As you may have noticed, I made some recent changes to lessen the number of dead boards on Peercointalk, which included merging a lot of boards for Primecoin and Technical Support. I also separated Peercoin boards into 3 categories, Peercoin, Project Development and Economy.
A couple days ago in chat we were talking about making some further changes to the forum. It was brought to my attention that the project development category was suffering from low visibility and participation. The low visibility is due to the fact that it’s in the 2nd main category, meaning people would need to scroll down in order to see it. The problem with having low visibility is that these are some of the most important projects being worked on at Peercoin right now and it’s discouraging for developers when they receive little views and feedback for their hard work.
I initially thought that having dedicated boards and descriptions on the front page for our main projects would bring greater visibility to them, but I’m now starting to think that the spread out nature of the boards is harming visibility and participation. I believe now that it would make sense to take all the specific project boards under the project development category and merge them into one board. It would end up looking like this…
Newbies (Remains as is.)
Peercoin Discussion (Remains as is.)
Project Development (All boards in the Project Development category will be merged into this new board. It will consist of all project development that takes place outside of the main protocol.)
Protocol Development & Technical Discussion (Slight name change. All discussion will be geared solely toward advanced technical discussion and development of Peercoin’s protocol.)
Marketing (Remains as is)
Minting & Proof-of-Stake (Remains as is)
Mining Pools & Proof-of-Work (Remains as is)
Bounties (This board will be disbanded due to low participation. Funding for various web and development projects would be a better fit in the project development board.)
Web Projects (Again, this board will be disbanded due to low participation. Web projects can now be posted about in the new Project Development board.
So in the end, one main category will be removed as well as 7 different boards, which all have the common theme of project development. This will greatly reduce the number of scattered/dead/inactive boards and uniting them by taking the majority of development outside the protocol and focusing it all on one board instead of many. This should lead to higher viewership and participation. I plan on doing this soon, but I’d like to ask if there is any feedback on it before I do so.
Thanks Sentinelrv for taking the time to clean this up!
(As an aside, while I agree the pruning, I’ve always favored the traditional hierarchical structure of peercointalk versus than the more trendy formats such that employed in discuss.nubits.)
Sounds good. Do you think it would be worth moving the boards from Economy to the main Peercoin category too? Since there are only two boards. The goods and services child boards could maybe be merged into the marketplace.
Was also just thinking for the language category all the board descriptions could be removed, as well as maybe the Hebrew board as it has never been used.
For me, the forum organization has never been an issue. There isn’t much activity here, so I only visit every few days and click Show unread posts since last visit.
[quote=“river, post:5, topic:3968”]Sounds good. Do you think it would be worth moving the boards from Economy to the main Peercoin category too? Since there are only two boards. The goods and services child boards could maybe be merged into the marketplace.
Was also just thinking for the language category all the board descriptions could be removed, as well as maybe the Hebrew board as it has never been used.[/quote]
With only 2 main categories for Peercoin and the 2nd one being so small, it makes sense to merge it all into one Peercoin category.
Since the marketplace has a combined total of 108 threads split among 3 boards, I also think it does make sense to merge them all into one board and disband the child boards, at least until activity picks up enough to justify multiple boards.
I didn’t notice the old descriptions in the language boards until you pointed them out. I can remove the descriptions, which should minimize the space on the main page that the language category takes up.
The new forum organization can be used on the discourse forum. In my opinion Nu has way too many boards. This thinned down version would be perfect for Discourse. People would be able to use the latest posts view or category view. Category view simulates the front page of Peercointalk and latest posts view displays all threads on one page, making it easier to read forums which aren’t too active.
Thinning down the number of boards here in my opinion is an in between step we need to take before we fully convert, which would take a lot more effort to accomplish. It needs to be done sooner than later though, as it’s getting to the point I can’t even use smf anymore. Much of the posting functionality on this forum is now broken, at least it is for me. I have no problems or errors using Discourse and it’s been a much more positive experience.
Everything is done. The Project Development board is situated underneath Peercoin Discussion and is now the 2nd largest Peercoin board on this forum, with a total of 5,750 posts and 359 Topics.
There are a lot of different projects here now, so how do you suppose I organize the stickies? I unstickied everything except for the Peer4commit thread about raising project funding. Should anything else be stickied? I don’t want to sticky too many threads, because then it will look too crowded. We have announcement threads for PeerAssets, PeerApps, Peercoin Wisdom, PeerKeeper, Peerbox, etc… I can’t sticky them all. Would it make sense to make one more sticky thread with a title, description and links to the announcement threads for every major project? This would prevent overcrowding by putting all project information into one sticky.
Thanks for the work! I like this very much.
As I consider this an improvement in PeerKeeper visibility, I want to give you a small tip from the PeerKeeper funds.
[member=890]Sentinelrv[/member] Is your user still up to date https://peer4commit.com/users/310?
Would make sense.
A sticky per project is definitely a bad idea, having all threads in one board motivates the active projects to keep an active thread.
The new forum organization can be used on the discourse forum. In my opinion Nu has way too many boards. This thinned down version would be perfect for Discourse. People would be able to use the latest posts view or category view. Category view simulates the front page of Peercointalk and latest posts view displays all threads on one page, making it easier to read forums which aren’t too active.
Thinning down the number of boards here in my opinion is an in between step we need to take before we fully convert, which would take a lot more effort to accomplish. It needs to be done sooner than later though, as it’s getting to the point I can’t even use smf anymore. Much of the posting functionality on this forum is now broken, at least it is for me. I have no problems or errors using Discourse and it’s been a much more positive experience.[/quote]
Absolutly agree. Nothing to add, waiting for it.
As a owner of maybe the biggest spanish forum of cryptocurrencies, every person that come to forobits, after some time always sais: “This forum software is crazy awesome and far times better than fkng BB, SM and similar.”
Build a confortable enviroment is necessary point for all the communities.
There is one other change I was considering making, but first I wanted to see what others think. Personally, whenever I need to post some thread about advertising or marketing Peercoin, I struggle between posting it in Peercoin Discussion and the Marketing board, but ultimately I always end up posting it in the former. I always feel posting it in Marketing isn’t going to get it the attention it deserves and that Peercoin Discussion is a more active board, which also seems to be an acceptable place for these kinds of threads.
That got me thinking on why we have separate boards in the first place and that we could probably merge Marketing into Peercoin Discussion. We could then call the board “Peercoin Discussion & Marketing.” Or we could just leave it simply “Peercoin Discussion” and add marketing and advertising to the board description. I really think the marketing board here is redundant.
[quote=“hrobeers, post:14, topic:3968”]I agree!
I would just hold the name “Peercoin discussion” but I wouldn’t mind the addition of “& marketing”.[/quote]
Agreed, I think it would be better to keep the current name and just expand the board description to include things like news and marketing, etc…
