WebJunction

So, if I read you correctly, you are shifting the focus of moderators from a forum-wide to a per topic basis?

Bob, I have always considered you to be the de facto moderator of St Jerry's, Shameless and a few other Getting Started topics, despite any official titles or lack thereof...

maddog, I replied to your question in a new thread of the topic moderator discussions. Take a look and let me know if that answers your question. Thanks!

Hi maddog,

We were a little worried about our traffic as well, since the performance problems we experienced at the launch time seemed to result in our users giving us a "time-out" till we got on firmer footing. But starting at the beginning of this month, our visit rate has been steadily and quickly upticking, and we are already experiencing more people on the site now than we typically did with the old site. That's definitely good news. However, I agree with you that, so far, posting to discussions has not been a top priority for members--other than those participating in the ExpWJ project and those who were already active in the forums. We have always faced the challenge of the huge ratio between lurkers and posters (usually is no more than 100:1, and WJ was more like 500:1). That is why we are hoping that by expanding the ways for people to engage with one another and with the content will give people more choices and incentive to actively participate. This is part of the grand experiment of the social web. And, indeed, many members are currently busy "friending" each other and exploring the other new features of the site.

But, certainly, having less-than-satisfactory user interface sure won't help. We've got adding pagination to the discussion threads on the short list for development. Aggregating new posts site-wide will have to go into the future planning bucket, because we decided to go full tilt with our change from separating content by content type (discussions/articles/courses), to a topic-based decision. I know that there are cons along with those pros.

Have you tried clicking the view-change icons at the top of each discussion board? You might be able to discover a view that is more user-friendly than what we have by default. We are also exploring how quickly/easily we can change the default view and the sort order (so that most recent posts float to the top).

As a long-time Super-User of the forums, we know you have the most and best advice for making the discussions workable. Keep 'em coming.

Meanwhile, with the UI currently as it is, can you think of ways we can better attract our community to the discussion areas of a given topic (either hosted or not)?


-Sharon & the Community Team

So, ummm are all of the forums dormant or just Getting Started?

Yes, I really miss the old site. Half the time I cannot even find my way to the forums and when I do they seem pretty ghost-town-ish. I'm glad it's working for you guys on other levels. I was always pretty ashamed at the lack of participation from NH libraries, even on their own WJ... I couldn't even get the staff at my own library to show much interest. It seems like such a great resource, especially for small libraries with limited budgets. I never understood why it wasn't embraced. Oh well, - You can lead a horse to water, etc.

So happy to hear of your recent wedding - congratulations!

You beat me to it. Indeed, we're testing watching/subscribing right now. So far it's all working correctly in our tests. If things continue in this direction, well roll this out with our next install.

And yes, we are indeed looking at re-aggregation for discussions. I'm of the mind that having these in one place will make participation in such a large site a bit more approachable. Consolidated message boards may not be new and sexy, but it's a format that has worked well for years.

We have some development trickery necessary to get these to work w/ the architecture and the rest of the site components, so right now this is just at the "investigation" stage.