bring back the old newsgroup!

[EricC]

i liked the old newsgroup WAY better.

in the old newsgroup, you were subscribed by default to all of the groups, and whenever someone posted a question, it went to everyone.

there was MUCH more user participation!

this new web-based newsgroup is a ghost town, because people dont linger around long enough to see a post they might be able to help with.

thanks for listening. (if anyone out there IS listening)...

[mhilger]

Eric,

There certainly were advantages of the old user group - most notably in the email-based nature of it and the immediate response that was given in many cases.

However, there were some serious disadvantages to that old system as well. Regarding the email of posts capability, we had dozens of customers contact us about, you guessed it, the flood of out of office replies. This was something the old system had no real control over. In looking at the logs from that old system, there were also a sizeable number of users who actually labeled emails from that old forum as SPAM which caused it's own set of deliverability problems.

Lastly, the old forum itself was based on technology that was circa 1983. Not that there was anything wrong with 1983 but web based forums such as these have been shown to be much, much more preferable here in the 21st century. The underlying technology of that old forum was dropped from being supported in the 1990's, I believe, if that's any indication of the vintage of the technology that was used.

For those users that would like to receive email notifications for any new activity on the forums, there's an ability to signup for notifications. An email will be sent out when there is activity in that forum with a handy link to view the full content.

[mhilger]

Eric,

I gave your post some additional thought and think I may have posted a reply too soon. Sorry if my first post came off a bit defensive. Maybe it's because I personally despised the old forum and was glad to see it go and maybe it's because were here in the "....rants...." forum.

Thinking more about your post then....

It sounds like the base of what you are requesting is a higher level of participation here in the community. With the instant email notification capability of the old forum, members received an email right there in their inbox and were able to reply to a post quite quickly. This responsiveness and level of activity was nice to see and it seems that there can be times here in the new user community where a post goes unanswered for some time.

Does that about sum it up for you?

If so, I think we (Printable that is) can look into strategies to increase both membership and participation in the user community. The new community is only 4 months old and we already have over 550 registered users. This is great to see but there are certainly thousands of users out there which haven't joined yet.

I, for one, would love to see this community as the #1 go-to place for all users with a question about the use of our products. I've talked to a number of customers over the past weeks who were actually completely unaware that the community even existed! We can obviously do some quick things to get the word out to more users.

As far as increasing participation, we've thought about various incentive programs designed to reward those customers who make the biggest contributions to the community - both in quantity and quality of posts. There's a couple ideas of how we can do this which I've been mulling over.

So please let me know what you think of this. If we look to increase membership and participation in the community, would that satisfy what you're looking for?

Thank you for this thought-provoking post!

[EricC]

Hi Mark,
Yes ... that is what I meant. The old forum had much more user participation because of its "in-your-face" method of displaying new posts.

And yeah I guess you're right ... the old newsgroup is very outdated.

As far as incentives ... have you ever heard of the website experts-exchange.com? I have been a member of that site for a long time. Back in the day, the site worked as a barter system ... you went to that site and posted your question. You also had to assign a "point value" to your question as well. 100 points for a question that was easy or not urgent, 500 points for a question that you considered tough, or you needed an answer to it right away.

Literally, within minutes, you would get at least one response. You would read through all the responses, and if someone answered your question, you would award them with the points. The more points you earned (by correctly answering questions), the more questions you were allowed to ask.

That is a subscription-based site. Nowadays you can just pay $50 and get to ask unlimited questions.

I'm not sure that this model would work for the FusionPro newsgroup, but some type of 'point' system would encourage users to help answer questions. At the end of the year (or maybe every 6 months), whomever had the most amount of points per category would win some sort of prize - $50 amazon.com gift certificate, a free copy of FusionPro ... whatever.

And how about this ... why not bring back a little bit of functionality from the old site? 2-3 times per day, each member of the printable newsgroup would receive a 'summary' email ... basically a list of all of the questions that have been asked, answered or commented on within the last 8-12 hours. Each user could quickly skim through this summary email and if a particular question or comment caught their attention, they could click on the link which would bring them straight to the message thread in the newsgroup.

