep seeing spam in the Advertising section, do we have a "report post to moderator" function on bestbbs?
Yah, send a mod a sticky about the offending post and they will take care of it.
Show me a product that will work and I will use it.
I'm not saying you should spend 40k-50k on a search solution. I'm just saying why not make this solution [webmasterworld.com] more prominent?
I'm just saying why not make this solution more prominent?
You should read caine's post (#11) in that thread, which explains things particularly well. ;)
At least notify people of the choice. It's not like this is a "little" problem with this community. How many topics have you seen about this very suggestion?
