Part 1: What I've been up to...

[Meng Lelan]

Oh goodie, looking forward to part 2 

 

 

 

Yes, when are we going to see Part 2?

[trevelyan]

Congrats on hitting the 11 year landmark Roddy.

 

Just reading your post, I'd be surprised if the user signup numbers aren't related to Google changes. I don't keep a good track of those things for my stuff (once you're on page 10, it doesn't tend to matter), but I don't notice forums stuff appearing in the mess of crap that tends to show up in search results these days.

 

You might want to look into adding the "canonical" tag and seeing if you can combine some of the CSS/JS files for faster page loads. That is known to make a difference.

[ouyangjun]

 

 

You might want to look into adding the "canonical" tag and seeing if you can combine some of the CSS/JS files for faster page loads. That is known to make a difference.

 

That sentence is more of a foreign language to me than Chinese, so I'm not sure I'm interpreting it correctly.  Here in the mainland the different topics can take a long time for the page to load.  Would love to see that load quicker.

[gato]

Ouyangjun,

Mainland China loading is more a Great Firewall issue. President Xi has seen what's happened across the Middle East and Ukraine. He is concerned about corrupting influences on the youth and has made sure that the Great Firewall is further fortified.

[roddy]

Ok, I got spurred into action on the highest reputation content thing and have hacked up what came with the forums to allow for selection by day / week / etc. There's obviously ways to expand on this - best content in March 2013, pagination, but this is what we've got for the moment. 

 

Take a look and point out any glaring errors before I add a header link? 

[imron]

I'd like to see just titles without any content.  As it is currently, it's difficult to scan.

[hedwards]

If you need a logo, you can probably find somebody on fiverr to do it for a low price, and chances are that the quality is still going to be sufficient. Alternatively, you could always run some sort of contest to have folks create one.

Personally, I'm back here in large part because it is a quality site. Moderation isn't something that's easy to get right. If you're too heavy handed you squash potential discussion of interesting, but dicy, topics. If you're too loosy goosy, you can wind up with a cesspool of vermin worthy of inhabiting a bar in Mos Eisley

[Lao Che]

"I'd like to see just titles without any content.  As it is currently, it's difficult to scan."

 

This. And "best content in March 2013, pagination" would be great too.

 

Oh, and for some reason this page is now broken: http://www.chinese-forums.com/rec.html

 

It used to show best posts of all time, this week, and other things... it was great.

[Lao Che]

I think activity will always be somewhat limited on a forum like this. The primary discussion on these forums is about learning Chinese with society, culture, and news being lesser topics. The number of people serious about learning Chinese is fairly small compared to those interested in discussing society, culture, and Chinese news. Additionally, for many people, learning Chinese and talking about learning methods is a finite activity, not a long term project. As a result, there is probably a greater turnover in users here as compared to other forums. For example, one can remain an active participant in a videogame forum: even if you haven't played the latest games, you can discuss sales figures, news, and other things as the time and effort required to remain active in the community is a lot lower. I also think this forum's mature tone ends up excluding a lot of the rabble cluttering up most of the internet; there's very little of the whining and drama typical of other expat sites (but that also makes this site less entertaining and less likely to increase its userbase).

 

If you could develop relationships with certain bloggers (which I think you have done - I occasionally see interviews on long-term Chinese blogs) it could help reinforce the ecosystem and perhaps result in gradual growth. A bit of self promotion wouldn't hurt either. This is one of the most valuable posts I have read on this site: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/43939-independent-chinese-study-review/. It really should have been posted to reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/) and other news aggregates, but I don't think it's been spread very far.

 

One thing that could be beneficial would be to de-segregate the forum a bit. I think communities tend to be more vibrant when there aren't a million little sub forums. I post on a large webforum that is divided into gaming and off-topic. I have been introduced to threads that I otherwise never would have read if there were a bunch of subforums. The current setup works fine for this site, and probably helps keep things more organized and useful than they otherwise might be. But perhaps there would be more activity if some of the subforums were merged and the community was packed together a bit more tightly.

[gato]

Oh, and for some reason this page is now broken: http://www.chinese-forums.com/rec.html

 

Hmm.  What happened to the "Recommended Posts" page?  It seemed to be more useful than the high reputation list (though it's not clear what the difference in selection criteria is.)

[roddy]

I've cut down on the amount of the post that is posted and some of the white space. However a) that template is used elsewhere and b) going down to just titles could be confusing as a) oh, hang on, done letters, i) we only have topic titles and these are posts, so it could easily end up being a list of the same title over and over; ii) I think we need some of the posts there so people can tell if this is something they've seen before or not. 

 

 

"Oh, and for some reason this page is now broken: http:// www.chinese-forums.com/rec.html" - I'd coded that myself and it was painfully slow. The new attempt has the same content, albeit on different pages. The criteria were exactly the same - number of positive rep points, over whatever timeframe. 

 

Lao Che: I think it's reasonable to say that there are limits to activity, but I think we can try and increase within those limits. And perhaps people can (actually they do) go from  beginner students, to active consumers of Chinese culture, all within the site. 

 

I would very much love to see content from the site getting posted to sites like Reddit, or shared on Facebook more, or blogged about. And we do get traffic from, ie, reddit, but it's usually a case of someone referring to us in an answer rather than posting about content. BUT I'm extremely reluctant to do that myself, because I'm not active on Reddit, or those blogs, and I'm not going to turn up and say "Hi, look at my site!" However if you're already active on such sites and believe you can post something from here which will be valuable to another community - that would be fantastic, and appreciated. 

 

You're correct about forums organisation, both in the general sense (too many sub-forums can reduce activity) and with this forum specifically. There's probably a very strong case to be made for reducing the number of sub-forums and categories we have on here. 

[Nathan Mao]

I haven't added many new posts or any new topics lately because I feel like I've run out of things to contribute.

 

I don't have the time to develop vocabulary lists for the TV serials I'm watching.

If I had more time and energy to develop such lists, I'd probably be better off using it to read more Chinese.  I gotta finish 士兵突击 within the next 3 weeks (the library time limit will expire!).

 

It seems like most everyone already knows how to study, and apparently everyone has a better system than I've ever developed.

 

So other than answering questions and occasionally giving my opinion on something or other, I think I've pretty much already provided the entirety of my semi-unique and sorta-helpful experience by writing about military/govt linguist jobs and career aspects.

 

But I'll keep hanging out, and maybe I'll hit something helpful I can provide without being too much of a time suck for me.

[gato]

chinese-forums.com/rec.html" - I'd coded that myself and it was painfully slow.

Try minimizing the number of database queries. I remember it doing the trick.

[roddy]

Part 2