If you are looking for recent content added to Armorama

You won’t be seeing it in this forum. You will need to go out to the main home page and look under the “Armorama™ Content Discussions” forum for those.

I am trying this out because I am still very unhappy with even 40% of our users staying stuck in this one forum. We may break out Campaigns as well, but if I do that I will probably look more at a main Campaign forum and then all campaigns/group builds having their own sub-forum.

Not understanding a web site operation, why is it an issue?

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Because now that we aren’t on a unified site, there is a lot of content or other generic scale modeling info/topics that wouldn’t get easily seen from inside a single forum.

I can only offer insight from my usage/perspective. I know the other sites are there. I choose to be mostly in the forums because of the enjoyment and knowledge I get from interactions there. The news only takes me a couple minutes to see what has been recently posted. The reviews, video’s etc are items that you see but do not frequently change and there is nothing to have an exchange with like another forum member. If you are saying that 40% of the forum users are Armorama readers, that might be true based on the numbers of armor builders. What would be the advantage of taking the campaigns out of the various forums and make a seperate campaign site then seperate them out again? Would it make it easier to navigate or create more clicks to leap from forum to campaign to subgroup back to forum.None of this is ment to be criticism so please don’t take it as such, it is just a thought to ponder. I am happy with the new site and I think you have done a good job in the transition.

Hi Jim,

I’m a little confused - what is the problem you are attempting to solve? IIRC the old site had Campaigns in a separate forum, so that change would make sense. But of course there is merit to keeping Campaign sections within each of the “site” forums too - Armour vs Aeroscale vs Automodeller etc - so users can see things grouped by their own interest.

But the topics to discuss content are more tied to the interest areas of each “site”, so breaking them out for the sake of adding more forums seems a bit pointless to me. Will there be the same for Aeroscale etc? That’s a lot of new forums to cover what used to be held within the old Site-based forums (the way it was until a few days ago).

If it was up to me, content threads would stay in the main interest “site” forums, and all the Campaigns/Group Builds would be broken out to a new Campaigns forum, subdivided by old site type.

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For campaigns the obvious benefit to putting them in their own parent forum would be organization by actual campaign. So that people could create blogs of their campaign builds under those sub-forums. Also since we do have some mixed build campaigns that would allow those to be found as well for those x % of users that are staying within a single forum area.

This is multi-faceted scenario and I will admit that I am using the biggest group as a test bed for this idea. One of the issues I didn’t outline is that many of the forums seem to get cluttered with content posts (not user generated posts). This leaves the impression to some new users of the site that ‘this is all we do’, etc.

Take Sci-Fi/Fantasy - KitMaker Network for example.

  • That’s a LOT of KM only posts with ZERO replies.
  • ZERO replies are not useful topics for forums.
  • ZERO replies don’t add anything to forums.
  • People who want to find links to content should be going to the sites that have the content. Period.

Let me be clear. The only reason we have these content topics is to have discussion. Period. No discussion. No reason to have content topics. Is this making sense?

Looking at Armorama’s content topics (Armorama - KitMaker Network) clearly there are less zero posts, but there are still a lot of them. So those really aren’t adding much to the overall forum health.

In short if people want to find recent content they have places to look for that (the sites, and the content forum area). The day I made this change we had been averaging about 80 new topics week for Armorama. We are at about 90 now (counting both forums). I want to see what we are at in a week or so and then I can see if it’s helping or hurting. If it helps you can probably expect to see the other sites content topics broken out as well.

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I just noted, while looking for a problem with the topic imports, that there is another more ‘nuclear’ option I could try. But it’s global so I couldn’t do it for just one site to start with.

Part of the issue may be the way these site-generated topics look and their titles. Upon opening, there is no pic of what it is talking about and usually a very poor description. Sometimes the titles are cryptic or don’t make any sense either. As most people are pretty lazy, they won’t continue clicking to find out what it is about. The old NEWS posts were much better in my opinion.

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Um - if the point of starting a topic for new content is to attract attention to said content (a “hey, look at this” signpost since the content is now on separate external websites rather than being under one roof) then hiding it until it attracts comments is as good as having no topic at all. I thought the idea was to use these topics to help tie the content sites and forums together?

The issue of nobody commenting can’t be new - do you have stats on the percentage of News etc posts on the old site that didn’t attract any comment? Folks may take in the info but have nothing to add in the way of comments - doesn’t detract from the usefulness of the info. And I think you’re likely to get more comment if they are in the appropriate general area forums rather than brigaded in a separate one, but let’s see how the test goes…

But on the Campaigns I agree a new Forum area, subdivided by Armorama/Aeroscale etc subheadings, is a good idea.

