Forest
Beloved Grand Eagle
Hi Everyone,
I just wanted to give people a heads up that in the coming days I'm going to work on combining some of our subforums to make the forum easier to use and more intuitive for newcomers.
Right now we have four whole subforums about our nonprofit. They are:
All four of them have so few posts that people visit them only very rarely. When I post in one of them, I feel like I am sending my post off to die of neglect....
It is really just very hard to get a conversation going in a subforum with little traffic.
Because the subforums with less traffic are located low down in our subforum list, I think that many people simply just don't bother going down to the subforums that far down on the page. As a result, posts in those subforums just don't get seen by a large proportion of our visitors. Further, when they do get seen, the threads are already fairly stale, so why bother replying.
Combining these four subforums will result in a subforum that is still very easy to keep on top of, but which holds more interest. It will also give people one place to post all threads directly related to our nonprofit, keeping things simple.
Another subforum that isn't getting adequate views is our "off-topic" subforum. Often people post threads in the General Discussion Subforum that really should go in the "Community Off Topic" subforum. To be honest, I can't blame them, though, because that is where the people are! Forums are about connecting with people and if there are no people in a given subforum, why bother posting? For this reason, I plan on combining the Community Off Topic subforum with the Laughter is the Best Medicine subforum to give people a single place to go for their off topic and fun posts. With the traffic being higher, people will be much more likely to post.
Of course, we want people to be able to find the funny threads easily and quickly, because they are a lot of fun. This will be made possible by more extensive use of what are called "prefixes." Prefixes are the colorful labels like you see on the Ask A TMS Therapist posts that say "Alan G" or "Dan L." If you click on a prefix, you can get a listing of all of the threads in a particular subforum with that same prefix. For example, here's a listing of all of the threads with the "Alan G" prefix in the Ask A TMS Therapist subforum:
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/forums/ask-a-tms-therapist.47/?prefix_id=88
This might not make sense now, but with some careful writing and customizations, we can make it more intuitive and easy to use, so that people will start using prefix listings without even thinking of it. We'll do this with the tutorials as well, but it will take some time to set it all up.
So far this reduces the number of subforums from an unwieldy 17 to a somewhat more manageable 13. However, there are still a number of subforums with very low traffic that could be combined into another subforum (or into different subforums). The key would be to carefully use prefixes and prefix listings so that people can easily find the content they are interested in.
These subforums would be:
We would make special prefixes to correspond with each of these old subforums and provide special links so that you wouldn't lose access to the views that you are used to (it may take one or two additional clicks to find them).
All told, we will slim down from 16 subforums to a much more manageable 10. Then we can collect more data and see how people respond. If people seem to like it, we can always go farther, but only time will tell.
Any thoughts on all of this? I don't expect people to necessarily love it at first, since the old system is comfortable, but when I look at the usage patterns from our Analytics data, the change seems pretty necessary.
I just wanted to give people a heads up that in the coming days I'm going to work on combining some of our subforums to make the forum easier to use and more intuitive for newcomers.
Right now we have four whole subforums about our nonprofit. They are:
All four of them have so few posts that people visit them only very rarely. When I post in one of them, I feel like I am sending my post off to die of neglect....
It is really just very hard to get a conversation going in a subforum with little traffic.Because the subforums with less traffic are located low down in our subforum list, I think that many people simply just don't bother going down to the subforums that far down on the page. As a result, posts in those subforums just don't get seen by a large proportion of our visitors. Further, when they do get seen, the threads are already fairly stale, so why bother replying.
Combining these four subforums will result in a subforum that is still very easy to keep on top of, but which holds more interest. It will also give people one place to post all threads directly related to our nonprofit, keeping things simple.
Another subforum that isn't getting adequate views is our "off-topic" subforum. Often people post threads in the General Discussion Subforum that really should go in the "Community Off Topic" subforum. To be honest, I can't blame them, though, because that is where the people are! Forums are about connecting with people and if there are no people in a given subforum, why bother posting? For this reason, I plan on combining the Community Off Topic subforum with the Laughter is the Best Medicine subforum to give people a single place to go for their off topic and fun posts. With the traffic being higher, people will be much more likely to post.
Of course, we want people to be able to find the funny threads easily and quickly, because they are a lot of fun. This will be made possible by more extensive use of what are called "prefixes." Prefixes are the colorful labels like you see on the Ask A TMS Therapist posts that say "Alan G" or "Dan L." If you click on a prefix, you can get a listing of all of the threads in a particular subforum with that same prefix. For example, here's a listing of all of the threads with the "Alan G" prefix in the Ask A TMS Therapist subforum:
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/forums/ask-a-tms-therapist.47/?prefix_id=88
This might not make sense now, but with some careful writing and customizations, we can make it more intuitive and easy to use, so that people will start using prefix listings without even thinking of it. We'll do this with the tutorials as well, but it will take some time to set it all up.
So far this reduces the number of subforums from an unwieldy 17 to a somewhat more manageable 13. However, there are still a number of subforums with very low traffic that could be combined into another subforum (or into different subforums). The key would be to carefully use prefixes and prefix listings so that people can easily find the content they are interested in.
These subforums would be:
We would make special prefixes to correspond with each of these old subforums and provide special links so that you wouldn't lose access to the views that you are used to (it may take one or two additional clicks to find them).
All told, we will slim down from 16 subforums to a much more manageable 10. Then we can collect more data and see how people respond. If people seem to like it, we can always go farther, but only time will tell.
Any thoughts on all of this? I don't expect people to necessarily love it at first, since the old system is comfortable, but when I look at the usage patterns from our Analytics data, the change seems pretty necessary.
I'm thinking it would be useful to have one called "Advocacy" where we can discuss ideas and activities to spread the word about TMS.