What is going wrong with the Forum? | Page 2 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Thanks everyone for the feedback.

I think there are a few reasons, many of which have already been mentioned. Firstly, I had to turn off email notifications and subscriptions because they stopped working. I’m still unsure why. People were getting other people’s alerts, couldn’t change their subscriptions etc. I think stopping them meant a lot of people weren’t getting email reminders to come back, so they never visited again.

Secondly, traffic to this site has generally flatlined in the last couple of years, excepting the February 2014 bump for the American Invasion anniversary. I was once on the second page of Google for searches for ‘beatles’ (when browsing anonymously/incognito to avoid history or cookies influencing results), ie number 11-20. I’m now on page five of the UK results, 50-something, and the US version seems to only rank my Candlestick Park page for that ‘beatles’ search term (ie it ignores the homepage altogether, which sometimes happens). Searching for individual songs or albums does tend to return my site quite well, so all’s not lost. If people want to know about I Am The Walrus or Don’t Let Me Down , there’s a good chance they’ll find me.

There might be any number of reasons for the traffic drop, including: changes in the Google algorithm; lack of site updates; other sites being more relevant. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a complicated business populated by snake-oil salespeople, but it’s something all site owners need to consider.

Sign-ups to the forum have slowed too, probably a result of the general decline in traffic. There’s always been a churn in the number of active members, with people moving on and new ones taking their place. That’s to be expected. What’s more troubling is that there aren’t so many new sign-ups as there used to be.

I wonder if some of the forum restructuring put people off. Back in the day people could start a thread on the strings on Eleanor Rigby ; another on the stereo panning on Eleanor Rigby , and another on the gravestone of Eleanor Rigby in Woolton. Then we combined everything of relevance into master threads for each song. Perhaps there’s the sense that a lot of what’s to be said already has been.

I know we put a lot of people off by culling some of the forum games and making them Beatles-only. I really needed to do that. I’m sure we lost some people along the way but I don’t want to change it back.

Can we blame Parlance? I’m only joking, of course, but she’s one of the active members who really made a difference by starting threads and posting news etc. I know many other people do the same, I just singled her out as an example of a very active poster who had to take a break to get on with real-life stuff. When that happens and nobody else is there to fill the void it becomes very noticeable. We’ve had similar drop-outs in the past, from people like skye, mithveaen, fabfouremily. I’ve never wanted anyone to feel obliged to stick around here, but when one of your all-time top posters goes AWOL it’s always noticeable. Perhaps this is a natural ebb and the forum will become more active without any intervention.

But I need to take some responsibility here. As MMM said, I’ve been trying to fix various broken things and mostly-empty pages, fixing holes where they exist. I’m also making progress on my Beatles book that’s been a work-in-progress for about four years now (I’m very pleased with what I’ve done so far, though it’s still some way off completion. Trust me, I want it to be available as soon as possible, but I’m not going to publish 100,000ish words unless I’m happy with them all).

I do visit the forum daily (unless ill/away), but most times it’s a quick glance to make sure everything’s OK. I also have to approve comments sent to the main part of the site, respond to emails, install updates, deal with server issues etc. It’s difficult to balance this with staying visible, but I hope you realise that I’m working on stuff whenever I can.

The best way to grow traffic, apart from using snake-oil SEO methods, is to create new content and publish regularly. Ideally I should have 2-3 or more new things on the site every week. I used to do that in a day, but nowadays it’s more like 2-3 a month. So the lower profile of the site is the most likely main cause of the forum traffic drop, and the best way to turn that around is for me to pull my finger out and write a whole lot more stuff to get Google to be my friend again. So that’s what I need to do. Write stuff, as well as fix broken things, deal with feedback, keep everything running efficiently, post to the forum, deal with feedback etc. Someone’s lent me an old 1963 Beatles scrapbook but wants it back, so I’m spending my lunch break scanning in pics. In the time it’s taken me to write this I could have done something on Paul and Ringo’s recent live shows. Anyone got a cloning device?

Zig makes an interesting point about the Thanks button. I’ve always seen it as a good thing (and I wish there was a similar acknowledgement button for emails), but I guess it has made a bit of a difference. That said, a post that gets 10 or so thanks would have been unlikely to get 10 or so replies doing the same. I don’t know, I’d quite like to keep the button, unless people would rather it went.

Lastly, I’m so grateful to each and every person who regularly posts in this forum. It would be nothing without you. Thanks for sticking around.

Thanks Ron. Some good points, as ever. And yeah, disagreements are good, as long as they’re honestly held opinions and not people being contrary for its own sake. Passion is contagious.

I don’t have much else to add, but I’m not too bothered about a partial slowdown in traffic. It’ll pick up again, and there’s clearly a correlation with a faltering Google ranking and the number of active forum members. I will see if I can get the notifications working again though.

I hadn’t seen that list of top 100 sites before, and I’m not sure how its scores are calculated. I’m not too bothered about being part of it, but thanks for sharing the link.

Jolly Jimmy said
As a fairly new member, I find  absolutely nothing wrong with the website.  I enjoy everything I see here.  I visit it every day although I admit sometimes it’s an ego thing to see if somebody responded to something I said.  My fear is that there are only so many songs and topics to write about.  Maybe I will run out of things to say at some point in time.

You’d be surprised. I started this site in 2008, thinking I’d be able to complete it in a year, maybe two. I’m still nowhere near finishing all the things I want to do. There’s a bunch of videos and images to sift through and add to articles, solo-era songs and albums to write about, history post-1970 to document, and I’m aware that the song articles aren’t as comprehensive as they might be (because I’ve learnt so much since I wrote them). I’m nearly 40 and could quite happily spend the rest of my days adding new material to the site.

I think it’s a similar thing for general Beatles discussions. There’s always news, new theories, revisions of opinions, and newly-uncovered info. Sure, people might run out of things to say, but the Beatles’ story is endless. Very few people know everything about all the songs and albums, group and solo (and if they did, they’d probably have loads to say about them anyway). Keep learning, keep discussing.

I agree that the games should be restricted to just Beatle topics as mentioned above.  But for those who feel differently, I see no harm in starting a game in the non-Beatle All Together Now section.

Yeah, please don’t do that. We used to have non-Beatles games and it overran the forum, to the point where most of the new posts were games with no connection to the group. I put a stop to it, which wasn’t a popular move but I needed to bring the focus of the forum back to the Beatles. It was discussed a lot at the time.