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Step 1 to bringing BigBlueBall back to life:
Remove any pop-up ads we operantly have–if there are still pop-ups anywhere, they need to be removed.
Uninstall that SnapShots thing, its annoyingly stupid and doesn’t serve a purpose. There are too many links that are easily hovered over. Perhaps turning the timing down to 100ms would fix it, but I say remove it entirely.
Okay, I just got a full-page pop-up ad for career counseling.
I also just viewed the site with IE7 not logged in, and I can see why people are complaining about the ads. On the forums home page, the ad space is ~1100×320, which is nearly 25% of my viewable screen area. Now, considering the rest of the screen is basically a useless header, an internal ad for a defunct podcast, and 8 top IM news stories… I don’t get a very good impression of the site.
This is on every page, and is unacceptable.
Step 2:
Reduce Staff.
Staff Page – There are too many people here. The team oriented model was a failure, it created segregation. I don’t mean to start telling people they aren’t useful and go away, but there is no need to add anyone new. The idea of the staff is to moderate BigBlueBall, not their own little section within. The idea is not to only care about one section, but to manage and secure the future of the site as a whole. This is how we used to operate. There would be one person responsible for each section, and the rest were global. This worked, and it worked well. Now we have the mentor position which doesn’t serve a real purpose other than them being outstanding members. The Mentors are what the Premier members should be. The Advisors and higher are those who manage.
Discussion about new directions and such for the site should happen at the premier level, not at the staff level. The staff level should only handle issues, ‘bad’ members, infrastructure issues, vacation notices and the like.
I feel that before the staff became team oriented and oversized, it was a more prestegiour position and those that held it treated it more respectfully, as a role that was vital to the success of the site as a whole. When there are 14 other people, it’s not as cool. It’s also something that members won’t bother gunning for.
Step 3:
Consolidate boards.
Push all the IM sub sections other than news into the parent section.
Create a general IM news board for all of the news, there is no need to separate it, it’s sparse as it is.
Push all the Off Topic boards back into the main one, there isn’t a need for those.
Push the Computer Support sections all back into the parent.
Step 4:
Send out news letters every week, if not more. Highlight the most interesting topic of the week (perhaps a poll on that every week) Also highlight the most active thread, and the most active member for the week (raw posts, nothing more than a calculation)
Step 5:
Offer news and alerts via IM. Register your screen name or handle as well as or instead of your email for news. Try and coax people back this way, maybe even take names from the database now and add them to a news bot, or give people the option to.
Step 6:
Interlinked content. There is a lot of useful content within the boards that needs to be extracted to be useful. Perhaps things like the download section should be more prominent, as well as the news section. This would coax people into posting things that they would normally put into just a topic into other places as well. This not only increases the value of the site, but also makes it appear more active.
This could be done by checking the text entered while posting for keywords, if they match enough in a list, the user will be prompted to submit as news, or add their link to the download section.
Step 7:
Increase community. Commit to socialization, whether it be a scheduled chat on the IRC channel, or anything that will promote people making friends. Friends will make people think twice about not coming back. Games that are multi player and involve chat are good, anything where you can get a more intimate feel for someones character and personality.
Step 8:
We need to make a push for exclusivity. Anyone remember the chat with FIXOR back in the day? Our traffic spiked hardcore from that, and I’m sure we gained some registrations. This would be even more vital now in order to promote the “new” BigBlueBall.
Step 9:
Work on page load time. Perhaps turning off “Related topics” at the bottom, and removing the stories on the right navigation bar would speed up page load times.
Nobody likes waiting for the next ad-filled page to load when all they want is content. Also I don’t know if vBSEO is loaded twice, but there are two copyrights displayed at the bottom of every page for it.
Step 10:
Realtime (whether it be IM or chat) conversations for staff at least once a week, involving a report from everyone on what they have done this week, what they plan to do for next week, and how things are going in general. We did do this for a while, but it didn’t last very long. More pressure on individuals will coax them into doing more for the site simply because otherwise their lack of activity will be more blatant.
Step 11:
Traffic analysis. We need to know where our traffic is coming from, and how people use the site. Trend analysis will allow us to figure out exactly what people come here for, and how we can exploit that to increase traffic.
This could be done through just raw stats for usage, but it might be wise to explore a solution where a user is offered a cookie and all their session data is tied to that cookie so we can later see exactly what they did and figure out how many others do that.
As far as staff goes, we should use “levels” or that is what I will call them for now.
Admins
These are people who will have pretty much control over anything and everything and who all can work together very well. I am thinking a group of 4 or 5 people here.Advisors
Still have global access, however these people won’t be able to do EVERYTHING. I’m thinking pretty much the same as advisors now, only they can do things in all sections.That is how I see our future staff system, yeah, people will get end up getting cut off probably, but we need a staff who is there and works together well and who actually staffs. Working together as one unit and not in bunches of separate teams, there will also be less complaining about who deletes what from who’s section. We will all own them all.
Step 12:
(Related to getting rid of the team model)
Get rid of all these staff colors. Admin/Advisor/Premier/Normal. We have at least 7 colors right now. Not only is it confusing and misleading, but it looks sloppy and unprofessional.
Step 13:
Re-tool the UI. These boards are really confusing, there are buttons all over the place. (And this is from a guy who generally writes poor user interfaces)
The icons and buttons are all over the postbit, and they’re not positioned intuitively.
There are 4 buttons below the post (this is on legacy), three above, and a checkbox. I suggest using a menu for all these items, and instead of the reliance on icons with tooltips, use text on the menu. The “Add Reply” button should also be merged into the Quick Reply box, and “Go Advanced” (what the hell does that mean?) being renamed to “More Options,” or “Full Post Editor.”
The “Posting Rules” at the bottom should be removed entirely, and some of the rules merged into the box with Quick Reply.
Also “Netherlands” is NOT a language. (From the language selector at the bottom of the page)
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