This sort of gets around to a very old problem though and it was happening a lot on the old sites as well.

The forum is for discussions, not for finding content. The fact that people find content there is obvious but not really how it’s designed to work. I will repeat again… the only reason these topics exist is for there to be a discussion thread at the bottom of the article page. On the content site.

So these changes are obviously intended to push some of you outside of your comfort zone by getting you the hell out of one forum. :slight_smile:

I mean yes I agree with you that the current way the system posts new content topics is less than ideal, but what if it posted the entire thing in the forum. Pictures and all. Then people would potentially never leave the forum and guess what… Soon there would be no Armorama content site, and then there would be no forum.

Also I think you are ignoring the fact that much of these content posts are ignored by many users as they attempt to find original user posts. So… what? I am suppose to sacrifice the quality of the various forums because some people choose to find the content via the forum?

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Sadly we don’t have a way to create

Campaigns

  • Armorama
    – Campaign Name

So it would have to be something more like

Campaigns

  • Campaign Name (Armor/AFV)

Or the campaign topic could be tagged with the site or genre name as well.

OK. I just assumed it was a case of assigning subs like the way the General Discussion forum is broken down into “Site Talk” etc. But if it can’t work, then it’s not an option.

On the wider issue that sparked this thread I can’t help feeling I’ve missed a protracted discussion somewhere! It felt like your announcement came out of the blue, and our replies are somehow raising hackles. But that’s mostly just out of ignorance, as I’m still in the dark about why our reading habits are of such concern all of a sudden - it would help guide the discussion if you were to get us up to speed on it. (Or am I just being thick? Been known to happen…)

It goes back to this thread (which albeit many people misunderstood what was being asked). But the gist of it is there is still a large number of people isolating themselves into the Armor/AFV forum alone.

Humm… This may be slightly off topic, but perhaps not entirely. I must admit I find some things a little confusing. I posted a photo / feature yesterday, and then checked back a couple times to see if it was live. As it was not displaying on the home page at all, I assumed not. Eventually I viewed it via my profile to check I hadn’t saved it as a draft, then noticed it had comments! I tracked it down eventually from the home page > menu > features. Then the thread that runs from it just has that standard text with no preview or anything much at all to attract interest. I see it’s had 299 views, but I’m kind of surprised it’s had that many considering there’s nothing visible on the homepage at all. I was looking for it and had a hard time finding it. Meanwhile, there’s four items on the home page carousel, one of which has been there for four weeks. There’s only five ‘features’ in total, two of which are by me (weird), and one of which also appears under ‘photos’.
I know, it sounds like I’m complaining because no one can see my content, but while that’s true, it does all seem a bit fragmented and unintuitive. I can imagine the vast majority of people are now viewing the site on mobile phones and probably just have bookmarked their fave forum, so just go straight there.

By the way, something that is also “interesting” is the whole suggestion bit about what you might be interested in. I think that’s some kind of ahem artificial intelligence data analysis thing, all the rage with silicon Valley types, but neither artificial nor intelligent. What it actually does is narrow everything down and effectively hide stuff. When I had the Google mail box I fantasised about torturing those at Google who came up with “targeted” mailbox selections, like those idiots knew what was important to me!

Hi Matthew,
Articles that go live can be edited by their authors, so if you either intentionally or accidently hit the edit view and then hit ‘save/submit’ again then the article disappears from the live view on the site and goes back into the approval queue. This would explain why it was ever in a position to have comments and views.

This has been happening a lot because contributors don’t really understand this is how that new system works. I will hopefully have at least a text dialogue or something to alert them to it going offline while the changes are approved.

Or in your case yeah it’s live but it wasn’t added yet as a homepage/featured item. This is a manual thing and an editor has to do this. Some of them do, and some of them don’t know how would be my guess.

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Forgive me adding the old adage “If it ain’t broke…”

I fully admit to not fully understanding what’s under discussion here, but to me, compared to the old site, things are just great. I simply identify the Forum I’m interested in, drill down to say “Cold War”, or if stuff has been differently posted, then I just monitor “Armour/AFV Discussions” which let’s me scan just about everything I’m interested in.

As I say…

True… but then you miss all these…

If people remember correctly the old main forum page looked a bit like this:


And surely you are not saying that if you stayed in just the Armor/AFV forum at the top you wouldn’t have been missing anything? I hope. :smiley: