Little advice to Garry and Co.

[steveu]

First of all, congrats on this great new board. I could make all sorts of comparisons with others and so on, but I won't ...

But as a message board vet and partial-admin, I'd like to make a few suggestions:

1 - If your software allows, break the board down into forums ... something like International, US, College, Training, General Comments or whatever. DyeStat has a LOT of categories, which works pretty well. Letsrun just has one, but the size of the font and number of threads displayed means you pretty much get all the day's active topics on one page. Just an idea...

2 - Also would recommend mandatory registration. While it seems so far that your board is going to attract serious, quality folks, that can change in a hurry. All you have to do is look at our site or letsrun to see that. I dont' know what else there is to compare to ... the IAAF boards look clean, but so many people don't know about them, so ...

Well, good luck and thanks for everything you guys do.

[gh]

Re: Little advice to Garry and Co.

Thanks for the commentary. We discussed both of your suggestions in depth before we went live, of course.

Our take on the multiple forums issue was that we'd wait and see what kind of traffic we had. Not having any idea what kind of response we'd get, we didn't want to kill a fledgling board by having too little traffic at any one spot ("critical mass" thinking).

Hard to predict where we're going to go, with the Easter weekend killing so much traffic just as we started to ramp up, so for now we'll go w/ one big place where everybody feels welcome, and there's no problem staying current with "popular" threads in a single window. But ideally, yes, we'd love to have enough traffic that we'd feel the need to split off separate forums.

On registration, we took the chance that at least to begin with we'd have--as you say--nothing but serious people, and we want to encourage the "meek" among them to feel free to jump in and live vicariously while posting as Darth Vader, or whomever they wish to pretend they are, with no chance of unmasking.

Since we started the eTN setup (that's our free results service for paid-up subscribers), we've been stunned by the number of people who are afraid to sign on becuase of Spam fears. Obviously, we can't guarantee that people can't harvest addresses by some back-door method, no matter how careful we are, but we'd certainly never sell/trade/give away any of the addresses of those who do register.

But until we get to a problem point (of the hint thereof), we'll keep things wide open, encouraging as many newbies as possible to be part of the message-board experience.

gh

ps--apologize if any readers find this techno-babble a waste of bandwidth; just thought you might be interested in knowing why this board operates (so far) the way it does. If you've read far enough even to get to this.... love ya!

[Guest]

Re: Little advice to Garry and Co.

Aiyeeeee! Not steveu, the dyestat moderator menace!

[steveu]

Re: Little advice to Garry and Co.

haha ... the above brings up another good point, rather Lincolnesque, I believe:

You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time ... but you can't please all of the people all of the time.

True, true. So at DyeStat, we try and please that middle/moderate 80-90 percent, knowing there's going to be kids (and unfortunately, adults) that really push the boundaries ... and others on the other end that are very conservative. We want people to have fun and also feel that whether or not stuff needs to be deleted (or people banned) can be somewhat objective, but also subjective as well.

DyeStat's Message board gets poo-poo'ed by a lot of people, but I think having over 6000 registered posters says something. We could weed it down if we wanted to be more elitest or structured, but we like to let kids be kids -- to an extent.

Anyway, sorry to defend myself, but I hope there's something in there for you at T&FN as far as finding that balance. Folks at letsrun and the t-and-f list have had to learn the same thing.

[John Lunn]

Re: Little advice from Garry and Co.

GH,
I hit the button for the "next 15 threads" and I get a blank screen. Do I need to hit the button harder or what?

[Guest]

Re: Little advice from Garry and Co.

(not logged in at moment)

I have no trouble; maybe you need to say please? :-)

Tech questions need to be referred to [email protected]

My expertise extends only to track questions and the typing thereof.

gh

[steveu]

Re: Little advice from Garry and Co.

Smack it good, that should do it ...

(not sure, though, really ... worked for me)

[guru]

El bumperino 8)


By the way, it's interesting to see how many of these ancient threads have been viewed since the switch to the new layout(since it only shows "views" since the changeover - Oct. 8 ). MJD is one busy dude :lol: