Polly's Thoughts on Future of Our Community

[polly_mer]

19 Guests, 4 logged in (one logged in who registered in May and has zero posts).

[polly_mer]

28 guests, 9 users (two never posted)

[bioteacher]

OK, you won't leave me alone. Fine. I'll tell you something you may not know. If it weren't for me and my presence on the old CHE forum, this forum would include a continuation of Polly_Mer's relentless, bullying opposition to the legal rights of faculty to organize for collective bargaining.

WOW. Replying to post on a public forum = "not leaving you alone" ??? I stated my reaction to your comments; I didn't drag you here at gunpoint and insist you reply. This is a community discussion forum where everyone is permitted to reply to prior comments as they see fit.

Secondly. I think you are a bit delusional about how much power any individual has here. You and Polly are two mere mortals, not the entire fora community. I cannot fathom how either of you can be single handily responsible for everything good or evil happening here or back there.

If you are not happy here, by all means, stay away. Life is too short to spend it in ways that do not feed your soul. I wish you well.

[Liquidambar]

Re guests, do you have a way of knowing that they are people versus bots (e.g., Google crawlers)?  Absent other info, I'd assume that a large proportion of them aren't real people.

[fast_and_bulbous]

Re guests, do you have a way of knowing that they are people versus bots (e.g., Google crawlers)?  Absent other info, I'd assume that a large proportion of them aren't real people.

No, Guests are anyone (well, a unique IP) who has not logged in who has loaded the front page... probably any of the pages, actually, but I tested it from behind a VPN and watched the counter go up one. A script or bot doing the same would be indistinguishable from a human.

[polly_mer]

Re guests, do you have a way of knowing that they are people versus bots (e.g., Google crawlers)?  Absent other info, I'd assume that a large proportion of them aren't real people.

No, Guests are anyone (well, a unique IP) who has not logged in who has loaded the front page... probably any of the pages, actually, but I tested it from behind a VPN and watched the counter go up one. A script or bot doing the same would be indistinguishable from a human.

Is that good for us to get newer members if the bots are looking at us?  I will mention that the guest numbers also go down late evening to early morning.  I don't know that bots keep a 9-5 schedule.  Just now, we had 15 guests and 5 users before I posted about bots; after posting about bots, we have 10 guests and 5 users.  Perhaps our soon-to-be bot overlords really are watching.

[miss jane marple]

I access The Fora from two different PCs and an iPad. On one of them I am logged in all the time, and on the other two I am Guest until I hit Reply or Quote. So not all Guests are non-members.

[polly_mer]

I access The Fora from two different PCs and an iPad. On one of them I am logged in all the time, and on the other two I am Guest until I hit Reply or Quote. So not all Guests are non-members.

1) Good point.

2) How do you reply or quote as a guest?  I have to log in on the other device to see those options.

[miss jane marple]

I have no idea how it works. When I go to the Fora from my home PC, it says Welcome Guest at the top, but it shows the Reply and Quote buttons, and when I hit one, it changes the top to Hello miss jane marple.

Edited to add: I just logged off this (different) PC and it said Welcome Guest at the top and the buttons disappeared, as one would expect.

[eigen]

I can confirm that a lot of the "guests" are, in fact, users that aren't currently logged in.

Polly, you should also be able to check this: If you go through and look at the IP addresses, you can click on them and if the IP corresponds to someone currently registered, it will tell you who that is.

It also lets me go through and see how many are bots/crawlers.

As for building up the site and getting new people: Anything like this is slow. We appear on google site searchers, and fast_and_bulbous is working on making us more visible there via changing some back-end settings.

Word-of-mouth is another way things get around. Once we're reasonably settled here and ready for new members in force, sharing this as a reousrce with incoming faculty and grad students you know is a way to get more users.

Increasing content here will also help- it will lead more people searching for academic questions on google to our doorsteps.

[downer]

It's the start of the semester for a lot of schools and The Fora are remarkably quiet.

What does this mean for the future? What's the biggest source of people viewing The Fora? Search engines, links from The Chronicle, or something else?

Is there going to be slow steady growth or a slow steady death?

[Puget]

I suspect a lot of folks are either busy starting their semester or busy with end of summer vacations and things will pick up again in September.

It's the start of the semester for a lot of schools and The Fora are remarkably quiet.

What does this mean for the future? What's the biggest source of people viewing The Fora? Search engines, links from The Chronicle, or something else?

Is there going to be slow steady growth or a slow steady death?

[mahagonny]

I keep my ear to the ground. I'm looking for a forum full of smart people where a handful hold court and say things like 'I've had your job and mine too, so I'll tell you how we are supposed to think...about everything.'

[polly_mer]

It's the start of the semester for a lot of schools and The Fora are remarkably quiet.

Compared to what? 

The academic subreddits I've checked on have fewer new threads per day than we do and they have many more members.  Those subreddits don't have the long-running threads that already have thousands of reads and keep floating to the top of each forum upon already having a community here for those long-running threads.

The old CHE fora was not nearly as active as some of us remember from many years ago.

However, looking at the publicly available statistics, we're getting reasonable numbers of reads for many threads.  Pull up a board and just scan down the stats on the side.  Even some threads with very few replies have hundreds of reads.  We have people who come here several times per week to read, even if they aren't posting.  I haven't been keeping written notes, but I'm seeing a wider variety of names as posting regulars than we had in June.  We're still picking up new members and we are denying a lot of spammers.  That seems to indicate people can find us.

Also, while some institutions may have started, this is prime final vacation time in other places.  I agree with Puget that September is really the pick-up time as people either need a lot of support or finally surface from the end of summer.

I keep my ear to the ground. I'm looking for a forum full of smart people where a handful hold court and say things like 'I've had your job and mine too, so I'll tell you how we are supposed to think...about everything.'

Admit it.  You, too, have a big curiosity streak and keep checking in on the unfolding story.  Otherwise, the question really is:

It doesn't sound like you were very hopeful about the conversation to begin with. I might have ended it sooner. They're obviously not selling books. It strikes me as like...why bother?

Why come here if you aren't getting anything out of it? 

Where's your productive contribution to discussions from your unique experience so that we can have a variety of viewpoints?

[mahagonny]

Admit it.  You, too, have a big curiosity streak and keep checking in on the unfolding story.

It may be too big for my own good.

Where's your productive contribution to discussions from your unique experience so that we can have a variety of viewpoints?

Frankly, for a person who's as likely to be advised to give up on a teaching career as what you just requested I don't feel I owe the community much.

If I think of anything brilliant or what's been missing, I may pitch in. Generally I see a troubled future for higher ed, and that's my general mood. i don't see it being worked on productively here, not that forumites are lacking, but largely because structural defects cultivate these problems.