Where is ERT headed?

[Srirangan]

Seems to be stuck here in the warp of PHPBB forever! :sad3:

[Huntress]

Not at all.  You know as well a I do that Matt is searching for a better alternative right now.

[Srirangan]

I'm not pointing fingers on Matt or anyone else. ERT is after all the collective responsibilty of us all. It just seems to have gotten stuck in the endless arguments and notification bugs.  :scratch:

[Huntress]

Unfortunately this is very true.   [-(

[COBOLdinosaur]

Sri,

You are not seeing the whole picture.  PHPBB is a dead end, and was never intended to be the long-term solution.  Matt is working to modifiy how the discussion part of ERT works, and I am working on the integration of content and discussion areas.

I agree with you that there is too much focus on notifications (problems with PHPBB) and some other detailed stuff. Part of the reason I wanted to seperate or drop the forum is that it was not performing as expected and it was dragging down the content side, by requiring too much of my time fixing minor inconveniences.

What has been going on behind the scenes is paying off for ERT.  Yesterday we had 400+ uniques, and we are on a pace today to pass that.  The action from Google is actually down a little so far this month.  The action has been coming from other sites.  The links to our content are getting posted in a lot of places.  Right now we are getting very heavy action from Stumbleupon.  Unfortunately, you get the same referrer from them no matter which link is clicked so I do not know the specific links that are producing the traffic.  I have about a dozen Stumbleupon links in various places, and I have seen links from other members as well. Right now, it looks like a lot of the action is coming from the Perl group, because Matt's perl tutorial is getting about 20 hits an hour.

We are also seeing a lot of Stumbleupon hits to the articles menu, Darkins Ray Tracing article and some of my stuff. On top of that I am experimenting with Digg and I submitted one of my pages this morning to see how much traffic it produces when it is not on the front page.  It is generating and average of 12 hits an hour, and about half the visitors off of it are looking at related pages on the site after they get here.  It is not getting any Diggs and won't make it to the front page, but it is bringing in traffic.

So I am in the process of adding a link to all the content pages for submission to Digg.  The content pages are generating a lot of traffic, and we are helping thousands of visitors, so we are accomplishing one of the goals we had when we set ERT up.  The problem is that the content oriented model does not produce the feedback of a forum model even though it is a thousand times more effective in the delivery of support.  So my focus is on developing an interface that marries the content-oriented model with a group discussion format that will be unique.

You cannot build something that is new and untried from canned general use packages; it takes custom design and development of both the programming and the tools.  When the site was first put up in September I said we would be up in January and we would design and build version 2 based on what  we learned and what was needed for the Community. We went live in January; just as I said.  Some things have been successful and some have not.  Version 2 will be much different, but there is no full time development staff, and resources are finite so things take time.  Matt and I both have other things that compete with the sites for our time.  

What I know is that when I put a link to Matt's PHP header tutorial on the home page is got 2200 visitors in 6 weeks; can't say how many were helped.  When I put my alt-popup article on the home page it got over 50 visits a day.  Since January my CSS rollover article has averaged 400 visits a month while in 3 years the links to it on EE have produced only 300 hits.  The way to deliver effective help is with the article orient model, but the way to make it a live inter-active learning center is to build a different kind of interface and we will get there eventually.  Until we do, we are using what we have available to deliver help, and we are doing it very successfully, even though there is not much action in the forum.

Cd&

[nicholassolutions]

Well put, Roy (and if you get this before my last email, pls. disregard it -- apparently the problem got fixed).

my work scrambling to set up the site management position, create a newsletter, set up election software, and improve the notifs was a result of the fact that I saw the community here withering away, and I thought that those things would help the situation. As Roy said, it's a multi-faceted endeavor. The article/content side has been working out well, and that's great. Unfortunately, the contributions of content have all been from a small, dedicated group, and I hope that increasing community involvement and awareness about the site might help that. But the community here has been dwindling lately. To some extent it takes community to build community, and without any animosity towards anyone, I'll plainly state that (with a couple very notable exceptions) I have not had much concrete help, despite making it (I think) abundantly clear that anyone who wants to contribute will be given the freedom and resources to do so.

Simultaneously, things are busier than ever for me, and I've decided to budget the time I spend on ERT more reasonably in comparison to my other activities. So 'priming the pump' is going even slower than it might otherwise be. I have been planning on sending some sitewide announcements to try to get people back here (esp. for the elections), but I want to have something to announce first, or it will just make people completely give up on the place.

One solution here is for people to step up to the plate and make a difference. Our drupal experiment was a nice step forward. Unfortunately, the notif mods we set up there work even worse than our current phpBB mods, so it's presently a no-go in terms of replacing phpBB. Frankly, I just don't feel like mucking around inside that code right now, especially because some of the other imperative mods also seem to be buggy. I've been considering other alternatives such as Mambo, but I have not had the time to experiment with them yet to see if they are any better (I did come across a very promising-looking setup that had integrated mediawiki into mambo).

It takes time. If people are frustrated with the current state of things, and have ideas that they would like to try out (with no gaurantee of success) and the skills to execute them.....they can contact me or one of the other Site Managers or Sandi, and they will be given the resources to try their ideas. If, on the other hand, the people who come here regularly do not have the time, skills, or inclination to help and see their ideas through, then all I'd ask of them is their patience.

[COBOLdinosaur]

Matt, I notice some intermittent connection problems earlier with a few timeouts.  I have an idea how to get notice up quickly when either site is down.  I will PM you later about it.

To some extent it takes community to build community, and without any animosity towards anyone, I'll plainly state that (with a couple very notable exceptions) I have not had much concrete help, despite making it (I think) abundantly clear that anyone who wants to contribute will be given the freedom and resources to do so.

Yes, but everyone is a volunteer, and we must be honest; not everyone has a strong commitment to ERT. The problem of lack of activity in the forum is not isolated to just ERT.  Certainly there are a few forums doing well with establish communities, but most new forums are not doing well at all.  The problem is severe enough that there are PR firms who will help launch a forum by supplying paid posters who go to a forum, register, fill out a profile, and then psot new threads and participate in existing topics for which they are paid on a per post basis.  I saw one ad that offered 700 posts from 70 different users for $149.95.  On Webmaster forums there was one of them solicitng contracts so she could go into business for herself.  She makes a living dong nothing but psot in forums where she gets paid by the post.

So, I don't think it is anything we are doing wrong, I just think that old style forums are no longer what most users are looking for, or perhaps there are just oo many choices for a new forum to have much chance to get a following, or maybe they just need to become a source of content, like we have been trying to do.  It just takes time.  I think .com has got just about reach the point where we can bring in authors just looking for the exposure, but I don't want to do that because it become a srepository instead of a learning center.  So we need to be patient and put things together so content continues to come from with in the community, and we have Mentors available to discuss the material.  Just a little longer and it will start taking shape and the interaction with the content will start getting added.