We aren't quite to your level of sophistication yet. I am just getting used to using full words for phrases like "are you" instead of just the letters "r" and "u".Originally Posted by LA Ute
If it helps I can use some of my 8th grade Latin to class it up: Semper Ubi Sub Ubi.
Loosely translated: "Always where under where".
Sorry. But it's the best I got.
The real problem is that there are too many lawyer types.
"It'd be nice to please everyone but I thought it would be more interesting to have a point of view." -- Oscar Levant
You are clearly not a student of my posts.
Sent from my VS985 4G using Tapatalk
So I said to David Eckstein, "You promised me, Eckstein, that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I noticed that during the most trying periods of my life, there have only been one set of prints in the sand. Why, when I have needed you most, have you not been there for me?" David Eckstein replied, "Because my little legs had gotten tired, and you were carrying me." And I looked down and saw that I was still carrying David Eckstein.
--fjm.com
I like this board for the same reasons Virginia Ute and Slim state. I enjoy the mutual respect that is here. I like that subjects are split up so if you don't want the churchy stuff you can pass on it and find something else to light your fancy.
Since I work in the medical field and work the weekend shift, I like the Elders Quorum sections of the board. It makes me miss and glad I'm not there on Sunday's. Just like being there for real.
"We're pretty damn good," -- Coach John Pease
Have you tried putting it in a bag of rice?
...Sorry.
exorcism.jpg
Certain concepts must not be allowed to enter here.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
We changed the startup page to push people toward clicking on "New Posts." Maybe that hasn't solved the problem. I'm all in favor of ways to avoid misperceptions. U-Ute: Have at it! You'll get a little something extra in your paycheck next week if you solve this.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Those views are still typically 30-40% religion/politics with a much higher proportion once basketball and football recruiting seasons end. It's easy to remove those topics from the new posts and active threads views on the Proboards product. Not sure about vBulletin.
Serious question: Please forgive me if I've missed this already, which may well have happened. On Tapatalk, I look at the "New Posts" option just to see what has recently been posted. I almost always skip most topics, including politics, believe it or not. As Rocker notes, I could set my page so I see only threads I've participated in or subscribed to. Are you saying that the format is confusing so that new users do not take that approach and get turned off by an apparent imbalance in topics?
Last edited by LA Ute; 01-17-2017 at 09:25 AM.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
I visit another VBulletin based forum for a owners of a model of a motorcycle that I have. They have 22 different forum categories, about half of which are not specific to this specific motorcycle, and about 1/4 of which have nothing to do with motorcycling at all. I usually skip over about 3/4 of the threads in the New Post page while I pick and choose the threads I am interested in. I enjoy this ala cart type viewing, and I guess it is why I am not really understanding jrj's concerns. Boards like Utefans.net and Cougarboard that give you no option to pick and chose without endless scrolling drive me nuts.
Maybe if we want to have the focus be on sports talk, we see if there is a way on the New Post page to have threads from the sports categories float to the top? I'm just spit-balling here.
“To me there is no dishonor in being wrong and learning. There is dishonor in willful ignorance and there is dishonor in disrespect.” James Hatch, former Navy Seal and current Yale student.
First, I don't think the majority of visitors interface through tapatalk, at least not initially. I don't use it personally as if at all possible I'd like to access a site through a browser rather than an app.
Second, the average new viewer probably doesn't selectively scroll through a bunch of titles and read some threads and ignore others. They're going to Browse the top 3-4 threads, form an opinion, then leave or stay. On this site, those 4 threads are likely to be one religious, one political, one 2016 football thread that is 15 pages long starting with preseason, and one basketball thread that is similarly long and hard to jump into midstream. It's very inaccessible from a new user standpoint.
This inaccessibility seems not to be seen as problematic by the current user group, but the current user group is a selection of all the visitors who came and weren't turned off and is not representative of the potential user base.
I think this is true. The board has been heavy on politics lately (not so much religion). If we want new posters, showing the sports posts first makes sense.
Also, there is a list of questions to answer for new users introducing themselves. The list is largely ignored, but the religion question could/should be removed from that list.
What's funny is that utefans always had as much politics/religion talk as we have here. The layout makes it feel like the opposite is true, especially to visitors.
Do things actually need to change here though? Maybe because I use Tapatalk the majority of the time I don't see the issue, but I can view this site however I want. I can only see posts I've participated in, I can watch all new posts, I can watch only subjects I've subscribed to or whatever else.
The proboards.com platform really doesn't seem all that different from vbulletin and no offense but the uofuboard.com design looks dated to me already. Maybe that is my aversion to mid 2000 icons.
I'm all for being welcoming. Maybe we do put the politics and church talk behind the registration wall, but I think the only result will be making this board look inactive. No pun intended.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I think this change is sort of long overdue. The part about the only result would be "making the board look inactive" is what answers the initial question of does there need to be a change.
That's what happens when the styling is left up to someone who doesn't even know what CSS stands for.
So why are you doing it then? I'm really not trying to be a jerk, I guess i'm just not getting it. I've seen you pitching the site around a few places so I'm just curious.
And maybe I should explain my POV. I've spent enough time around message boards to realize that the quickest way to kill something is to try to control what is being communicated and what should be communicated about on a board. Almost universally the boards that do well and have large memberships are allowed to be pretty organic while maintaining a level of respect. For good or bad, non-sports subjects are the glue of a site in a lot of ways and what keep people sticking around and making it habitual. Trying to suppress that will likely just kill the board.
