Too Many Topics About US Election May Alienate Some Users

At the new a2k we are one click away from getting a simulated politics forum, that is all of the threads that have been tagged politics. Is everything tagged that should be? Don't count on it. Is everything tagged really suitable for a politics forum? Don't count on that either. At the old a2k stuff that was put into the politics forum that did not belong there was moved to its proper place by the mods, this of course no longer happens.

For me the difference is that the tags are not always consistent or intuitive. Some members on the old A2K ONLY posted on 1 to 3 forums and that created a unique culture within those forums. That's where you went to find certain people and certain kinds of topics and discussions. What I would have formerly expected to find in the Politics forum might now be tagged Philosophy and not Politics. Or what might have been a topic that would have been in the old Philosohy forum might be tagged something altogether different now.

It does make it harder to build a consistent community. And its a whole lot harder to find a topic you took interest in and thought about returning to later but didn't tag. I don't know if that problem will ever be solved, but I do think it is why more newbies aren't being inspired to settle in and become a member of the family. They're losing thread before they ever catch on to the concept of tagging. I also think all the ugly, insulting, or hateful tags that are attached to a lot of threads are also a turnoff to some. As well as the zeros.

But perhaps this too shall pass. Or not.

We'll cope.

How did a thread on too many US politics threads and Quebec turn into yet another place for hawkeye to trawl his weary "I hate Craven and the new A2k" bait?


Me, I was damned interested in Quebec.

Or...a bunch of the newbies are coming here, finding what they wanted, and leaving again...traffic that I understand to be as much what the site wants as we weary old villagers...

Agreed, which is why I said that the head count is far more important to the success of the site than any of us having it the way we would prefer it. So, to have it the way we might prefer it, we have to work harder to woo people to become members of the family and to help them become orientated and participate. If that's too much effort to us--and it very well may be--we will likely not see our little family here grow and in fact it will probably decline.

If the site was thus useful the newbies would come back again and again, looking for new stuff. PAge views are way up on the new a2k, but reach is not improved. for the community it is reach that is important.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/able2know.org

I just found a copy of A Source-Book of Canadian History at a thrift store for Set. Told him about Diest's Quebec question.

We'll see.

according to the following site the value of a2k has gone from $41K to 45K in the last six months, and daily ad rev is up about $10. However, as I have pointed out before what is best for Craven is not necessarily what is best for me, or the a2k community.
http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.able2know.org

You know, what gets me a tad irked re the complaints about "we aren't a community any more" is that, although I happily consider myself amongst the biggest "L" Luddites here, I have managed to grasp that there are a whole bunch of community building tools in the works.

Some of them may be fantastic wooing tools and all.

Ahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!



Heheheheheehheeheheheeheheeeee

don't hold your breath, the design team market themselves as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts and web site design experts. This area of expertise does not translate well into community design competence.

You know, the only good thing about your turning your obsessive hate on Craven is that you have as far as I can tell...I have you on ignore....lightened up on your obsessive misogyny and propaganda for abusing teenagers.

Now...why don't you try to translate all this hate energy onto something useful....there's just soooooooo much of it...


Hmmm......how about hating Multi Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus?


Here you go........focus on this...now........use all that nasty energy.....

Yes, thats really annoying. When I see that, I always add neutral tags to try to push those out, but yeah. They're there, and brand new threads (that havent been tagged by many people yet) are extra vulnerable.

Craven did try some safeguards (like, a tag would only ever appear as one of a thread's top five tags if it was a tag that was used more often, so that weird one-off tags are automatically excluded), but yeah, it's still happening.




OK, these are roughly comparable complaints - and, I mean, sounds reasonable. But, OK, so (and I dont mean to be on your case, FF, very much agreed with your reply to Hawkeye on the other page), I thought I'd just check it out, whether this really is a real problem. I mean, categories becoming blurred, things not being in the right place, tags having all kinds of misplaced content - how big a problem is this being in practice?

These are the newest ten threads that are tagged Politics right now (if you look by New Topics):

• How about a president who can anticipate the future?
  
• Biden cries during the VP debate.
  
• Oinkbama losing suppoprt over ACORN
  
• that is very bad [about Iraq]
  
• Diagnosis: Greed [about the financial meltdown]
  
• is sarah palin an alpha female
  
• Palin Found Guilty Of Ethics Violation In Abuse Of Power
  
• Troopergate report: Palin abused power
  
• Fox News: Palin's Newsweek cover "untouched" and "mortifying"
  
• Connecticut Supreme Court Legalizes Gay Marriage

I dunno, those all seem to be rightly tagged Politics.

