SD,
No problems there, don't worry about criticism or whatever - if we didn't want comments we wouldn't have this section.
The new member post thing: this is always a big topic for new users but they can't see it from our point of view. This is a huge and very busy forum, there are over 100,000 posts a month. When new members were allowed to post anywhere, the entire site was spammed to hell, and it was impossible to locate much of that spam / trolling / obscenity because of the size of the problem. For the Moderators it was like looking for a needle in a haystack; so members would see it first of course and complain. The problem got so bad, we introduced a 15-post requirement in the New Members forum. That worked OK and stopped 99.9% of the spam, but it was over the top.
Now, we've backed off to 5 posts and it works brilliantly: it deters most spammers, keeps any spam contained and easily found, and best of all you can get out of the NM board if you want to in about 15 minutes, you only have to make 5 posts. However some people like it there so much we actually have to kick them out eventually...
As regards the forum / organisation thing, you may be right - it depends. There are some things we can do soon, such as pulling out some good info that can be reformatted for standard website publication, and placing it on the CMS. This will make it much easier to find certain types of info. There is a basic dilemma with board content though:
- Have very few boards - but each has thousands of threads each with hundreds of pages, in order to cover the full topic range. Finding anything is virtually impossible.
- Have dozens or even hundreds of boards. Because the pressure is off, each board has fewer threads, each with fewer pages. It's much easier to locate something - but the site looks 'larger' from the front page.
But the core issue of the forum, that you are basically talking about, is that it's huge. There are hundreds of thousands of pages, there are over 3 million URLs on the sitemap. It's just enormous. There simply isn't any way to make something so huge, easily navigated.
We are always working on it and every week boards are moved, things are reorganised, new boards are opened. Yesterday, for example:
- About 60 boards were re-ordered
- 3 new boards were opened
- There were two separate DDOS attacks that shut the site for a few minutes each time
- Our server tech and host's tech support fought to keep the site up
- We liaised with 3rd party organisations on extortion threats / hacking attempts against the site
So: it's on-going, all the time - just one day on ECF.
ECF is vast, we have 15 staff now for example. What has happened over time is:
- The forum exploded in size
- A couple of months back it was the second-fastest growing large forum in the world
- It has become the world's largest ecigarette website, with over 3 million URLs and 100,000 posts a month
- People stopped thinking of it as 'a community', ECF now hosts hundreds of communities
- It is Alexa ranked as one of the top sites in the world
- ECF has thousands (yes thousands) of Google #1 search results - so many, in fact, it's impossible to count them
- ECF has about 25,000 links, all purely organic as we certainly don't have any need to create them
- It has the most complex trade-community interaction system of any site we are aware of
So what you are basically talking about is a huge affair with no simple solutions to any single issue. In a way, the fact that people don't see something like the giant dinosaur of the Microsoft website for example, means in a way we're doing our job, if it looks 'simple' or like a 'normal website'. The fact is, it's so huge that the task of sorting anything out is not easy.
What we especially like to see are focused suggestions that target one single problem - it's far easier for us to address that type of issue. But keep 'em coming anyway
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