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Yes we are now seeing errors and yes the community is crawling. We knew we had a problem and had scheduled to work on this next weekend but they have become much worse so Steve will be working on things tonight to see if he can identify the problems and fix them.
It's probably worth reviewing the community with you and tell you what our plans are for the future so here goes...
We have to recognize that the community is not well used for whatever reason. We have also taken a long time to fix some known issues which hasn't helped. As a business we put our efforts where they make the most financial sense and the community actually costs us money rather than makes us money and hence it has not been a high priority.
That said there is no excuse for us having a system running that is not doing what it was intended to do.
Over the past year I believe we fixed the Arcade system top score issues and we have added in a lot of social networking options. The only other thing we want to add is a Google Maps feature but other than that we didn't intend to do anything else with the community.
That said we have been watching the work being done on the v5.0 release of this software. We're currently on v4.0. We see a lot of things we like in this new version but it is still under beta release. Even when the product is officially released we don't intend to jump right in but will carefully consider it when the first point release is made of the full v5.0. That's simply experience talking as any full release always picks up new bugs that need fixing.
So our intention is to wait for the full release and then the first point release after that when we intend to do the upgrade. At that point, once we have ensured everything is working as we expect, we intend to relaunch the community.
We really need a lot more active posters in here to make it a much more interesting place to come. For that to happen we need to do some research to find out what we need to do to make that happen. We'd certainly be more than happy to hear from you on anything that can contribute to make this happen.
One of the side issues that can affect what we do is a Comment System on our main Electric Scotland web site. As you know I am working on this at the moment trying to decide where to go on this. Having the right comment system can mean that individual pages on our site might actually take the place of some of our forums.. Those are things I'm trying to get my head around right now.
As to this community I actually like the system and believe after a short learning curve it's a comfortable place to be. We have cleaned up the Intro pages when you first join and now you can use your Facebook account to sign up as a member. I also like the ability to display a YouTube video within a message. While the photo gallaries are not used much I still think it's an excellent facility.
While this community is meant to support our main Electric Scotland web site it may be that we've been too broad in our scope with the forums and we'd be better focussing on pure Scottish material. That's actually another topics that you might want to give your opinions on. When I designed the forums I had considered that we might attract people that were not Scots and so was probably much broader than I needed to be.
Right now our music forum is well used but there are many others that aren't.
The Blog system while powerful in its own right did not allow us to moderate posts and as you may have noticed in previous posts we decided to remove it.
The other major problem with a system like ours is spamming. For such a small community I am amazed at the high level of spammers we seem to attract and it does take work to identify them and remove them. It seems to me since we removed the Blog system we have seen much less spam.
We do have the ability to add a Wordpress Blog system to the community but given my experience am not sure I want to do this.
So the upshot of all this is that I'd certainly be happy to receive any suggestions or comments from you on how we can make the community a better place for everyone. Feel free to be critical as well as constructive. because we need to know where we have failed as well as knowing where to go next.
Alastair
It's probably worth reviewing the community with you and tell you what our plans are for the future so here goes...
We have to recognize that the community is not well used for whatever reason. We have also taken a long time to fix some known issues which hasn't helped. As a business we put our efforts where they make the most financial sense and the community actually costs us money rather than makes us money and hence it has not been a high priority.
That said there is no excuse for us having a system running that is not doing what it was intended to do.
Over the past year I believe we fixed the Arcade system top score issues and we have added in a lot of social networking options. The only other thing we want to add is a Google Maps feature but other than that we didn't intend to do anything else with the community.
That said we have been watching the work being done on the v5.0 release of this software. We're currently on v4.0. We see a lot of things we like in this new version but it is still under beta release. Even when the product is officially released we don't intend to jump right in but will carefully consider it when the first point release is made of the full v5.0. That's simply experience talking as any full release always picks up new bugs that need fixing.
So our intention is to wait for the full release and then the first point release after that when we intend to do the upgrade. At that point, once we have ensured everything is working as we expect, we intend to relaunch the community.
We really need a lot more active posters in here to make it a much more interesting place to come. For that to happen we need to do some research to find out what we need to do to make that happen. We'd certainly be more than happy to hear from you on anything that can contribute to make this happen.
One of the side issues that can affect what we do is a Comment System on our main Electric Scotland web site. As you know I am working on this at the moment trying to decide where to go on this. Having the right comment system can mean that individual pages on our site might actually take the place of some of our forums.. Those are things I'm trying to get my head around right now.
As to this community I actually like the system and believe after a short learning curve it's a comfortable place to be. We have cleaned up the Intro pages when you first join and now you can use your Facebook account to sign up as a member. I also like the ability to display a YouTube video within a message. While the photo gallaries are not used much I still think it's an excellent facility.
While this community is meant to support our main Electric Scotland web site it may be that we've been too broad in our scope with the forums and we'd be better focussing on pure Scottish material. That's actually another topics that you might want to give your opinions on. When I designed the forums I had considered that we might attract people that were not Scots and so was probably much broader than I needed to be.
Right now our music forum is well used but there are many others that aren't.
The Blog system while powerful in its own right did not allow us to moderate posts and as you may have noticed in previous posts we decided to remove it.
The other major problem with a system like ours is spamming. For such a small community I am amazed at the high level of spammers we seem to attract and it does take work to identify them and remove them. It seems to me since we removed the Blog system we have seen much less spam.
We do have the ability to add a Wordpress Blog system to the community but given my experience am not sure I want to do this.
So the upshot of all this is that I'd certainly be happy to receive any suggestions or comments from you on how we can make the community a better place for everyone. Feel free to be critical as well as constructive. because we need to know where we have failed as well as knowing where to go next.
Alastair
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