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It seems that the articles, reference and stories on the front page aren’t of any interest to anyone — because it’s rare that anyone posts a comment on any of them. It’s a lot of work to post this, but if no one cares, maybe I should stop? It’s discouraging to spend hours and hours on this stuff and get no feedback at all.
I’d like for everyone here to start thinking that the “front” section of the site is for news, tutorials and reference. The forums will be for support, and NOT for those other things.
There will be exceptions — such as the “old” news forums. These will be shut down to prevent NEW topics (it all goes to the main site), but still allow replies to existing topics (like the popular Google Talk topics, which still bring in a lot of search traffic).
For now, I guess I’m looking for your feedback. Are the articles and posts on the main site of no interest to any of you? If so, I need to stop writing them and look for better ways to spend my time.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I rarely even go to the Home page. Most articles I read from any site are 95% handled start to finish via RSS. I rarely find the need to actually go to a site to read anything. Thus, I rarely comment on most posts for any site. What you might perceive as little interest may actually be a result of the means by which readers get information these days.
I can fully appreciate the time that goes into creating the posts. They do involve quite a lot of work. You could use the “more” attribute if it’s available to force a break and make a reader come to the home page from an RSS to read the rest, but personally, unless something is really riveting, I rarely do that myself. (Mental note to self: stop doing it in my own blog!)
Informational/reference posts and tutorials (unless there is something unclear) generally don’t lend themselves to debate or personal expression and result in far less comments. If you want lots of comments then post articles that are fire-starters for debate. Can’t say as I remember the last time anything IM related sparked that kind of fire in my belly though.
*Jumps down, tucks little soapbox under arm and heads back to work before being noticed missing* I know no one usually agrees with me on my views of such things. But I feel compelled to respond anyway. See! That’s what it takes to get comments. Engage a person and you’ll get comments, speak at them and you’ll get far less.
Thanks for the response, Doris! I guess I’m still working out the details on how to engage people. I need to write better “hooks.” 🙂
Doris wrote:I rarely even go to the Home pageI almost always jump right to: bigblueball.com/forums.
I, for one, do have a short attention span…it literally took me a whole year to read a Harry Potter novel…no lie. So I will be discouraged if I see a lengthy article on the front page. Jeff’s “IM tips” article was pretty OK for my attention span, however. (I commented on and Dugg that article).
Doris wrote:Informational/reference posts and tutorials (unless there is something unclear) generally don’t lend themselves to debate or personal expression and result in far less comments.I agree with this statement. From time to time, I do read articles on the front page…but have been not compelled to leave a comment for this reason.
Find me guilty but I too, jump straight to the Forums whenever I log into BBB (call it a force of habit, but I’ve been doing it since joining BBB). But I do find from my own experience in my blog, that people don’t seem likely to post comments unless the content is absolutely riveting, unsettling, pertinent, sacrilegious (?) whatever, take your pick.
You can ask/beg readers to comment, you can have the Read More… thingy as proposed by Doris, but really, I have no idea how you would encourage more comments, unless you wanna pay them, LOL.
I too do the same as above – i skip straight to the forum to view posts and only click on those that catch my attention.
Hence my comment on the desktop thread.
Ditto… I just go to “Today’s posts” and see what is there that interests me or that I think I might respond to. Aside from that, candidly, I CBA* to read, much less respond to stuff that’s informational.
* Can’t be arsed
Hopefully this will be rectified by the new style, which will FORCE you to at least SEE the latest homepage stuff.
Until then, has anyone tried the email subscription link (found at the very top of this and every page at BBB)? It only sends a maximum of one email per day, and only if there is a new story on the front page (comments don’t count).
I’d be interested to find out how many of you are using it, why or why not, and if you have, have you found it helpful for getting notified when there’s something new.
I’ll be honest – I didn’t notice it so I have not used it. The only thing I’ve used is the “Suscribe to Topic” option.
I’ll try it out though.
I don’t hardly read never mind comment on news articles as they don’t tie into the forums the way they used to. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, just change I’ll have to get used to and force myself to do.
I use the Subscribe via RSS. And you are correct, there really aren’t many notifications that come through.
@patndoris 237610 wrote:
I use the Subscribe via RSS. And you are correct, there really aren’t many notifications that come through.
Yeah, I tend to post in spurts, and even if I do several posts on one day, you’ll still only get one email (via the email subscription). Of course, if you subscribe via RSS using your favorite feed reader (iGoogle, Netvibes, etc.) you get the new ones more regularly, but it is unobtrusive — which may be another reason people don’t reply! :p
I really think when I get the theme finalized and integrated, this problem will begin to solve itself. Just takes a little time. Until then, everyone can help by leaving comments here and there in the front section! 🙂
By the way, since installing the BackTrack plug-in for WordPress, we have been getting “comments” coming in from Twitter. Basically, when someone tweets a post from BBB, that tweet shows up as a comment.
You can see this in action on this week’s Sunday Funny: Emoticon War. Check out the comments that follow, and you’ll see it says “originally posted on Twitter.” These people saw the post on BBB and sent a tweet to their followers with a link. Unfortunately, they didn’t leave a comment on OUR site, but the BackTrack plugin captures their tweet and imports it as a comment.
Interesting, no?
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