I just got back from a couple of days of business travel (shooting cadaver legs for a femoral plate company. Ugh.) And while visiting Mobius just now, and seeing most of the same threads from last Wednesday still at the top of the forums, it dawned on me that there seems to be quite a bit less activity than the old days.

Moderators, am I imaginging this? How less active are you/we?

Also, there was talk when this Mobius Phase II went into effect that it may be temporary. I even remember a poll about formats. What was the "winner?" Do you foresee Mobius continuing like this into the future, or are changes still possible?

Yea, I've noticed that more threads seem to linger from lack of activity more often. There's still pretty good churn though.



Case in point...

I don't have any hard data beyond a seat-of-the-pants guesstimate to go on, but my feeling is that overall, the activity level has been somewhat lower than it was on the old board. One could probably attribute this to a variety of factors - the downtime we had before this new incarnation got up and running, the occasional turnover in participants that's inevitable in even the hardiest online communities, or simply one of the cyclical up/down swings in activity that seems to occur every so often. Of perhaps more importance, though, I've not noticed any decline in the level of discourse here, which is something that precious few fora can claim.

As far as I know, the board we're currently posting on remains an interim measure, and the plan is to migrate to a new server with board software that more closely resembles that which we used to have. But I haven't spoken with Todd about this recently, so I'm not sure what the current status of that effort is.

Dave

This place is slooooooow, compared to "the old days."

I'm sure it is slower than we used to be at the old site, although I don't have hard stats to back that up. It's difficult to compare given the difference between the two board software types.

We did lose a fair number of readers after the crash who, for reasons that puzzle me, still haven't found their way here. I'm talking about readers who had deep (board-specific) bookmarks at the old board who either haven't gotten around to trying "http://www.mhvf.net," or haven't used a search engine search to find us here. Even though we've been at this temp site for six months with the MHVF.NET URL pointed here, a number of veteran readers continue to straggle in, exclaiming "I had no idea Mobius was alive!" We don't really have a way to reach these people; they'll have to find us on their own.

Although many can't seem to figure out our registration process -- which is difficult, granted, but there's little I can do about it given the inflexibility of this software (although I'm also being more selective about extending accounts) -- we have about 450 people registered here, including about 100 more whose registrations were purged because they never posted. We typically have 25 to 75 people reading the forum at any one time; we are definitly an active forum. That said, many choose to lurk or refuse to post for whatever reason -- be it our posting policies, lack of anything to say, lingering disagreements or conflicts with another poster(s) (which is sad), the software, or whatever. It's their choice, and that's fine. This forum is what we make it. (And complaints about slooooow posting activity by members who've been registered here for six months who've only made 35 posts, who fail to see the irony of their complaint don't help the issue).

Part of the blame is on my shoulders. I'm not nearly active as I once was for a number of reasons, and I'm not really providing a direction or vision right now that engenders growth.

Although we've been here for six months, I still consider our current site a temporary solution. I'm not happy here, or satisfied by this software. But I don't have a timetable for us to move at this time, although I still want to make it happen. To be honest, I've had great difficulty getting traction and the motivation to ramp up and create a new site. Losing the old site, and the way it happened, really affected me a lot more than I realized in the months after it happened. We have significantly less funds than we did last year as well, so that's also been a significant prohibition.

One reason there might be less posts overall is that only posting topic-line messages isn't very convenient with the board's format. That seemed to be quite common at the old board. Less people are probably willing to try and put together a paragraph where they used to be able to just toss in a quick remark in the topic-line.

I personally like the current format better, the old one was a bear to read for me. Perhaps I'd have gotten more used to it, but it was incredibly difficult to find older posts. At least compared to the relative ease this format affords. Actually that's another thing that may add to the sense of less traffic - it's apparant at a glance what topics have new posts, where (as I recall) at the old board it wasn't quite so easy to tell.

I found it easy to find old posts at the old board. Using a quick pull-down menu, you could search for everything posted within the last 1.5, 3, 6 or 12 hours, or you could simply find every new post since your previous visit. The pull-down menu was located just above the top post on every board and was a cinch for me.

And it's a lot harder to find older posts here, because the old board had a functioning search engine and this one doesn't.

So, how do you find older threads or posts? For example, this board lets you look back through the last four pages. How do I find something that's, say, nine or ten pages back?

At the bottom of each board, you'll find more pulldown menus that allow you to search for threads by date and sort them just about any way you would like. You can, for instance, search for posts from the last 5, 7, 10, 20, 30, 90 days and more, or you can go all the way back to the beginning of this temporary board and see them all.

re: lower posting and folks not finding us, I've noticed that I never see a MHVF post indexed at google anymore, whereas I used to see them quite regularly. Perhaps this is a result of the new board software, or just a figment of my overactive imagination. Presence on Google is the singlemost powerful way to get visitors to remember you exist these days, IMHO. It's the reason why lovehkfilm.com is the most visited Hong Kong movie site, while the HKMDB, which really should be, has fallen off the face of the earth (there is a membership now and google doesn't index all the content, therefore the pages don't pop at the top like they used to, therefore it has to all appearances ceased to exist). Well, if I am properly medicated at the moment and this observation is accurate, perhaps it would be of use as a factor in the board software decision when it comes time to relaunch Mobius in a new "permanent" home, if indeed you decide to do so.

-- Peter

Peter, that's very true -- this software doesn't allow search engine indexing of posts because the posts are generated dynamically (which means the software "builds" each thread/post as a user clicks to access it; it's not sitting as an already-created HTML page on the server, which is the way our old software worked). I will definitely take that into account with our new software, although the downside is much larger (i.e., more costly) Web site storage if we have thousands of static posts sitting around on a server as opposed to being dynamically created upon each read request.