Where did everything go? - Page 2

And you end up with hundreds of subforums with a handful of posts every year. We tried it. It didn.t work.

"But we've noticed a downturn in traffic over the last year or so. A number of reasons, but the old format was not that great..."
Perhaps because of the earlier changes?
Is traffic increasing since this new format?
I guess search for earlier posts is on the increase.
New posts?
It's a shame that I don't even know how to quote properly with this editor.
Can I see who quoted from whom?
Can I see who upvoted-downvoted my post?

For Quote enter a '>' followed bythe copied text. Or use the Double Quote button on the editor. For more info on the editor, press the ? button on it and you'll see a full run down of the features.

Who quotes what has never been a feature.
Votes are anonymous. Rep isn't.

Heh heh, from past posts, your views about this editor and downvotes seem to have been festering for 2 years. From a Mod POV we just can't be using BBCode. It's just not good enough. It gets abused and misused. Downvotes are a bitch I agree, but making them anonymous stops rounds of vendettas. Can you imagine the fallout with FB hate buttons.

For Quote enter a '>' followed bythe copied text.

Does not work as expected.

Heh heh, from past posts, your views about this editor and downvotes seem to have been festering for 2 years.

Perhaps they are sick?

Downvotes are a bitch I agree,

Any need for them?

[Dani]

I fixed your formatting by adding a blank line beneath each quote. This is how Markdown works. It's not unique to us nor unique to our recent design change.

[dtpp]

Because maintaining two versions would be really easy, right?

It'd be easier than maintaining this mess as it grows.....thats for sure

Dtpp. While healthy discussion is one thing and to be welcomed. This is starting to smell bad. Since you joined you've made a handful of regular posts but the rest seem to be bitching about the site and Dani. Not sure what motivates you. Takes all sorts I suppose.

In response to the negative rep I'm accumulating from you dtpp, all I can say is that if DW goes to the wall, it won't be due to the changes made recently. Were DW to carry on as it was, I don't think it would be in good shape some 6 months from now. I'm not pretending to know all the ins and outs of our traffic, just stuff we've gleaned from Dani over the year. Despite what you may believe, the forum format is not that popular any more. People have moved on. I used to administer a couple of forums myself, but with the advent of social media, our traffic fell to a trickle and despite our best efforts we had to close up shop.

Many other sites of which I was a member have also gone to the wall. The sites that are doing well seem to have a more organic structure. Users tend to be better versed with searching than they were 10 years ago. There is little to be gained from constraining posts to niche subsubsubforums. You can't / shouldn't post to more than one (sub)forum, so if your post, say had more than one component to it, e.g. PHP and MySQL, you'd have to decide between one or the other. A prime example of "where the hell does this go" is .htaccess. Do you create a new subforum for Apache or webservers? What if the question was related to url rewriting and PHP superglobals? Would you bury it deep in a niche subsubsubforum where the odd weirdo may pop in from time to time, or place it in the general forum? So there are opposing forces at work with a forum structure - a need to be more granular but also a need for cross-forum posting. A bare tagging system would be very awkward, but I think Dani has got the balance right. There is just enough forum structure to this tagging system to make it work.

You will see what Im talking about in some time (sooner than later I suppose)

I know what you're talking about, I just don't agree with it.

For you it didnt work, for others it may work well.....

There aren't many forum sites out there with growing member rates. In fact most of them are on a sharp slowdown with regard to signup. Of course there may be one or two, but those are rare exceptions and IMO probably have a great USP rather than members being turned on by the forum structure.

[dtpp]

@up:

You get negative rep points, simply because I dont agree with you. If DW goes to the wall, there will be thanks to complete switch to tagsystem, not UI change (which is quite well-looking in fact).

Ive no idea where you are located and where do you see slowdown in forum niche, but I think you are getting it wrong. I know many (>10 for sure) big boards with 1k+ users online at the same moment. And its not temporal - its constant.

The fact that you had to close down does not mean that this was due to social media - there are plenty of possible causes which needs to be investigated carefully. Many forums had to close due to inmature team members (esp. where I live).

When question fits into many categories/subforums, or does not fit into any of them, than there is category/subforum called 'others' adequate to house questions which do not fit elsewhere. General forum is more like OffTopic one.

There should be logical order of subforums: from the most important to the least important ones, so first thing that catches user eye are the most used subforums. Pretty easy.

There are many big forums with growing human member counter.

There is not enough structuring here - look at 'Software dev' section: why there is topic about Excel VBA or about sharing sth via LAN? Its irrelevant to software imho. That topics were created there because OPs were confused. They wouldnt be if there was previous structure. Im sure.

If DW goes to the wall, there will be thanks to complete switch to tagsystem, not UI change (which is quite well-looking in fact).

I don't know how you can make that assertion. You have no evidence other than your own prejudice against a tagging system.

The fact that you had to close down does not mean that this was due to social media - there are plenty of possible causes which needs to be investigated carefully.

No. It was. Believe me. We had feedback from missing members, all sorts of stuff. Resources like Facebook Pages finished us off. Even Twitter took tranches of our Community pages. Having to use BBCode to insert spotify resources as opposed to hitting the share button in-app, for instance. There were tens of things that SM sites could do, that forum sites couldn't - the 'share to' was just one. Your statement suggests that we did not investigate carefully - why?

When question fits into many categories/subforums, or does not fit into any of them, than there is category/subforum called 'others' adequate to house questions which do not fit elsewhere. General forum is more like OffTopic one.

So we end up with 20 others forums or failing that, a fractal structure. Which would be stupid. Other statements you make (e.g. "pretty easy") suggest that we are in need of enlightenment. That's a bit condescending don't you think? I don't think you've actually read - or if you have - I don't think you appreciate the various iteratons and changes we've been through. I will repeat - we tried what you're suggesting AND IT WASN'T WORKING.

I'm not pretending that there won't be teething problems with this system, but so far, the amount of moderating I've had to do is about a tenth of what I had to do previously - with no difference in the number of threads I peruse each day. So, the "evidence" so far seems to be that users are not "messing up the system" as they used to.

I doubt anything I say is going to convince you, but that's OK. We can agree to disagree.