[Sir TVDinner]

I was tossing around ideas with Ryan in private and he suggested that we move the discussion to the forums to get feedback from other PF members. the discussion was about how to motivate other PF board owners to post more on other sites. There really is no reason that they will post more or less from one month to a next. If the site falls one month, they just bump it up with a quick barage of posts over a few days and disappear again. I have watched it happen over the past month checking out the system and then participating. so some owners are really into the PF and making lots of great posts on multiple boards and some owners do very very little.

I would suggest making it a tiered system.

What if you made it so they had to post at least a certain amount of times (for example 75 - 100 time) to be a "featured site" which got listed first for people to choose from when picking sites in the PF system. Then the second tier would be something like 50-74 posts a month and you go on the second tier list of participation sites. So you are rewarding board owners who post a lot and ongoing.

And lets say you did not post OR posted less then say 25-49 times (that is just an arbitrary number I picked out of the air for the discussion) then you are not listed at all. You are still part of the PF system, but you need to make the bottom required amount of posts to be listed again.

The goal would be to reward people who participate more then others. What do you think about that? does that make any sense. Thoughts....

[AnnCP]

I think the main reason why I haven't posted much anymore through PF is that it's hard to find a site that actually interests me, AND also has some decent discussion. I've seen so many ghosts towns and I can only talk to myself so much, ya know?

I get that many of the forums are just starting so it's natural that it would slow, but it's really hard to keep posting if there aren't new threads being put up at least by the admins/mods on a regular basis, or if they aren't at least responding to my posts so we can have a discussion..

I'm probably not explaining this right. I guess for me, I can have all the desire in the world to use the PF system, but that won't do any good if there's no active discussion on the forums I want to visit. I'm sure some forums on PF are very active, but they may not be on a subject that interests me...

[Sir TVDinner]

Well if you like TV -any TV, then my new board is active and people are posting. Over 1000 posts in the past 3-4 weeks, so we would love to have you.

I still think that there should be some requirement to post if you want to participate in the program, or many just will not post at all.

[bdude]

I think that there could be some sort of tagging or categories system, so I don't have to look through pages of forums.

Your idea of rewarding quality users of PF is a good one, +rep

[Sir TVDinner]

anyone else want to give their thoughts?? Ryan?

[Ryan]

I think that the basic idea is a good one, as I've noted in our PM's...I don't know, however, that we should set up multiple tiers. It would be good to make this as simple as possible...The more complicated you make it, the more people are going to be scared to use it. Simple but effective is the goal. My thought was to just require people to make x posts per month in PF to remain listed. They will retain the subscriptions and credits no matter what, but will only be on visible in the PF lists if they made x posts in the last 30 days.

but I don't really know...we need some more input from the users, as you know what goes on in the head of a PF user. We don't know that

Originally Posted by AnnCP

I think the main reason why I haven't posted much anymore through PF is that it's hard to find a site that actually interests me, AND also has some decent discussion. I've seen so many ghosts towns and I can only talk to myself so much, ya know?

I get that many of the forums are just starting so it's natural that it would slow, but it's really hard to keep posting if there aren't new threads being put up at least by the admins/mods on a regular basis, or if they aren't at least responding to my posts so we can have a discussion..

I'm probably not explaining this right. I guess for me, I can have all the desire in the world to use the PF system, but that won't do any good if there's no active discussion on the forums I want to visit. I'm sure some forums on PF are very active, but they may not be on a subject that interests me...

Yeah, I know that can be a problem...but do you know of any way to fix it?

People are often very quick to tell us why PF doesn't work, why they don't post, etc., but they rarely offer suggestions as to how to fix it. We know that PF is not pefect, but it's not easy to come up with a solution.

[AnnCP]

Yeah, I know that can be a problem...but do you know of any way to fix it?

Nope. I don't know of any way to fix it. I don't consider it a PF problem really, it's more of the standard problem that happens with most new forums. The only thing that will fix it is time and more people posting, but people won't post untill it's already active...it's a catch twenty two.

So no, I'm pretty useless in the suggestion department today, sorry.

[Ryan]

I know what you mean...I think that this problem that you're referring to is not something that we can fix. It is inevitable and something to be expected of PostFusion. Think about the idea behind PF...the people who are using it are those with forums that are new or need posts...Naturally these forums are not going to be very inactive, but many PF users don't realize or accept this.

[Sir TVDinner]

i think right off the bat you should make the "X" amount of posts requirement ASAP. Just send an email to everyone and say that effectively immediately you have to make 40 or more posts (less?, more? that is up to you) on one of the participating forums in the last 30 days, or your site is deactivated from the PF exchange. That way everyone is motivated to make posts, or they drop out.
You will QUICKLY see who wants to stay and who does not care. This might be a good way for you to prune the current program down to good members and then regrow from there.

Personally I think the requirement should be 50 a month. that is not that much, but it is up to you.

James

[LarryB]

Well please remember that when if we decide to do this, there probably won't be a really fast way that we do this. There is a lot of changes that will need to be made on the backend to facilitate this type of ability if/when we were to make something along those lines.