These are the latest ten threads started that are tagged Philosophy:

• The difference between philosophy and religion
  
• What is will?
  
• Deep thought in football. What is luck?
  
• A unifying language for the metaphysical?
  
• Devil Music
  
• 3 Ways to Create an (Almost) Crime Free Polity
  
• ONTOLOGY STUDENTS OR LANDMARK EDUCATION GRADUATES?
  
• cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers
  
• So what becomes of wrong?
  
• Business Ethics

Now I didnt check the Devil Music thread (it's by RexRed), but I dunno, these all seem to pretty appropriate for the Philosophy tag too.

All of which just to say, ok - how much of this is a problem of the new system in theory, and on what scale is it actually happening? Cause I sometimes get the impression that much of the complaints about the new site are almost, eh, philosophical discussions based on hypotheticals - like, yeah, but wouldn't people fail to x, y and z? Wont the tag system result in a, b or c? But when I check how it actually goes in reality, I just dont see these scenarios happening in practice, at least not on any significant scale... That seems to be the case here, for example.

I mean, for sure, no prob - its true that some threads wont get tagged the right way. There's more room for user error in the new system. And the newer the thread and the fewer people are tagging, the more likely it is to not be found in the obvious place. And you didnt have that problem on the old site, or if things were misplaces moderators would move them. There are real trade-offs involved - the greater flexibility in tagging vs a less waterproof system covering every thread; the "mothering" of threads on the old site in terms of them being moved into the right place by moderators vs the unsustainable burden on the small moderating team, etc.

But what I am wondering is whether there's not a lot of focusing going on about what the consequences could all hypothetically be, when if you go and check how it works in practice, it seems to actually work pretty well by and large. Maybe not 100% foolproof, but those two lists above of the newest 10 threads tagged politics or philosophy sure dont seem to confirm that there's widespread blurring and misplacing of categories going on?

Back to Quebec.

The old city is very beautiful....




and actually is still walled!

RE: Quebec pics

That's super cool. I love stuff like this. I've been thinking lately about how terribly uneducated I am about our neighbors to the north and I listened to a 30 oped piece on public radio while in traffic the other day about Quebec that caught my attention.

RE: Site

Nihm, what is more difficult about driving a stick shift car when the shifter is on the left? Same mechanics right? Most of us are probably used to the shifter being on the right, and I'm sure that we could adjust, but for us to adjust (buy a car with the shifter on the left/steering column on the right) we'd have to be pretty attracted to the other features. A car maker has no benefits to arbitrarily change the side the driver sits on.

Many of the changes to A2K were to things that weren't broken and were extremely intuitive and consistent with other forums. While the changes made A2k unique (I have seen no other forum with this format) it doesn't make it inherently better.

Here: http://able2know.org/tag/spirituality_and_religion/
That's just sad. Forget the site veterans for a moment and remember that this was once one of the most thriving areas on A2k for new posters.

Here: http://able2know.org/tag/relationships/
While there are a lot of topics, look at the number of replies. The new site lacks functionality and appeal to new users.

I've heard no explanation as to why we reinvented the wheel here...


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what you say is true, but one can not market themselves as cutting edge web designers by doing what everyone else is doing. This goes into a long American history of change for change sake, of doing something different to stand out and for no other reason. This is an American obsession of sorts. In the east the saying is that the nail that stands out gets hammered in, in America the one who stands out is rewarded normally.

Actually, the way the old site was, it couldn't handle all of the data coming in. It wasn't change just for the sake of change, even though it may seem to be so. There were a lot of outages and a lot of "unable to insert row" errors which I suspect a lot of users did not see, but these errors and problems existed all the same.

I recognize it's very different from what it was but there were definitely things that didn't work. There were always topics that could not be well categorized, or topics that would have fit into new forums if making new forums would have been easier (it was not easy due to all of the pages that would have needed updating). These are topics that had anything to do with things like crafts, coin collecting, beauty and fashion, etc. There was just no place to put those.

Then there was the Australia forum. It was named that because of the continent name, but a lot of the Aussies (plus folks from places like New Zealand) wanted it to be renamed to Oceania. We couldn't do that, again, because of the enormous number of changes that would have had to occur.

I hope this explanation helps.

Just catching up on this topic
and figure I'll work up a spitfit.
Or not. Back later.

So THAT'S why the whole site changed!!!!!


SUPER COOL!!!!!!!

It's cos we threatened to swim over there and beat you all up, isn't it?


We got the MOJO!!!!

LOL. But if you do swim over, we'll get a hot dog.

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