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How would you ChangeTheSite.org?
Olly_B
Posts: 222 Trailblazer
in General Chat
Hi,
We’ve launched a new blog, ChangeTheSite.org, to kick off the discussion about what we’re going to do with TheSite.org over the next few years.
We want everyone to feel involved in this process; site users and those who don’t use TheSite.org; staff and trustees; other “stakeholders” (grr… I hate that word, can’t believe I had to use it) and other experts, opinion formers or random waifs and strays.
The wider the circle of people involved the better the final product, and the greater the awareness of what we do.
And, please, don’t think that your comments don’t count. It's easy to post comments, but I'm also keen to get people creating their own post. If you’ve got a blogger/google account it’s really easy to give you access to post; and if you don’t then it’s a sinch to create a new account.
Look forward to hear from you all soon...
Olly
We’ve launched a new blog, ChangeTheSite.org, to kick off the discussion about what we’re going to do with TheSite.org over the next few years.
We want everyone to feel involved in this process; site users and those who don’t use TheSite.org; staff and trustees; other “stakeholders” (grr… I hate that word, can’t believe I had to use it) and other experts, opinion formers or random waifs and strays.
The wider the circle of people involved the better the final product, and the greater the awareness of what we do.
And, please, don’t think that your comments don’t count. It's easy to post comments, but I'm also keen to get people creating their own post. If you’ve got a blogger/google account it’s really easy to give you access to post; and if you don’t then it’s a sinch to create a new account.
Look forward to hear from you all soon...
Olly
0
Comments
They were amazing.
Oh, and stars.
and stars
I think it would be good to make it more inclusive. Not that's its not, but its the same members mostly in the forums, in the user panels, in the chatroom etc. and I think it should be encouraging to newcomers. I know in the past you had a welcoming committee or somesuch but maybe it's something that needs thinking about. Its about getting a balance between spam though and making the forums and the advice therein accessible.
I think they were there when I first started or just before but can't remember what they were for.
I know on some forums you can star threads from 1 - 5 based on how good you think they are. But I'm pretty sure these stars were next to people's names on here.
lol Pretty much.
Edit your options -
http://vbulletin.thesite.org/profile.php?do=editoptions
In thread options you can remove avatars, sigs and all images
Stars went because they seemed to reflect that being here longer, or posting more, made you more important. The user titles were used as a fun way of replacing this - but stars are really seen in the same context as a reputation system. We really feel all posters should exist on a level playing field and their posts rather than an abstract reputation should determine how other people see them.
I'm sure there's lots of things people want to post about but don't cos this site is being too visible on search engines - I've seen things posted on here and they're showing up on Google within 2 hours.
In many ways this site is going to become a victim of it's own success and NOT help the people it's meant to.
:yes: Genius plan.
I wouldn't have minded hearing people's thoughts or even sharing how I dealt with it in the end but I wouldn't want that thread on here forever and ever.
In the end I told someone on here I chat to on MSN and they thought I dealt with it well.
Personally I'd like to see a quick advice thread where people can post on any topic they want. And say within 48 hours of the original post the thread is automatically deleted. Perhaps 48 hours since no activity but it means any moron posting rubbish could keep that thread alive forever.
Perhaps there could be a 48 hour thread and a 7 days thread? And people can choose which to post to.
It would also be nice if a self pruning thread wasn't indexed by the search engines - I know you can tell search engines which pages NOT to index.
Perhaps the other thing is a thread that can ONLY be read by registered and logged in members and perhaps people that have been members for a certain amount of time - say at least 30 days.
But I know there are many times in the past I wanted to post something but didn't because I know this site is achieving such high ranking in the search engines - from time to time I'll even misspell certain keywords on purpose so I can ask a question with less chance of someone I know typing those words into Google.
Yes, this is what I really really really want!
I dont think a pruning thread is a good idea, I think its a crap idea, I imagine a ton of people Google for help and then dont create threads as a result as their question is answered, a self prune will just create large amounts of duplicate content.
Agreed. On another forum I used to post on, we had stars, which were related to the amount of topics someone had started. This meant some people starting really useless topics.
Agreed.
On Moneysavingexpert, they have a thanks button, (which is used instead of loads of people replying with 'thanks) could we have something like this please? I've found it to be better than saying thanks to someone when they've responsed to a topic of mine and given me a good answer.
I know plenty of people here that also DON'T post certain things here and instead ask advice on MSN Messenger between each other because they know this site too well and don't want their posts to come back to haunt them later - Self pruning is built into most forum systems so guess there's an easy way to test it out!!
If you want to be able to browse on a mobile device then you should state which device you use - or do you expect them to cater for every device out there?
The other alternative is why don't you state your devices and see if the site can get you cheap copies of better mobile browsers by doing deals with the relevant companies that write such software.
e.g.
http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/
Doesn't this mean that loads of newbies bump up threads that are old?
I'm unsure about this - whilst getting rid of old threads would be a good idea, there's also the issue of people (I've done this in the past) who search for something and know it's been talked about, but can't find it as it's been deleted.
Plenty of people have second accounts and there is no restriction on creating them, plus the mods I'm sure are happy to delete posts/threads on request, far more efficient than losing literally a million (potentially) useful posts and having hundreds and hundreds of threads with the same question being asked over and over because it was posted the month before and pruned.
I shouldn't have to state my mobile etc, there are custom scripts for vBulletin that pick up mobile devices and show a 'lite' version of the forum that all browsers should display.
such as a specific place, advice on a specific entity such as a specific company, etc, etc
plus some people don't want to go around pretending to be someone else - they just want a quick bit of advice - and just in case you're confused by the suggestion - the idea is NOT to make all threads self pruning. But have a specific thread setup for people to post in that is self pruning.
Most people aren't going to want to post something and then go back and ask MODs to start deleting stuff (especially if they are new and don't know who the MOD's are and if they're approachable or not) ... they're far more likely just not to post in the first place and suffer in silence.
Where as I know some times you want many people's opinions on a single matter