Thread: Site changes in the near future

Hello all,

Recently we have had some internal discussion among the staff, based on the various issues that we have been having the last couple of months. All these things are interconnected in one way or another. We could have addressed all these things separately and drawn up various sets of specific rules to cover them, or we could take a more high level view, based on 'What are we trying to achieve'.

In the end, we decided to go with the high level approach, and run a trial based on the ideas we have been discussing at various points.
This trial consists of a couple of changes, which will be evaluated over the next several weeks.

The first change has to do with signature lines. We've had several issues with those. People put all kinds of links there that may or may not be acceptable under out terms of use, and we cannot automatically filter out spam links, advertising, political messages, inappropriately large pictures, etc. Some of those things can be configured (like picture size) but others can't. We've tried to come up with restrictions in the past, but the amount of detail required is significant, and it would have to be policed manually, causing additional work for the moderators. On top of that, the way sig lines are displayed in vBulletin, they take up a lot of screen space sometimes.

So we decided to disable sig lines completely to see how that works. The reasoning behind this idea is that the forum is only one part of SRP. The purpose behind the forum is to exchange ideas and engage in discussion. Signature lines are about self expression and / or advertising. Neither of those benefits the primary purpose of the forum, and in some cases detract from that purpose.

A second change has to do with the couple of things that are beneficial in sig lines, such as people who link to the beginner section of the wiki etc. Signature lines are not really the best vehicle for that. We are currently putting together a small team to help publish articles on our main page in a structured manner. This should help beginners who arrive at SRP and only want to read enough to get started. This groups is still in its startup phase. In the end there will be a small group of publishers, and a larger group of people providing the content.

A third change is that we are activating the blog system. There are a couple of reasons. First of all, we have a mentor group which consists of experienced people who might be interested in sharing their own experiments, research, observations, etc with the rest of the community. Currently they have no way to do that unless it is fit for a discussion topic. And even then, that information will be spread throughout the forum, and without a good way for them to manage it. By giving them access to blogs, we hope to give them a better experience. The mentors will be the first group to get blogs for this purpose. Later on we could grant access based on post count / time in.

The second group to get blog access will be the vendors.
Under the first change, vendors will not have sig lines anymore either. Their advertising was legitimate under the vendor rules, yet the advertising also gave some discussions a much too strong commercial outlook, with advertising between each post. With vendors having their own blog, they gain the ability to discuss and promote their own products / services. This makes them much more visible for the people who are interested (after all, they have subscribed to the blog / are explicitly browsing it), while also removing them from the actual forum discussions where such advertising might be distractions from the main forum purpose.

We don't currently have a detailed set of rules for the blogs. The main guidelines are that the content should be somewhat shaving related (so no politics for example), no opinion pieces about other vendors or sites, and people posting commercial content should be a vendor and only cover their own products and services.

With these 3 changes, we hope to simultaneously take away a part of the problems the moderators have to deal with, while also giving the forum and the main site a more focused purpose, while also improving the whole experience for vendors, mentors and senior members.

I realize that nothing will make everyone happy. We will implement these changes, and then gather feedback along the way to fine tune the way things are implemented. After a couple of weeks, we'll evaluate how things are going , and make changes if / when needed. Worst case, we'll have to discard some of these changes. Sometimes it is impossible to predict if something will work for the community or not. In that case, just giving things a try is the only way to find out.

If during this try you have feedback for us, you can either reply here in the discussion thread, or send me a PM.