Put aside for a minute the technical and design issues of UF.N and just consider the community. Long before any of those issues UF.N has long since become a place I don't feel welcome because many of the people there have drastically different views and interests than I do. I went from posting multiple times a day to once a week and then eventually not at all. I could spend time trying to correct that (and fail) or I can find a community that works for me. For others the content and community of UF.N have never been better and so that is great. Let UF.N be what it is.
Conversely this community came from the cougarute forum and I was (am) a bit of an outsider here. I'm not as smart or good looking as most of the people here, but I still enjoy it for what it is.
My 2 cents.
I don't think he's really suggesting that anything be suppressed. Just make it so that when someone hits "new posts," it shows the sports posts in a bunch on top and the other posts in a bunch underneath (if I understand correctly). If possible, I don't think it's a drastic change.
I guess we could try to be better about parsing threads so that a new user doesn't have to try and join an ongoing, 3 year conversation. I, of course, still like the idea of killing everything over a year old just for routine street sweeping.
First off, I love futureman. "Did you see what he was wearing" was probably my favorite line of that movie.
You're not being a jerk at all. And "why" is a great question. I spend too much time on boards. I look at boards of other schools and conferences, and for the most part the boards are totally amateur compared to what you find for different interest groups, especially nerdy topics where 90% of the users are programmers. But those poorly designed sports boards WAAAAAY outperform their design and are heavily trafficked.
Utah boards, including this one, are better than the average college sports board but are WAAAAY less trafficked. Why? Because, as you said, non-sports subjects are an essential glue for holding boards together, especially in maintaining off-season traffic. Ute fans, more than any other fanbase IMO, are polarized and passionate about religion, politics, and sports and the unique convergence of those topics in this state. Essentially, our glue is bad.
So I watch as new sites spring up (Utahby5 and later Utehub) and they look good, but then I sort of question "what are you doing about the glue issue?" and the answer is "Just click what you like; nobody's forcing those topics on you". Although I agree that an unsupervised spontaneous site is better 99% of the time, I think it has failed 100% of the time for Ute-related boards.
So I sort of thought maybe it's just technically really hard to segregate content, and like most of my IT requests it's poorly worded and impossible. So I tried to see what it entailed so I could better explain what I wanted. That snowballed into just building a site as a thought exercise in segregating content. It works for Cougarboard, and they (unfortunately) are probably a better model for what might work for Ute fans than other fan bases, so why not try it?
So for why? Because persistent unaddressed bitching led to a thought exercise that turned into a forum. It was an accident. And after investing a certain amount of time in an accident, it turns out that it's not so bad. Ultimately, I want a Utah web presence that actually lives up to our enthusiastic fanbase. I don't think that's possible until somebody designs with the primary attempt of fixing the glue issue. I'd rather a really good web developer do that while I sit back and enjoy, but the glue doesn't seem to be seen as the top priority for others who have tried.
So because I see a window for opportunity for uniting the fanbase when Utefans collapses, I'm sort of imploring somebody (Utahby5) to fix their glue and be prepared to step into that void when it opens.
It's been years since I've been to CB, but they don't have the glue problem you are describing, right? I imagine that place as more of an echo chamber than a cornucopia of ideas/opinions.
Again, if it's an easy change for U-Ute, I see no reason why we can't group "new posts" into sports and other categories.
I'm a little confused.
Your initial posts were saying that there's too many non-sports related posts, and now you're saying their necessary to keep the board interesting. Perhaps what you really want is a good balance?
I'm wondering if the problem is the number of sports related forums vs non-sports related forums. We have 5 sports forums, of which only 2 are active (>100 threads) and 9 non-sports forums, of which 4 are active (>100 threads). But the interesting thing is that the number of threads that are sports related (880) is basically the same as all of the non sports threads (828).
So maybe the fact that those non-sports related threads are spread out across multiple forums gives the appearance that there are many more non-sports related posts when there isn't.
The community is great here. The basketball discussion is very good compared to other Ute sites. ALL forum layouts are intrinsically less accessible than the threaded format of Utefans and Utehub but have the advantage of fostering more depth of discussion and are less prone to the sort of memetic drive-by posting that ultimately dominates most threaded boards. The more cerebral nature of this board is as much a function of it being a forum as it is of the individual users IMO. The layout influences how people interact.
Because a forum is intrinsically less accessible due to partitioning and a requirement to click a few times before viewing anything, I think the design has to try and compensate by promoting greater accessibility. That's why I sort of complained about definitive THE whatever threads that ran interminably. There's also no way a Utes board is going to succeed or have any breadth of users unless it handles religion and politics somewhat separately from sports.
I bring all this up becaus I think Utefans is on it's last legs. If the attitude here is that we don't really want any of those posters, and we're certainly not willing to change to facilitate new users, then that's certainly cool. If the attitude is that additional users are wanted, then it's time to get moving on making some significant changes, IMO.
Maybe there is a Tapatalk user forum that will tell us how we can allow our users to put certain subforums on ignore. Have we looked at that?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
vBulletin allows you to filter access pretty easily. We could make the non-sports forums be inaccessible by default. Although I'd like people to still be able to see they exist. Not sure.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Maybe we can set up a button for "Additional Forums" or something like that? That would let people know there is more. We do appreciate you looking into these things.
Last edited by LA Ute; 01-29-2017 at 07:32 PM.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote