Hi all,
I wanted to take a few minutes to write down what some of my thoughts have been in relation to our community since we launched the new site. Obviously we've seen a pretty significant decrease in user activity, and I want to talk about reasons why I think that may be, and explain things from my perspective about the purpose behind rebuilding the site on a new platform. But first, a few statistics.
Since launching the new site
- 678 unique users have logged in
- 196 new users have registered
- 0 bot/spam account registrations
I'm not listing these in an attempt to convince anyone that the site has seen tremendous activity since launch. What I am showing is that based on these numbers, we've had nearly 500 previous members of this site (users who were registered and active on the previous site) log in since launching the new site. At the same time, we've had nearly 200 new registrations, all of which are (as best I can tell based on lack of post spam) legitimate registrations.
With this in mind, I think it is fair to say that despite having a bit of a rough period getting users transitioned to the new site, 500 legacy users logged in points to a fairly successful transition. I'd have to look to know for sure, but I'd say it's a safe bet that we never had too many more than 500 unique logins over a 3 month period on the old site, meaning that everyone that wanted to transition probably has at this point.
User Activity
Now I want to talk about the resulting activity data associated with moving to the new site. Even without access to the statistics that I have, most regular members would realize that there's been a pretty significant decline in user activity since the site transition. There are a lot of potential factors with this, which I will discuss below. While I wont post explicit analytics, I can say that since launching the site, I can give some general insight.
- We average about half as many user sessions per day.
- We average about a third as many pageviews per day.
- We average about a third as many unique users per day.
The first thing I'd like to address is pageviews. Something to keep in mind is that Google Analytics is not overly accurate at differentiating between spammer/bot traffic and legitimate traffic. This is due to the fact it is a JavaScript driven tracking system, which means that its statistics are not captured at a server or DNS level (where detecting spam/bot traffic is more easily identifiable) but rather at a client machine level. However, due to the fact that our site URL structure has changed, and bots/spam often reach a site via referencing links, the portion of traffic that was previously bots/spam may have decreased as a result. While there's no way for me to know for sure, that is one possible explanation as to why we are seeing fewer pageviews, which consequently means that the data is simply more accurate now than it was before in regards to reflecting real user pageviews.
Anyway, now to a more subjective interpretation of this data.
I will be the first to say that the transition to the new site hasn't been without its hiccups. I expected that we'd have a rough period of users trying to log in and failing, and eventually locking themselves out. The facts of the matter are this. Three months prior to launching the new site I created a thread that every single user that logged into the site was redirected to. This thread explained that everyone needed to update their email address in order to ensure that they would receive their account activation email once we transitioned to the new site. Obviously I never expected everyone to pay attention to and follow those instructions, but I am stating that there was a clear message conveyed that this was a critical step that every member needed to take in order to ensure a smooth transition, and that it was done with ample time prior to launching the new site.
Second, the reason passwords were not able to be moved to the new platform is due to the fact that VBulletin and Drupal (our current software) hash their user passwords with different types of encryption. I spent hours researching in attempts to come up with a solution, but given the launch schedule and number of tasks still left on my plate, I was unable to come up with a method to migrate user passwords. It wasn't for lack of trying, it was simply out of my capability at the time.
With that said, as I mentioned earlier, we've had approximately 500 users from the old site log in to the new site, so roughly speaking, we have enough unique and active users on the new site to produce the levels of content (threads/posts) that we were prior to the move. Which leaves us with, "If we have enough users, why is the site so dead?".
People don't like change
I feel this is really at the crux of the issue. We have plenty of logged in users, and we have a forum. Roughly speaking, users still have the same basic functionalities at their finger tips as they had before. The site looks a bit different, things aren't all in the same place, but my point is, we can make threads (excluding the recent issue), we can make posts, we can quote each other, we can send private messages. The communication stack is there, and despite some bugs, it's been functional since day 1.
What needs to be understood, is that prior to this transition, our website had seen almost no change in functionality since 2005. That's nearly 10 years that a lot of our most veteran members have been using a particular system, adjusting to it, learning its idiosyncrasies, and its capabilities. To move these members to a completely new platform I'm sure was nothing short of a shock to the system. Many of these users may have barely been holding on to their forum life, as it were, by a thread to begin with, simply logging in and reading out of boredom. This isn't even speculation, I know of several of our oldest, and previously most active members that hadn't made more than a few posts in the past year, but were always logged in lurking the forums. The significant change to the site may have simply been the straw that broke the camels back, and been enough of a reason for these members to finally give up the site entirely.
