If you are looking for recent content added to Armorama

Personally, It doesn’t matter to me what category you put them under. My comments were more to how they look.

I click on the Scale Modeling Forums (back arrow) tab at the top of the page to see the latest posts.

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I wish they would look better with a thumbnail or something, but until the wizards at the Discourse development team do some magic… yeah it ain’t changing. :slight_smile:

On this note, is it possible to keep the banner with this tab on top inside a topic? Right now, it disappears unless you scroll to the beginning of the topic, which can be way up there on some of the more popular/longer ones.

This?

No, but I didn’t realize that took me to the same place. Disregard.

Most of the ‘content’ I see seems to be new product news and reviews. I appeciate that it would be of interest to many modellers but it’s mostly 1/35 scale stuff and that isn’t my preferred scale these days.

In terms of why I remain here rather than explore the rest of the site, it’s because I come here for the ‘discussion’ - the user-generated questions and responses that provide me with knowledge about a subject or a model. That’s the real value of these forums from my perspective.

Ultimately, I find this area valuable to me but the rest of the site less-so. I rarely get involved in campaigns so I have no preference on keeping them here or moving them to their own area. Likewise, removing the ‘content’ posts from this area wouldn’t increase my appetite to look elsewhere for them.

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Hi John,
But if I am understanding your situation as you described you aren’t really looking for posts on mostly 1/35 scale news and subject matter anyway, so by them not being there you don’t think it’s more likely you will see posts you would be interested in?

While it’s not as obvious in say the ArmorAFV forums. I would point to some of the other areas where we have a LOT of content topics and seemingly few member generated posts. Areas like the ship forums, figures, etc. In fact I could go back to a time prior to us even posting content topics on the old site and we had far more interaction in the forums. So basically I am not convinced these posts help the overall discourse. I mean sure some of them are getting replies. But not in the way other member generated posts get them. Again this is still kind of experimental but by doing it on the Armor/AFV side I will get a pretty quick idea of whether it’s going to help or hurt.

What is the best way to search for News from a certain vendor or subject? I think I’m missing something.

Hi Jim, one thing we haven’t mentioned is the advertisers’ views on the matter. I don’t claim to know the answer and am asking this as an open question - will advertisers be happier with content topics in a separate forum or mixed in with discussions? The reason I ask is that obviously you need their money to keep Kitmaker online, so their thoughts may trump ours…

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Well at this point probably using the search feature I just posted about. But there is a division of content by vendor, it’s just super clunky right now as it lists 2500 vendors in little text blocks on a single page. Vendors | Armorama™ :slight_smile:

Oh and if you are on, say an ICM article, you can click the ICM Holding tag/box at the top of the article and that will bring you to a page with more for that vendor.

Sorry Tom I don’t see the connection. Our advertisers aren’t paying to get things posted in the news area. We do that for free for 100s of them and we only have a handful of advertisers at present. They are paying to advertise on the various content sites with little to no advertising in the forums right now. So yeah in actuality they would probably be happy if there were no forums and articles were just discussion topics driven by Facebook.

Fair enough - I just wanted to make sure the important business wasn’t being overlooked!

Jim - You’re right, moving the content posts to somewhere else would allow me to focus more on the stuff I like, but is that good for you? Forum use generally (across many well-known forums) is declining so is it wise for you to fragment your visitor-base, forcing them to make a conscious decision to go to other parts of the site to find material?

I’m suspect your argument will be that the kitmaker front page allows visitors to branch out from there to all the different parts of the site, but I bet that I’m not alone in having this forum bookmarked and clicking straight into it - this is my ‘front page’ into the site. I bypass the kitmaker front pages and treat this a self-contained forum. At the moment, I see (and mostly ignore) the content posts unless they attract my attention because of the subject matter. If I wasn’t seeing them, I wouldn’t go looking for them. How many others are the same?

Arguably, keeping the content posts here is ‘advertising’ other aspects of kitmaker and encouraging people to explore further.

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What he said.

Seriously John, this is exactly how I operate when using the site; well put.

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Matthew, that may be my fault because I forgot to reset the publication date when approved the article, thus using your original posting date and falling down the list… The feature was there, but not being the most recent one you may have overlooked it (depending on your screen, you had to scroll down).

Guess I need some practice in this field, sorry for the troubles.

No problem Carlos, thanks for letting me know. I must admit I thought that was just how things worked, and thought it a bit strange.

On the wider point here, I always thought it was a mistake to remove the content posts from the main forum when it was changed on the old site, because it started to sideline the rest of the content for some users who habitually accessed everything via the forums, including news, reviews, features etc. I think that effect may be being accentuated further on the new site, unless you have evidence that it isn’t.

I assume added content generates a forum post via an automated routine, and that this results in the not very attractive forum entry zero, as it were. Perhaps that should be switched off and a manual post created by the editors instead, with some promotional wording and an image to kick things off.

… and perhaps that nice new post should just go straight in the main forum.

Based on the replies to this topic, I presume most people primarily visit forums and find content they are interested in via the forums. I agree that the automated posts for new content do not engage readers, which could very well be one of the reasons less people frequent the content site.

There was an effort to add a teaser post with an image right after the automatically generated forum topic. Jim started with it, I try to do it with the content I publish (probably missed it more than a couple of times though), but I guess it didn’t stick.

I guess the promotional post by the editors would be the best solution, as it seems we cannot count on Discourse programmers to develop a more interesting automated post.

Mario

Sorry but if I have to do this, I will have to limit the number of news I prepare, don’t want to spend so much time writing the same twice, or manually creating posts for vendor-added news…

I have gone over this before, but the forum is only a small percentage of user interaction for content.

Take this article which was published about 9 days ago, before this change to the forums.

1119 views on Armorama
The topic in the forums has been viewed only 139 times and OF that only 36 people clicked through to view the article. So that is like 3% of users viewing content via the forum.

So… yeah the forum is not where most people are finding content. Thus why clutter the primary discussion areas with content posts? No if people want to see content posts they need to ‘get the hell out of a single forum’. Seriously… did nothing I post above matter to anyone?

This was our old forum set for Armorama. AND it included a ton of general modeling forums as well. How many people were bookmarking the single Armor/AFV forum? Or were they bookmarking the Latest Posts page? Either way… they were missing out on a lot. If they want to miss out… that’s their choice. But I am not going to prioritize the overall health of the user discussions over ‘content bookmarks’ throughout the forum that only 3% of users are clicking on links and maybe 5% of topics are even getting replies.

FWIW that screenshot is what I bookmarked to get to the old site! Then I’d go through to whichever of the forums that interested me, and even that varied from day to day. The home page however held little attraction for me other than access to the samples spreadsheet. With the new set-up I go to the overall list of forums to start, maybe working through the unread posts before diving into any of the forums, and usually my route to any of the content sites is through the link in a content post.

I think the root problem here is that there are so many different ways that folks can use such a multi-faceted site as the Kitmaker collection!

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