Hi everyone,

It is just a really serious concern about a feature. Everytime I post a thread, I'm asked to share it on social media networks. It is really irritating. My message to the Daniweb management is that if you want to keep this feature then let users "us" to have our choice remembered all time rather than alerting us.

I would love to hear what others think about this.

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Only happened once for me.

Lucky you.

Now I see what's happening. It happens when you start a thread!

For every lame-assed question we post to get help, we're being asked to broadcast our stupidity on Twitter and Facebook. Why the 7734 would we want to do that????

I agree. Get rid of it -- it's annoying and useless.

Member Avatar for diafol

I bet all my mates (definitely of the non-IT variety) would just love to see my nerdy tech posts. I'd never hear the end of it. Daniweb is my dirty little secret. I don't want the world to know about what I do late at night.

commented: Or early in the morning... And in the afternoon for that matter. +0

Especially if you are a (shudder) student.

hahaha. What is worse is if you're a student doing a group project with a bunch of fellow students and one of them sees your posts! In the meeting, you pretend being the smart guy knowing everything!! hahaaha

Adding this feature alone has increased our "social activity" from an average of 250 likes/tweets per day to forum discussion threads up to an average of over 400 per day.

Currently, the very vast majority of our traffic comes from Google results. Google has made it no secret that they are now factoring social signals into their search algorithm (meaning, they take the number of tweets/likes a page gets into consideration in determining how that page should rank in the search engine).

Encouraging users to socially share kills two birds with one stone. Firstly it helps our Google rankings, but perhaps more importantly, it also helps send traffic to DaniWeb from other sources so we hopefully won't have to rely on Google so much in the future. Right now, we rely almost exclusively on Google to keep our heads above water, and it's not a very good position to be in. The amount of traffic we're getting from Facebook and Twitter has been slowly increasing lately, and continuing on that trend is a sheer necessity for our future.

Yet another benefit is that ad agencies are really hopping on the social bandwagon lately, and they really want to put their money towards publications that are ahead of the curve with social media.

A LOT of research has indicated that the vast majority of the DaniWeb audience are on the social media bandwagon, and are actively integrating their Facebook world with DaniWeb.

For example, we just fairly recently integrated a Login with Facebook feature, and we're now seeing an average of 500-600 new members registering through Facebook daily! What this means is that we first created the Login with Facebook feature late July/early August, and we already have seen over 20,000 new members joining our community thanks to the feature.

Based on my research, a lot of members are socially sharing threads that they start to get more attention to their question. If they're frustrated trying to solve a problem, and they post it on DaniWeb, there's pretty good incentive to mass-phone-a-friend in one click. It instantly broadens the potential audience of people who might be able to help them beyond active DaniWeb members, and hopefully will lead to quicker answers for frustrated members.

While I can appreciate that you guys might find it a bit irritating, I also need to take into consideration that most regulars very rarely start new threads, and therefore this is not a feature that needs to appeal to regulars as much as the newbies who will really take advantage of this feature. For example, you, WaltP, have been a member for over 6 years and have only ever started 87 threads. That's out of nearly 11,000 posts. And diafol, you're no better, with just over 80 new threads out of over 8K posts. That means that once a month you might have to do one extra click, which IMHO is not a significant enough hassle to warrant the cons outweighing the pros.

With regards to why I don't want to make this an optional feature, it's really been a strong recurring theme since the redo to keep profile options to the absolute bare necessities. I thought vBulletin had way too many unnecessary, confusing options (although it's not as bad as Facebook!), and this is mindset of sorts related to our UI that I feel very strongly about. I feel that it is possible to achieve a good balance to satisfy the masses without every member being required to go through 100 profile options. There's something to be said for simplicity, and there's definitely something to be said for standardization for usability and being able to expect how a UI will be have because it's repeatable and predictable for everyone, regardless of 100 different settings.

commented: Agreed 101% +0

I just also want to point out that, because of the dramatic difference in how many people socially share since this feature was implemented, I am able to look at the daily chart of social interactions in Google Analytics to find that we implemented this feature August 21st. If you're just noticing it now, it can't be that much of a constantly irritating issue for you. Meanwhile, look at all the good it's doing :)

<second bump>

Haha, I just looked at our SVN and saw that the feature was uploaded to production on August 20th. Confirming that the huge increase in social interactions per day is definitely due to this feature!

I probably see it more than most as I post editorial (news/reviews) items regularly. Cannot say it bothers me in the slightest, in fact it actually helps me as I automatically share those posts out into the social ether anyway. For me, it's less clicking not more.

However, my rather unique position apart: What She Said :)

Adding this feature alone has increased our "social activity" from an average of 250 likes/tweets per day to forum discussion threads up to an average of over 400 per day.

WOW!!! Significant! And surprising, at least to me. With many of the posts I see, I'd be embarrassed to socialize them. Are these likes/tweets across the forums or mostly in a certain cross-section of the forums? What percentage of the new threads are socialized from the message in question? What percentage from other directions?

For example, we just fairly recently integrated a Login with Facebook feature, and we're now seeing an average of 500-600 new members registering through Facebook daily! What this means is that we first created the Login with Facebook feature late July/early August, and we already have seen over 20,000 new members joining our community thanks to the feature.

This one actually, if I thought about it, makes sense. That never bothered me, though.

While I can appreciate that you guys might find it a bit irritating, I also need to take into consideration that most regulars very rarely start new threads, and therefore this is not a feature that needs to appeal to regulars as much as the newbies who will really take advantage of this feature.

Absolutely true...

For example, you, WaltP, have been a member for over 6 years and have only ever started 87 threads.

And mostly in Feedback and Mod I bet...

Yes, looks like you Walt have around 10 threads outside Community Center.

It is natural for (hu)man to be shy on needing to ask, but really, when it was such a terrible thing for your image? Compare to the times you really should have asked and became ashamed you didn't! I do understand that these comments are only quarter serious but thats my 5 euro cents...

No, I'm not talking about the need to ask. It's the idea of asking a question like "Gimme the code for flogging deceased equines. I don't know how" and then tweeting it. Especially when your instructor can find it easier.

Well it's my guess that lazy students aren't facebook friends with their instructors :)

If you can't wrap your mind around which types of threads would be socialized upon being posted, here is just one of many recent examples: http://www.daniweb.com/software-development/python/code/432797/brute-force-check-for-largest-palindromic-product-of-three-number-integers (I specifically singled out a post by a mod because I thought maybe you would appreciate it more ... sorry pyTony!) Tony here has earned lots of activity points for sharing things on Facebook and logging in with facebook :)

Another example is http://www.daniweb.com/software-development/cpp/threads/432765/trying-to-implement-code-into-a-gui-program-with-qt

Regardless, I think this is a moot point for you, Walt, because it's actually a bug for the socially sharing thing to come up if you're in a behind-the-scenes forum, meaning you'd only ever see it like 5 times a year. Certainly not a big deal considering all the good it's doing.

Member Avatar for iamthwee

I think it's a good idea to drive traffic to the site.

I've actually liked daniweb on my facebook. I encourage all those in the daniweb closet to come out and be proud. ;)

Member Avatar for diafol

It doesn't bother me as long as it's not in my face telling me to retwit [sic] or share to faceballs. Those who spend their lives on these things - carry on. Those of us - a dwindling number I fear - who would rather live life in the physical world - can decide to ignore it. :)

That said, I will continue to develop sites for the SM slaves - as you say - it drives visits.

Well it's my guess that lazy students aren't facebook friends with their instructors :)

Well, that's true. Not that they can't find their Twitter account easily.

If you can't wrap your mind around which types of threads would be socialized upon being posted, here is just one of many recent examples

Oh, I actually can come up with types of threads that are socializable. I kinda doubt the forums I haunt would have many likely candidates. But some do exist.
Maybe a code snippet or two - if I was brave ;o)
Maybe how-to posts like some of the stickys
Those types of things in the Software Forums.

In this thread I'm playing more of a devil's advocate, egging them on.
Hmmm, I guess my cover is blown.
Omelettes, anyone?

Maybe a code snippet or two - if I was brave ;o)
Maybe how-to posts like some of the stickys
Those types of things in the Software Forums.

Those are the types of things that you would share because they're informative, but a lot of question-askers would rather post in one place and see if anyone in their social network could offer assistance, instead of posting their question on facebook, posting their question on twitter, posting their question on linked in, and then posting their question on 50 different forums, trying to get an answer out of desperation and frustration, so asking as many people they can.

Yeah, respect to all who contributed in this thread. Although, I think it is so annoying that every time I post something, I get the message alerting me if I want to share my post on other websites. Consider giving your users options if they want to disable the feature or not.

Consider giving your users options if they want to disable the feature or not.

Agreed. And if disabled, add a button to share so they still can. And stop apologizing. There's nothing worse that someone always apologizing for something they do over and over and over anyway ;o)

When I consider the ratio of the number of threads that I have started to the total number of postings I have made, the "inconvenience" of having to ignore the social media requestor is insignificant compared to the benefit to the site as a whole. I don't mind the added step at all.

commented: Agree with the reasoning; I too feel the same way. +0
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