Igor Antunov wrote:So how do you see the site by the end of 2022 Fox? Any long-term plans?
In the long term I think PoFo should be hosting real-world debates and posting the videos to the site. Failing that, it should be video conference debates. Perhaps recorded to begin with, and eventually live, with questions from members who are online. I think in the very long term, live streaming video debate will be the future of forums, but there will always be a role for text based discussions too.
Igor Antunov wrote:Social networking is the key to engaging more unique visitors, you have google plus and twitter sharing links, but consider facebook, reddit, digg, blogger, etc as well and go beyond mere sharing shortcuts. Allow people to post on the forum directly in a select sub-section using their existing accounts. Experiment with direct integration.
I've looked at mods for allowing log-ins from Facebook and other sites, but the integration with the forum software seems buggy. Also, on Facebook in particular, because it is not an anonymous service I'm not sure how good a match it will be for a political site - unlike Twitter, which I really should work on more. Undoubtedly PoFo needs to engage more with political bloggers and try to connect with their audiences.
I have tried experimenting with social bookmarking services, but the plug-ins were massively underutilised and slowed down the pages with tons of JavaScript, so I got rid of them.
Rather than trying to do everything at once I will focus on getting the design changes finished, then building up our presence on Twitter and then getting involved seriously in the blog arena. After all that, then it can be time to reassess and see if it is time to move into another area too. I feel it will be more beneficial to do one social networking service well, than all of them badly.
Not to forget search...
The main problem I have identified is search traffic that lands directly in topic pages. We get many thousands of unique visitors that land directly into the middle of topics from searches, but the overwhelming majority 'drop off' rather than exploring the site. This is quite unlike visitors who arrive on forum indexes or the board index, who overwhelmingly do click further and explore the site.
At some point the topic display page is going to have to be redesigned or amended. I had hoped the "similar topics" would have a significant affect, but it has not. It is difficult because I'm designing for two different audiences - the forum regulars are interested in the content of the thread, and at present the topic page is focused almost exclusively on that, but the new visitor needs to be shown a glimpse of the wider PoFo at the same time.
Igor Antunov wrote:Hand in hand with the social networking revolution, you need to start taking into account your core demographic:
The quantcast statistics are probably more accurate than Alexa, as Quantcast is directly measured, whereas Alexa is a pure estimate. The main differences are the age spread and education graph:
http://www.quantcast.com/politicsforum. ... OBAL#!demoThe fact that the largest group of members are still probably penniless students doesn't bode well for raising funds to expand via advertising, or organise events etc. I'm not quite sure what can be done about that.