The user could also 'subscribe to' or 'watch' that particular thread, so that whenever another comment was posted to that thread, he/she would receive an email right away, instead of waiting another 8-12 hours for the next 'summary' email.

At the very LEAST, a daily summary report. I've posted questions on these newsgroups before and havent received a single answer. There may be several hundred subscribers, but i'll bet only 4 people saw my post.

If someone has subscribed to these newsgroups, they are most likely looking for quick answers. What you have to ask from the members in return is active participation. It should be mandatory that all users get email summaries throughout the day.

[mhilger]

Eric,

These are all great suggestions - thank you.

I like the idea of a points system with some type of reward associated to it and will look into the options for it. There are a ton of "mods" for vBulletin (the forum software we use) and I'm sure there has to be something that we can add.

The summary email is also a great idea. We'll take a look into options for this as well.

We have plans to increase membership and use of the forum throughout 2009 that are already underway. I'm confident these will bring additional members to the community as well as increase per-user participation.

So... more to come. Thanks again for the suggestions.

[tsghost]

I echo Eric's post.

I loved the daily summary e-mail. I would never forget to read my e-mail. Now there are days I go without coming to the forums. I learned so much just by reading my summary e-mails.

I will check out the e-mail notification Mark suggested, I just want to let Printable Eric is not alone so they can continue to improve this forum.

[Todd_Ball]

I also agree with Eric 100%!
The immediacy of the emails was great.
Regarding the out-of-office replies, I don't ever remember spending
more than a few seconds to delete them.

Todd Ball

[Dan Korn]

As Mark said, we are looking at various enhancements to this forum, including ways to allow users to more easily be notified of new posts.

In the meantime, you can always bookmark the "New Posts" link (at the top of each page) and check it as often as you want:
http://forums.printable.com/search.php?do=getnew

I usually check this a few times a day, depending on what else I'm working on and how stuck I am on it.

You could also get tricky with some HTML and code up your own page to auto-refresh the "New Posts" page. For instance, you could copy-and-paste the following into a new HTML document on your machine:

<HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="600"> 
<TITLE>Printable User Community - New Posts (Auto-Refresh)</TITLE></HEAD>
<FRAMESET ROWS="0%,100%" framespacing=0 border=0 frameborder="no">
<FRAME NAME="up" SRC=blank.html>
<FRAME NAME="down" SRC="http://forums.printable.com/search.php?do=getnew">
</FRAMESET></HTML>

Save the document, then open it in your web browser. You may need to "Allow active content" or otherwise enable the meta-tags depending on your browser settings.

You can modify the "content" attribute on the first line to adjust the number of seconds between auto-refreshes. It's currently set to 600 seconds, or ten minutes.

The caveat here is that if you click on another link, say to view or reply to a thread, you'll want to open it in an new tab or window, as the auto-refresh won't stop as long as you've got the page open, and will revert back to the "New Posts" page regardless of whatever else you were doing. More sophisticated solutions are possible.

I've attached the sample page to this post (remove the ".txt" extension after downloading.

[marcuslayton]

Just my two cents again as well - I read every single e-mail that came through the old lists system, and while it may be older technology and many have moved to a forum based support system - I really enjoyed seeing every issue and solution. I still have months of e-mails saved and still search through it for issues. I permantley have my e-mail open, and thus would see issues as they arrive.

[EricC]

this same issue is THE reason why printplanet.com has died ... it shifted from the old-style, in-your-face email subscription, to this newer web-based forum.

back in the day there was LOTS of participation on printplanet. and now ... well i cant even tell you when was the last time i logged on.

dont get me wrong ... there are DEFINITELY advantages to the web-based forum. (i gotta say the single biggest advantage is the search capability). with the old email based forum, i would frequently SAVE all of the email posts into a separate folder in my Inbox, and 6 months later if i had to search for something (like a JavaScript rule) i would search my mailbox. But the way the messages were stored (not threaded) it was a pita to search. So in this respect the web-based forum rocks.

but because members are not getting emails on a daily basis, the participation has died down (probably) 95%.