For people who fall within this category, there's very little I can or am willing to do. Is it unfortunate, yes. Is it understandable, certainly. However, I made a decision to buy this site last spring with the intention of giving it a new home that allowed for the potential to foster growth should the market place forces that be trend in that direction. Sadly, this has not been the case. The Master Chief Collection promised much, but in the end has been one of (if not the) worst video game launches to date, and the effects of that are nothing but widespread. HCS is an excellent example of a production that had every resource at its disposal and reason to succeed, yet their first season was absolutely dismal, much in part to a broken game, and much in part to a disorganized structure and overall lack of interest by the Halo community, and the console fps community at large.
Blame where blame is due
There's another set of users who have transitioned and made attempts at using the new site, but have, over time, stopped posting due to the fact that their user experience is not what they expect it to be. Maybe it's the fact that there's no in-line post reply form, and it requires an extra click to post a reply. Maybe it's due to the fact that there are no user signatures, and people feel robbed of their ability to make themselves stand out. Maybe it's that the old site had 100 smilies, and the new one only has like 6. It could be a number of things related to the user interface or the user experience that has caused them to simply say, "Meh, this isn't for me", and move on.
I'll take the blame here. While it's true that you're never going to please everyone, the truth is that there are undeniably some missing components to the new site that people had come to enjoy and expect, and I didn't deliver on bring those over. That was part of the downside of moving to a brand new platform. Several people criticized me that I wouldn't just upgrade us to the newest version of VBulletin, or that I should have used IPB or some other forum software, and that's fine, but the reality is that every single one of those platforms, while more comprehensive forum solutions, pale in comparison to the extensibility of Drupal. I'm not going to sit here and make my case on that, I work in the industry, I work for a company that's launching sites for multi-billion dollar clients, and we use Drupal and only Drupal.
But the forum modules that I'm using for Drupal have only just recently been developed, and the ecosystem of features/functionality is still in its infancy. So why move to a solution that was worse off in the part of the site (forums) that we use the most? It goes back to planning for the future, and for potential growth (should the market support it). I didn't just want to upgrade to a shiny new version of shit software, I wanted to give us the ability to expand. I wanted to build on top of a platform that allowed us to quickly and easily add brand new features to our site that no other site to-date has. That's what I've done with the Video archive. It's a prime example of something I was able to engineer thanks to the infrastructure Drupal provides. Had I used anything less, it would have never come to fruition. It simply would have taken too much time to try to integrate fully with some other forum software. I would have constantly been fighting a battle of trying to integrate with overly complex systems and outdated methodologies.
You are the community
While I own the site, I alone am not the community. That's you guys, and if we want to usher in new users or grow our community and its reach, then that desire has to come as much from each of you as it does from me. If we simply want an e-home to discuss random shit, well then we have that right now. But if you want to see the site grow, I need people taking initiative, and not because I want you to, but because you want to. We still have polls, we can run competitions. We have social media accounts, we can post unique content. The new site alone is not stopping us from growing or expanding our horizons, but I alone do not have the power to do that.
Please, if you have an idea, make your voice heard. Do you want to help contribute articles to the front page? Please tell me. Get yourself involved in something that you are passionate about.
Where do we go from here?
As I stated in the March Update thread, I am currently working on implementing a number of new features and fixing existing bugs. I'd like to take a second to thank everyone that has donated over the past few months. I assure you that I have not forgotten about you, and when I am able to implement some more user customization, you guys will definitely be denoted in some way.
On the topic of continued development, it's happening, and I've recently made some changes to my workflow that make it even a bit more efficient for me. However, I must note that I have recently been moved to a project for work that is in its final stages, and everything I'm doing right now requires my absolute availability. We're working with a very large company to make sure their site launches mid-month, so don't expect to see anything in the coming days. However, it's worth mentioning that I did recently add a forum search functionality, so that is at least one example of something I've done recently to hopefully give you guys some faith.
Writing this has already pulled me away from my work for too long today, but I felt compelled to speak out today (for a number of reasons).
- Nv1
Sigons, Skols, Blackhawk?