Edwin said:
5) Out with frivolity, in with speed: get rid of glow (substitute colours or larger fonts, perhaps) and above all get rid of Avatars. I don't go to a trade show or conference to find that each participant is wearing a funny hat with their choice of cartoon character on it...
If all the above sounds too dull and dry, over the long term the changes will be ENTIRELY BENEFICIAL to this community as it grows more and more rapidly. The way to keep things on track and on purpose is to get rid of distractions - and to discourage those who feel they need such distractions from participating.
... in another post...
Basically "fluff" like glow, avatars and so on is needed at the first stage of an online community's development, where the key metric is how many people come back and how quickly traffic can be developed.
I would wholely disagree with this statement, as a few people have already done. I bother to reply for the good of the forum... and hopefully to help anyone else running a
community.
As bolded,
Community is the most important word here. All of the "fluff" is what makes a community. If you take
personalities away from people; and remove the "fluff", there's not too much left to come back to day in and day out.
In a
community, there is a spot light on personality.
There is half correctness to the statements only if the goal of this forum is to be changed to a business-only, stiff necked, shirt and tie kinda place to post and sell domains, then perhaps the fluff should go. If the goal is to become an
afternic or even
snapnames.com like service, then
community has little to no place.
In his post, however, Edwin continues to refer to this site, overall, as a
community. And, IMHO, to "get rid of distractions" is to get rid of... all together now... the
community.
Now... Just to make sure to not lose his other points, as he specifically requested...
1) Remove all advertising (through multiple skins or similar) for Platinum members at least.
The problem being that the people who buy Platnimum memberships are about the only ones who would (probably) qualify to buy the products advertised. The rationale being that to buy from the advertisers here you need to a) be interested in domain names and b) have money. If you qualify as a & b, you most likely have a platinum account.
I think if advertising is to be removed, DCG will need to consider a significantly higher priced membership.
2) Make the Domain Names for Sale a non-bumpable forum... -snip- ... At the same time, raise the threads per day limit to 2 or 3 from the current 1
I would much rather keep the thread limit per day lower and keep the bumps in place. It's much easier to see a bump in the thread list; I am more apt to foolishly look at a new thread. The topic of thread ownership is much more revealed with limited threads.
IE, in all my time here, I have 3 threads I've nursed for a very long time. They're easy to pick out when I update (aka bump) them. On the other hand, if I started these 3 threads a new each day... well, that would mean I'd have created some 180 threads in my time here... instead of just
3.
3) ENFORCE THE RULES. It's as simple as that. If a rule says "No comments in sales threads" then kick out those that break the rules. This isn't a social club - it is (or at least, it should be) a place where serious businesspeople can transact business.
Much easier said than done. Especially in a forum like environment. BTW; refering to my started on
community, this is, somewhat, a social club. ;-)
Hope something in there helps someone... somewhere.
