The Official Chat Thread - Part 2

[Romanos]

Yes, they get more traffic than MHB, and yet have virtually no active administration nor custom features. That was the reason I decided to leave, and focus on MHB. When I joined MHB, I noticed there was a team of admins, and all were active on a daily basis and valued user input. I liked that much better.

No active administration?

 

[MarkFL]

No active administration?

The site owner would drop by once, maybe twice a year at most...and doesn't trust anyone in the AdminCP. I offered to do some coding to add requested features, but the offers were never responded to.

I firmly believe a site needs active administration, like CH and MHB have. :thumbsup:

 

[psalms 91]

They do and any site without that is poorer for it

 

[Romanos]

The site owner would drop by once, maybe twice a year at most...and doesn't trust anyone in the AdminCP. I offered to do some coding to add requested features, but the offers were never responded to.

I firmly believe a site needs active administration, like CH and MHB have. :thumbsup:

Wow so no one has Admin CP access?

 

[MS140ukn]

greetings CHers. just passing by this morning.

 

[MarkFL]

Good morning, Malcolm!

Wow so no one has Admin CP access?

No one but the owner. So, when an issue arises that can only be handled from within the AdminCP, it just goes undone.

 

[MS140ukn]

look! its mark. sup:happy-run2:

 

[MarkFL]

I really like your new avatar!

 

[MS140ukn]

good ol kung fu panda lovin' mark. i bought kung fu panda 1 and 2 recently. btw, your talk about forum with inattentive admin..ive run into a few in past..the admin would only check in once a month, leaving only his global mod in charge -without access to acp. the admin has complete confidence of his staff...but no access to acp doesnt make sense.

 

[tango]

Good morning, Malcolm!



No one but the owner. So, when an issue arises that can only be handled from within the AdminCP, it just goes undone.

Reminds me of a photography forum I used to use. For a time it was a really good place to post pictures to get feedback from a wide range of people, and ask questions of people who had more experience of a specific area than I do. From what I could tell the owner had the idea that selling premium memberships to the site would give him a passive income he needed to retire somewhere quiet, but then decided he was bored of the quiet life and moved back to the big city. Sadly he lost interest in the site and merely let someone else run the show, and the someone else did a great job of driving away the members who had the most to offer. Before long the site was little more than endless arguments over whether Canon was better than Nikon, lots of people posting pictures and few people offering any useful feedback ("wow, nice shot dude!" isn't useful feedback, nor is someone making backhanded comments that seem driven by gear envy).

Last I heard someone had decided to grasp the poison chalice of breathing new life into it, which was an uphill battle given the site could crash and stay down for a week at a time until the owner got around to restarting it all. It's hard to build an online community when the site is gone for days at a time and nobody knows when, or even whether, it will be back. The sad part is that instead of running it into the ground the owner could probably have sold the site as a going concern to someone who could have breathed a little new life in it. The really sad part is that when it started up it was worth paying a notional membership to get features like email notification when someone comments on your picture or replies to your forum post but in this day and age people expect that as a standard feature, and don't expect to have to include HTML tags in their posts to get things like paragraph breaks. It's all well and good giving "you're helping keep the site running" as a reason to pay for the pretty gold star but it makes more sense to present options like that as giving people the chance to donate rather than offering a specific product for sale at a specific price.

 

[MS140ukn]

theres tango. sup!:gathering:

 

[tango]

Hey Mr Panda Man.... that avatar made me chuckle

 

[psalms 91]

Good morning

 

[MarkFL]

Woke up to a difficult coding request (Go me!)...got that done. Now I can finish waking up...

 

[Romanos]

Good morning, Malcolm!



No one but the owner. So, when an issue arises that can only be handled from within the AdminCP, it just goes undone.

Oh my that's ridiculous.

 

[MarkFL]

Oh my that's ridiculous.

Yes, I quite agree. It was the main reason I left...I grew weary of manually banning and moving the posts/threads of 10-20 spammers every single day when a few minutes in the AdminCP installing some spam prevention add-ons would have saved a lot of effort on the part of the moderators. It also grew increasingly embarrassing to have to tell users reporting issues, "sorry...there's nothing we can do about that."

 

[psalms 91]

Im sure that site did not survive

 

[MarkFL]

Im sure that site did not survive

You would think so, but it's actually thriving. It has been around a long time, and so it has high search engine rankings despite all its shortcomings.

 

[psalms 91]

Wow then I would say the admin took an interest or else got rid of it to someone else

 

[MarkFL]

Wow then I would say the admin took an interest or else got rid of it to someone else

I am still in contact with some of the folks I used to moderate with there, and nothing has changed in that regard. Search engine ranking is what drives traffic there, and search engine ranking is still blind to too many aspects of a site.

It's kind of funny...two of the most active math help sites I know of are the worst in terms of spam and admin neglect. They just happen to have been around longer than most, and so their search engine ranking is higher than most, and when someone gets online and looks for a math help site, those two sites sit at or near the top of the results list. So, they get more new traffic as a result, and this then drives their ranking up even further...it's a feedback loop. Newer sites in a fairly saturated niche are at a distinct disadvantage under the current search engine ranking regime.

By and large though, it seems most students seeking math help don't care about site features or lack of spam...they care about finding a site where they can dump their homework, go goof off on facebook, and come back later to pick up their assigned work, all worked out and ready for them to copy/past/turn in. Most times when we ask a new user to show their work so we can actually help them, not do their work for them, that's last we hear from them. But, at MHB we're not in it primarily to have a huge site, we are in it to help people, and you aren't truly helping anyone by doing their work for them (if anything, you are hurting them). If we eventually wind up a huge active site, that would be nice, but we're not going to compromise our principles to get there.