Relevant Background: I'm starting this thread speaking for myself as one of the handful of people who got us transitioned. These are my thoughts, although I know from discussions before, during, and after transition that I'm not crazy out in left field.
Polly, where are you going with this?I'm wearing my college administrator and engineering hats to think in terms of ensuring long-term survival of these fora by balancing between the goals of migrating regulars from the CHE fora, preserving the good parts, recruiting new people, and acknowledging that the world has changed since 2002 and even 2007 so we need current advice, not just long-standing, beloved threads enshrined at the CHE fora.
I read nearly every post nearly every day. For years on the CHE fora, I did the same. While I post a lot, I read even more. Years of observation here and elsewhere indicate that a thriving community has enough new content that people come and engage with that content. Years of reading discussions indicate that people engage with content on these fora in several different ways, but one way is to lurk for quite a while before posting either a relevant question or joining a long-standing support thread.
What difference does that make to me as a regular forumite who just wants to post?Thank you for being a member of the community. This is our community and we're all better off because you're here.
People love to hate on administrators, but even volunteer efforts fail when no one is keeping an eye on the bigger picture and ensuring that smaller daily tasks are done. I have no desire or energy to micromanage anyone (notice I said I'm reading most posts: I didn't say I'm editing tons of posts, removing tons of posts, or banning people who disagree with me publicly), but I have been taking purposeful actions that I hope will help these fora grow and thrive.
Thus, I appreciate all feedback received: formal, informal, public, private, and what I pick up as I read through most of those posts most days. I don't always act on every piece of feedback, but I am considering it as I think about the long-term goals for these fora.
Why would you devote time and energy to being a volunteer adminicritter?Because a thriving community with fabulous active members doesn't just happen without a few nudges and I want this community to thrive. I view this as service, just like when I become an officer of a professional society or take over organizing the new arrival lunches at work.
As was noted recently in another thread, we have several hundred people registered for these fora. However, a fair number of them have never posted, despite being registered for long enough that they should have been able to post and get approved. I keep an eye on the stats on the front page. Right now, we have 28 guests (i.e., people with a webpage open to this site) and 7 forumites (i.e., people logged in with monikers). I seldom see the reverse with several times as many forumites logged in as posting as lurkariat browsing.
Guests cannot use any of the variants of "show new posts since last visit" features. My bet is that a fair number of our registered-but-never-posted forumites have signed up just to use those features including following threads or just being able to jump to the first unread post in an ongoing thread. Again, keeping an eye on the main page stats and who is logged in indicates we have people here nearly every day who don't post. I spent several years on the old fora reading nearly every day without posting and then I refrained from registering for more than a year when that became a thing. Thus, while I have 12 years logged with these fora, I remember vividly all those prior years of reading.
Thus, when I read something like:
I thought of asking before, but now I will since someone has brought it up: Do child boards really help much?
<snip>
Are there people who find this helpful? I'd be glad to hear why.
and related posts that hinge strongly on SPADFY for even basic web-browsing, I am reminded that I should make explicit some information I have that underlies actions I take.
For example, while I love the games, I think it's unlikely that most of the lurkariat are eagerly awaiting the newest entry for, say, "Keep a Word, Drop a Word" either at the top of the General Discussions board or as a substantial portion of the "show recent posts" disembodied posts since threads work much more nicely to see a true discussion. Instead, it's more likely that people are browsing by section, as they would an actual paper newspaper.
For the goal of having more people with a variety of viewpoints joining us to participate in lively discussions, having a front page of every section that has a good variety of types of threads and reasonably active threads will likely yield better results in terms of having members of the lurkariat join us or at least that's a hypothesis I'm currently testing in various ways including starting new threads in boards that aren't as active.
To be clear, I love the games; I'm an active participant in games. We will continue to have games as long as I'm a primary member of this community. As one of the most thread-derailing silly people, I have no plans to try to get only serious posts enforced anywhere.
However, it's more likely that people will come out of lurking to join us for substantive discussions, which means they have to both find those other discussions and see that we're an active community in those discussions. Two threads each a week old on a technology sub board aren't very appealing. Two threads on technology as part of the 15 active threads in the past 5 days in General Discussion may entice someone to delurk.
Eh, what else do you have, adminicritter?The CHE chose a particularly poor time to make the transition because most of the big areas (teaching, research, job search including grad school) aren't nearly as active in the summer. That's part of the nature of the academic calendar. For example, few people start teaching for the very first time in July, but it would be good for those who will be starting in the fall to know we have that board and we have the long-running threads of collected wisdom.
Thus, calls for the various sub boards people enjoyed on the CHE fora are somewhat premature before we know what discussions will take off here. The really active board by the numbers is General Discussion. Thinking ahead to having sub boards to group threads for those who like to read that way, I floated the idea to the transition team of making Fun and Games our first sub board. I know there's a good sub community who will find the games in the equivalent of moving the coffee table three feet to the left for rearranging fora furniture and it has the side benefit of having General Discussions then show more variety when different threads float to the top instead always the same handful of game threads.
Those are my thoughts. You are free to point out that no one asked me to do any of this and Eigen is the one who did the heavy lifting for getting us a space. I look forward to reading. For those who are curious, that's about 3 hours this morning on administrative work here, reading, and posting.
