What is going wrong with the Forum? | Page 8 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Hi all. Some good discussion points here, definitely plenty to consider.

Taking the last one first, dormant accounts which have previously been active are not deleted (unless for other reasons). The only accounts which are culled automatically (after three or six months, I can’t remember) are those where someone has signed up and never posted. There are a couple of reasons. I’ve had past problems with emails not being sent out from the server containing people’s login info and password links, and if someone doesn’t get that email they can’t access the account. The other reason is sometimes people sign up, forget, move on, then months later try to sign up again. Autodeleting the accounts seems like the best solution. Oh, and spammers. Bots do love to sign up despite the blocks in place, and, although we manually zap a lot of them, sometimes they sign up and don’t post, or do so months later.

Moderation has been mentioned. The mod team are brilliant and I’d be lost without them. I had a really tough 2022 for personal reasons, and was barely on here (I hardly worked at all for six months, truth be told), but they keep the whole ship afloat. I’m not the most active poster these days anyway but I do try to keep across the conversations wherever I can, but I’m aware that it often feels like I’m missing in action. It’s a difficult balance which I don’t often get right. I’m pulled in a lot of directions (tech problems, legal issues, emails, comments, content creation, non-Beatles things, real life) and, as the site owner, I know that my presence or absence is often more notable than most members’.

The mod team being voluntary and having other commitments brings me onto the subject of non-Beatles discussions. We used to allow them, and it was a bit of a nightmare. I don’t wish to sound ageist, but we had a bunch of teenagers who would sit on the forum day after day starting meme threads, discussing Pink Floyd v Led Zeppelin vs Queen, what they watched on TV last night, all kinds of banal and irrelevant stuff. The mod team (broadly) had its collective heart sink whenever they checked in and saw 90% non-Beatles chat, 10% Beatles, if that.

So we locked a bunch of them. It wasn’t popular, but it did bring focus to the board. Did it slow down discussions? Of course! That was somewhat the point. Would I love to have more discussions on Beatles matters? Absolutely, but a forum by its nature depends on the contributors, and although some of us can steer things to a degree, it’s more of an organic thing.

@Sea Belt said
No doubt those are good reasons for the current slow traffic here. The Forum stats say there’s 2,781 members. If they were all active, or potentially active on any given day (with lots of variation among them of course), there would pretty much never be any slow traffic here. So it stands to reason that most of those are simply not posting here anymore. In the time I’ve been here I’ve taken a look at the stats at the bottom which include people who are online at the time I am, plus seeing the people who have posted new replies over the past 2 months, it seems like there’s less than 20 people who visit the Forum and deposit comments. So if we have only 20 people, then those factors of seasonal slowdown and busyness in real life will have a drastic effect, whereas if there were a pool of 500 or 1,000 (even that is much less than half of what the number of members is supposed to be), then the statistical chances of any slow traffic day would be rare, and most of the time we would be seeing several new postings every day along with back and forth discussions among members.

This is a good example of the 1% rule. It’s inexact, but in online discussions roughly 1% of a website’s users actively create new content, while the other 99% lurk. People lurk here, some are motivated to create an account, but a decreasing number actually contributes. If ~20 people actively contribute, that correlates with the ~2,700 members. We could comfortably deal with some more though.

The Steve Hoffman forum was mentioned. In some respects I’d love to have a forum that active, but it also brings its downsides. SH is quite heavily moderated, and it must be a nightmare to have to sift through everything that gets posted to make sure it’s compliant. The mod team here is amazing but I wouldn’t ever want that kind of workload to be foisted upon volunteers.

On that subject, this site and my book sales do bring in money, but it’s definitely not a king’s ransom. It only just covers my (fairly frugal) living expenses and I’ve been picking up other bits of work where I can. There are about 1.8 million words on the non-forum part of the site (in comparison, my book is 110,000 words and runs to 300+ pages). It’s a huge amount of content, free to access, which I think I’ve earned the right to monetise. I’ve considered stuff like Patreon instead but I don’t really want the commitment of having to provide regular extra bits of content, so ads are the necessary evil.

If I was making millions I’d reduce the number of ads and pay the mod team as a priority. Maybe having a hugely active forum would bring in more revenue, but I’m not sure if it’s something I’m able to take on. More users = more arguments = more fires to fight = more white hairs and wrinkles, and less time for enriching, fun stuff.

That ADITL aaahs thread is a good example of the latter. It had to be locked because it descended into fighting and ridiculousness. One member in particular just would not let it lie, things got heated (over something that really didn’t deserve that level of passion), and I just could not be bothered with it anymore. He deleted a bunch of his messages so I’m not sure how much of it has been preserved or makes sense. I’ve locked other discussion threads for similar reasons – there’s a page on the Paul is Dead myth which attracted a panoply of nutjobs, who posted endless screeds of ‘evidence’ and got in the way of what should (as should everything here) be a harmless thing to chat about. I just can’t be doing with it, so it gets stopped. It’s pop music, nothing to get hung about.

I hope that explains some of the reasons why things are how they are. I’m happy to discuss any or all of this further. Suggestions are always welcome.

We’re all human, don’t think the thought police is going to swoop down if you go off-topic. But as a general rule of thumb, if you’re coming here primarily to discuss non-Beatles matters, maybe there are other places that are better suited (this isn’t really aimed at you; I don’t really know your posting history).