plan for more members?

Oh, yes, we definitely are working to improve things here. There are two key things we are working on right now:

1. The Content Site (A Padded Cell)

We always had a hard time promoting this place without a content site. It is what has held us back for many years. We have it now and are continuing to work hard on producing content. It is tough right now because it's just Liam and I writing content so we haven't been able to publish as much as we would have liked (especially since we got married and moved into a new house this summer).

It would be great if others were able to contribute articles for the site. We are targetting a more beginner level audience with a lot of it (although some articles are more advanced). It's easier to write content about topics that are easy for you (but not for the noobs!).

2. The Drupal Conversion

Liam is still working hard on the Drupal conversion. He's had some other work come up (that pays money!) so it has been stlaled a little bit. He has been spouting off about it on the vBulletin forums and here so now he feels extra motivation to get it done.

How does this help us get more members? We feel that drupal will be a lot better for our search rankings. It has "nice" url's and cleaner code and we feel that it will help us a lot.

How you can help

There are a few things you can do to help us out:

1. Link to us from your site, tell your friends etc.
2. Vote for our A Padded Cell articles or even particularly good forum topics in social bookmarking sites
3. Continue to participate as much as you can and try to generate discussion.
4. Write some articles for A Padded Cell

Finally, I'll admit that I've slacked off in some areas lately. Sometimes it's hard enough just to keep on top of things here and make sure peoples' questions get answered properly and the spammers are dealt with. We've disucssed the membership problem many times in our moderators forum and haven't been able to come up with a lot of good solutions.

I'm glad you're enjoying our forums, greg!

Maybe some kind of subforum dedicated to Web 2.0! j/k. I guess someone could make those tiny web banner/icons I see often on other sites, like this: but for this forum.

I think Megan's accurately summed it up.

greg wrote: I just wondered if this is TWF's opinoin too or if the big wigs, and the other regulars, are happy with the way it is now?

Hehehe, big wigs. There aren't any of those around here!

I can offer an update on the Drupal work:
We do want to expand the forums though, I've created a couple of modules to convert from vBulletin (without users having to reset their passwords either!), once this site is converted I'll get those modules onto the drupal.org site (along with several other patches and another module) which will create several high-PR, relevant links from Drupal to this site, not only that but people converting their forums from vBulletin to Drupal will look to us as an example. I intend for us to have some sort of forum dedicated to helping people with those modules and other Drupal problems.

Oddly what's holding us up with the forum conversion is a couple of third-party modules, notably Subscriptions (the RSS feed tries to get every node in the whole database) and Privatemsg (some of the interface just doesn't work). There are a couple of others that I need to generate patches for. Work has ground to a halt mainly because the problems are a bit of a moving target I'm not familiar with handling. Also have to convince others of the worthiness of the code I write, and amend it to fit the communities needs. Then there's a bunch of contract work that just came my way (not that I'm complaining of course!)

Anyway, thanks a lot for your post, we know what you're saying and indeed these things do seem to take forever to get done (which would be my fault). Honestly, if you have any ideas of how to make TWF better we'd welcome them. The community we've got is great, but it could be a bit bigger.

I only peek here time to time but I do agree that it should be more active. It's long established, it certainly does appear to have the traffic.

Personally, I don't think it's much about adding content or the script drupal. I'm not sure that'd improve any activity but instead it might just increase the admin workload. This site as whole is a forum community. I think the real way to turn traffic into posts and contributors is the most obvious things - such as the forum skin. It could do with a more lively and vibrant, yet clean look.

And perhaps applying tiny changes to make it more friendly/easier for the newbie webmasters. Those people should be the real target of such site.

You could also have a larger team of staff, this also opens unknown doors. Might be surprising to find out how much difference 1 person can make.

Cheers

Thanks for your feedback, James. We'll have a new design here when the drupal convesion comes in (we have a bunch of other reasons for converting to Drupal, some of which Liam has outlined here). You're right though, this skin is 7+ years old, it's time for a change.

The staff is a good point as well - a lot of our moderators have been busy and haven't been able to contribute as much as they used to. We have a few ideas for expansion there

Greg's ideas also brought up another idea we'd like to implement in the future. Liam is really keen on doing some sort of karma system where members would get "points" for, among other things, linking to us and being especially helpful in the forums. We're not sure what these "points" would be redeemable for - it could be something like Slashdot where there are levels of perks ranging from getting nofollow removed from your links to actually having moderating powers.

The points system is a good idea, it wont of course bring more members in itself, may help with 'the good word' - I.E. TWF now has a user points system, new look, has been updated might try it/give it another go etc.

The points system I prefer is the thanks count. USER has had xx thanks.
The prefixed level is also good, where you start at noob (or perhaps 'beginner' is less harsh ) and have say 6 levels with the top being guru master or whatever.

Perhaps both can be used successfully in conjunction with each other? - something I have not seen before

so you have a pre-fixed user level and underneath a thanks count.
For me the user 'level' should depend on various parameters, such as:
total number of thanks, total number of posts, last post date, last active.

So if you don't post or log in for a few months, you could drop a level. some may say that's a little unfair, but personally I think it stops everyone simply having the top level and keeping it.
you end up with the forum full of guru masters and then it means nothing. The regular helpers should realistically have a higher stat than someone who comes here every 3-4 months or whatever...even if once they did help out a lot.

So you don't come here for a few months and your level drops but then come back for a bit it will build up quickly as your post count and number of thanks is high. Of course stay away for a FURTHER 3 months and you drop even more.
Again, some may say that's unfair, but why should you stay top level with the regulars if you haven't been here for 6 months.
People who aren't really active members probably aren't that bothered by being seen as a constant and regular helper anyway.

