Constructive criticism for DP forum format
Posted January 8th, 2008 by vincebodie
output
I just tried to send an email to Michael Nystrom, but apparently the site is getting so many hits that he can't promise to answer emails, let alone read them. In my mind this is good and bad. Read on and you will see why I say this:
Hi Michael,
This started off as a forum post, but then I thought twice and decided to send it directly to you instead.
Let me first say that I spend more time on this site than all other RP sites combined. I love the humor and the insight and the immediacy that it offers about what is going on with the campaign and us in the grassroots. I think you have done a great job with the site and you are offering a wonderful service to the campaign and to the message of freedom and liberty.
Unfortunately, it is this immediacy that I think is also the site's achilles heel. Because of the way the most recently active posts are lumped together on the right column, I think it leads a few people to try to outdo each other to get their post read, leading to titles in ALL CAPS and multiple ***!!!???*** to get noticed. This leads to posts that are inflammatory or which jump the gun with "stories" that have not been sufficiently researched or documented. You and I both know that there are people cruising this site that are not RP supporters, and they must love seeing the bickering that goes on.
I liked that you added a forum section specifically for videos, and I think breaking the forums down even further would be very beneficial. You could then just list a few of the threads in each forum that are getting the most hits on the home page, and when people click on any of them it will take them to that specific forum. This will make people think more deeply about their post, knowing that it will only make the home page if the content is worthy of multiple responses.
As it is now with every new post going immediately to the top of the home page (including posts that are written with intent to be inflammatory), if the first reaction is negative the thread goes right back to the top of the page, and the firestorm starts. If a post could not make the home page until it reached a certain number of replies, many of these types of posts would just flame out. This would prevent a lot of "piling on" and name calling, and take a lot of the heat off you as far as having to decide to delete posts or not. And it would give all of us more free time to write about stuff that really matters and get out there canvassing and promoting RP's message. And maybe we'd stop seeing so many posts like "I am leaving Daily Paul", and "Why was my post deleted?"
My one last issue is the layout. I think the site could make better use of screen real estate by being wider. There is a lot of unused white space on each side. Also, if the forums were listed all in one place (say at the top or down one side), then the bulk of the screen could be made up of topical news items, videos, and commentary.
If you want to turn this into a post and take a poll on these ideas, feel free. I'm still thinking about doing that myself.
Just my 2 cents...
In liberty,
Vince Mross
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I Very Much Agree
and have been writing about this im various places.
I only found this post by going way back into the data base. Too much important stuff is getting launched in the avalanche of new stuff.
We need many different categories. I want to be able to find the top 10% of the posts that I most want to read faster.
I suggest those of us who want to continue to explore and develop these ideas could keep on posting here which would keep up towards the top.
Daily Kos has a feature where the most read posts stay on the right at the top. This could be implemented here in perhaps even a better way.
If Michael needs more money to do these changes we could raise those funds.
There is so much good stuff here. We are very creative and well informed people. This place needs to be organized to leverage all that value.
Changes needed
I agree that some sort of change is needed to the way the forum works. I think instead that there needs to be some way for people to "mod down" a post. Some people would complain about being modded down, but I think that most of those would be the people posting in all caps with multiple exclamation points in the subject. There are ways around having it abused, but they are very complicated. Slashdot has a very effective moderation system, but I think that it may be overkill for a site like this.
I think that the YouTube model would work best. Give everyone the ability to give a thumb-up or thumb-down. Once a threshold has been reached, the post drops from the front page no matter how many comments are made. The biggest problem now is that an inflammatory post will remain on top because people are responding to it. Allowing people to respond and rate the original post negatively would go a long way to ridding us of the troll posts and the plants.
Yep
Site desperately needs a mod.
Or at least the ability to make the folders sticky.
I keep posting ACTION ALERTS for redistribution and they keep getting buried.
I agree
Something has to change on the site. People are posting comments as forum topics. By doing that, positive productive forum topics are quickly buried. I usually only get to post one comment on a forum topic before it is buried and dead. A lot of good ideas, good discussions are being lost and wasting peoples' time. It takes about 15 minutes sometimes to find a forum topic that I commented on so I can see others comments in response. People quickly move on to the next topic without finishing the topic that was being discussed.
The format is making it hard to focus and get things done, but that is just my opinion.
The fact that I'm bumping my
The fact that I'm bumping my own thread to get it noticed is evidence that I think I'm right about this...
It's the technology under the board
That's how I see it, I'm no programmer. Maybe 4 weeks ago, the board was very fluid and easy to spot new stuff. But the last few weeks, the activity here has taken off like a rocket. There are many many great posts of interest going up all the time. I've posted good stuff too, and it goes by the wayside sometimes, but that's ok, sometimes people spot it and post, or someone starts a new thread on the seem topic. I don't mind that at all. It shows me that people are very active here, googling, yahooing, youtubing, researching looking for every nugget we can find for guests and members here. People are watching for new stuff, it's just a timing thing now, with so much going on.