Mike
Well-Known Member
This is not a sudden change for this year, as we have been slowing making a few changes to prepare for this year. Most importantly, we wanted to change the attitude and tone of the forum last year. While a few didn't understand the reasoning, we had hit a pretty long slump in terms of activity, mostly because it had become difficult to get new members, get the new members we were getting to participate, and I had noticed an alarming amount of established members who were drifting away from the forum.
Also, as with any forum I guess, many of those who were disturbed about the direction of the community who did choose to speak up, typically spoke to me rather than reporting things that bothered them so our moderating group could address issues.
In a nutshell, we made our first installment of changes by directing the discussion of the forum into a more friendly environment, as it had been back in the early days when were a fairly new forum. In addition, we put more focus into keeping the more serious forums on topic as long as possible, though we all know that you can only do that for so long in each thread. We feel like we have been pretty successful in most cases in regards to keeping the threads on topic. In addition to this, we began taking a more serious approach to to insults and personal attacks within the forum, because as stated in the past, we want this to be a family friendly environment. What one person may think is funny, many others may find offensive, and we feel that a private venue is a better place for people to take their personal battles and insults.
Overall, the above has been mostly a success. As with any change, there were a few problems and misunderstandings, but we pushed forward and I feel we have an overall improved community as a result.
Moving on to 2014
Supporting members
First off, we are making changes in regards to our Supporting Member group. We will be creating a section exclusively for supporting members, as well as opening up some features strictly for supporting members.
The Politics Forum is one of the existing forums that will be moved to this area. Politics has been a primary concern for this forum for quite some time now. More and more, politics bleeds into other sections of the community. The problem? most don't like discussing politics, and this often alienates many from what could be a productive discussion. This will be our final effort to keep politics out of the rest of the forum. As stated to the moderators, I realize that political comments will slip into some news threads, but what won't be allowed going forward is the back and forth Party vs. Party talk within those threads.
We will also be adding a non political supporting members only forum. In here, we will back off of the rules to an extent. How far this gets opened up is to be determined.
Supporting members will also have other small forum features available to them such as custom titles, recognition of being a supporting member, increased conversation abilities, and over time we will come up with more perks.
And, this will be the only "ad free" usergroup, though I will have to work at this a while so you may see ads from time to time until I get it completely figured out.
I believe the current cost of being a supporting member is $15/year. This will be increasing once I get the setup fine tuned and can come up with a fair price. In some cases, contributing in other areas of the community can offset these costs.
Increased Forums
We will be working on adding additional subforums for more topics. This will be done gradually, as we don't want to add on too fast. We want to grow some of the technical areas and open the community up to those who want to discuss these sorts of topics.
Contests!
This was briefly mentioned in another thread recently, but in an effort to promote growth on the forum, we are looking to start holding contests in 2014. Contest cost money (unless we can get some contest prizes donated), so how much we can do is hard to say. Our goal is to hold 4 contests this year. I have some cool ideas for prizes, but a couple of them are rather costly (at least for my empty wallet
). It's always fun to win stuff though, right?
Resource Area
This year, we hope to begin growing this year with quality informative articles. We want to grow this from within the community. If you have decent writing ability, and some good knowledge to share with other truckers, we would like to have your contributions here.
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That covers most of it, at least for now.
Also, as with any forum I guess, many of those who were disturbed about the direction of the community who did choose to speak up, typically spoke to me rather than reporting things that bothered them so our moderating group could address issues.
In a nutshell, we made our first installment of changes by directing the discussion of the forum into a more friendly environment, as it had been back in the early days when were a fairly new forum. In addition, we put more focus into keeping the more serious forums on topic as long as possible, though we all know that you can only do that for so long in each thread. We feel like we have been pretty successful in most cases in regards to keeping the threads on topic. In addition to this, we began taking a more serious approach to to insults and personal attacks within the forum, because as stated in the past, we want this to be a family friendly environment. What one person may think is funny, many others may find offensive, and we feel that a private venue is a better place for people to take their personal battles and insults.
Overall, the above has been mostly a success. As with any change, there were a few problems and misunderstandings, but we pushed forward and I feel we have an overall improved community as a result.
Moving on to 2014
Supporting members
First off, we are making changes in regards to our Supporting Member group. We will be creating a section exclusively for supporting members, as well as opening up some features strictly for supporting members.
The Politics Forum is one of the existing forums that will be moved to this area. Politics has been a primary concern for this forum for quite some time now. More and more, politics bleeds into other sections of the community. The problem? most don't like discussing politics, and this often alienates many from what could be a productive discussion. This will be our final effort to keep politics out of the rest of the forum. As stated to the moderators, I realize that political comments will slip into some news threads, but what won't be allowed going forward is the back and forth Party vs. Party talk within those threads.
We will also be adding a non political supporting members only forum. In here, we will back off of the rules to an extent. How far this gets opened up is to be determined.
Supporting members will also have other small forum features available to them such as custom titles, recognition of being a supporting member, increased conversation abilities, and over time we will come up with more perks.
And, this will be the only "ad free" usergroup, though I will have to work at this a while so you may see ads from time to time until I get it completely figured out.
I believe the current cost of being a supporting member is $15/year. This will be increasing once I get the setup fine tuned and can come up with a fair price. In some cases, contributing in other areas of the community can offset these costs.
Increased Forums
We will be working on adding additional subforums for more topics. This will be done gradually, as we don't want to add on too fast. We want to grow some of the technical areas and open the community up to those who want to discuss these sorts of topics.
Contests!
This was briefly mentioned in another thread recently, but in an effort to promote growth on the forum, we are looking to start holding contests in 2014. Contest cost money (unless we can get some contest prizes donated), so how much we can do is hard to say. Our goal is to hold 4 contests this year. I have some cool ideas for prizes, but a couple of them are rather costly (at least for my empty wallet
). It's always fun to win stuff though, right?Resource Area
This year, we hope to begin growing this year with quality informative articles. We want to grow this from within the community. If you have decent writing ability, and some good knowledge to share with other truckers, we would like to have your contributions here.
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That covers most of it, at least for now.