Although I frequently read people stating total post count doesn't mean much, as any idiot can make a post, I disagree. even people with no knowledge at all add to the forum by providing new threads to assist in and thus giving more advice threads available throughout the forum...for search engines to find and other people when searching
so everyone helps by posting IMHO
So they too gain better levels, even from just asking questions, with the post count in the equation. As they learn they assist others and build up their level more. Other wise they remain "noob" indefinitely and that's a little unfair if they are active members.

that's just my opinion. might give you some more ideas!
and, wow, I've written a novel again :snooze:

Thanks for your feedback on that, greg! We'll defintely consider that if/when we get around to putting that system in. The only reason I mentioned it here is because we'd like to have a way to reward people for promoting us (but aren't sure how we would actually do that).

greg, you're certainly thinking the same way we are when it comes to this kudos idea. We'll reward people for many things, in turn rel=nofollow will be removed from signature links, they will get mod points (although there will have to be controls in place to ensure this facility isn't abused) and maybe we'll have a kudos leaderboard. We are hoping to get new members by giving people large amounts of kudos for successfully inviting news users to join.

We don't want people to become uber-powerful though, so the kudos available to any user will be the square root of the kudos given to them, think of it like this:
$kudos = sqrt($kudos_recieved - $kudos_destroyed - $weeks_since_last_post) - $kudos_spent;'
It's a little more complicated than that, to account for minus numbers, but you get the idea. $kudos_destroyed is a measure of how much other people have reported the user for trolling etc.

Anyway, this is all in the future, we've got to get off vBulletin first!

Can't fit "Webmaster-Forums" on those little buttons, but this might work:

You should also consider adding a Stumble button to the bottom of your articles on A Padded Cell. From what I've read, Stumble Upon sends more traffic than Digg. From the little traffic I get on my blog, I can tell you that when someone Stumbled one of my articles, I got > 300 hits to that article over the next few days. A submission to Digg yields like 5. The only exception would be if the article made it to the homepage, which would be rare.

We've spoken about that too and I can't remember why Jeeves said it's not on there... We've gotten good traffic from StumbleUpon too.

If any of you do use social bookmarking sites you could really help us out by submitting some of our articles

greg;224959 wrote: I was just wondering if there was a battle plan in discussion or in place to try to get more members?
Or if it's something TWF wants.

I feel the site is lacking in liveliness. A couple of new posts are made each day and a couple of threads are replied to but that's about it.

What's hurting is page loads. 128ms pings as well, as the server points to Amsterdam. :/

It's like 56k modem speed to go from page-to-page (despite very fast broadband)...

And page loads truly affects how folks will stay to seed a forum.

Nitewatcher wrote: the server points to Amsterdam

Hmmm, no it's in London.

Nitewatcher wrote: It's like 56k modem speed to go from page-to-page

Not for me. It's lightning quick, although I have been doing a lot of processor intensive work recently. Has anyone else noticed a slow-down? You might have just been surfing at a bad time, although I should really stop stealing all the servers processor cycles.

Quote: Not for me. It's lightning quick, although I have been doing a lot of processor intensive work recently. Has anyone else noticed a slow-down? You might have just been surfing at a bad time, although I should really stop stealing all the servers processor cycles.

Nope. Roughly 1-3 seconds load time per page.

Just also thought I should put it out there that if I was a new user coming to a site with advertisements as flashy as a specific one that talks about making some large sum of money in the $200k area by virtually doing nothing, it makes me either leave or enable AdBlock for that site. The ads on a site can really influence how long its visitors stick around.

In other words, advertising if fine, but it's really hard to read posts and write responses while there's a strobe party going on in the sidebar.

programmer wrote: In other words, advertising if fine, but it's really hard to read posts and write responses while there's a strobe party going on in the sidebar.

Very true, so the animation in the ads has been removed and the advertisers notified. Howzat?

NiteWatcher wrote: 85.233.164.139 also points to a Plesk page. And if this is on a VPS

It's on an--almost--dedicated server (we run a couple of other low volume sites on the same machine). Currently top looks like:

'
So it's definitely not the server itself. I'm in Canada, pr0gr4mm3r is in the US and we have several mods from the US who aren't seeing this problem (or at least they're not saying anything about it). I wasn't aware that ISPs had started charging websites for service yet? :eek:

Am not refuting that you're having troubles, and possibly a lot of others are too, but most of the visitors to the site aren't seeing it. I'll try raising a support ticket with the hosts to see if there are any connection issues we're not aware of. It's a weird problem, would be funny if we solved this and the floodgates opened to thousands of new users (doubtful though).

From here am getting a ping of ~95ms, not great but not bad for a Web site either. Have to take into consideration that up here in Canada all network packets have to be delivered by carrier-moose, that increases latency.

NiteWatcher wrote: Do you want me to make a video to show how slow this site actually is?

That won't be necessary. Am not saying I disbelieve you, just that you're the only one seeing the problem, which is weird. Well, you're the only one who's posted about it anyway. Since we have several mods from the US they should have told us... Oi! Mods! Is the site loading slowly for you?

NiteWatcher wrote: Two that do post from the US are claiming the site is loading slow.

Who's the other one? Anyway, I've created a support ticket with our hosts, we'll soon know if they've got any connectivity issues. Thanks for going to the trouble of reporting the problem by the way. It's really annoying when people don't give feedback and you're left wondering why something isn't successful!