Re: @Drewc - Oh look... @diodesign
Drew,
I agree with you. I don't think this has been a success.
To be brutally honest, I don't think your non-article forums have been much of a success either. You get the odd 100 post thread, but I suspect most of those are linked to/from articles. Or have been going over months, like the wishlist/bugs ones for example.
It's a bit of a vicious circle. You post something, get no reply for a while, then stop bothering to look back, so when your reply turns up, 3 days later, you don't even notice.
I don't know what the cause of that is, although I could hazard a few guesses. Personally I think it's the unwieldy forums you use, which make it harder to follow conversations, and hard to see whether/when you've had a reply. It may also be down to the users only wanting to comment on articles, and not have discussions, but I do think there's a subset of your commentards who would post on non-article forums regularly.
I presume this was an experiment to try and drive more users to the forums, given that you've tried before by having a link from an article to a discussion thread, but that's not then attracted people to other threads.
I must say though, although your staff do make an appearance on them, it's pretty rare. And when people ask questions about badges for example in the Reg Matters boards, you guys don't often come along to answer. So even replies from you guys can take days/weeks. Then you'll do several at once. So if you're not even checking out your own forums all that regularly, why would you be surprised if your users aren't?
I know what a pain in the arse this can be. My company have just appointed me chief-spokesman on Twitter, to try and build up our Google ranking via social-bollocks, and maybe get some marketing value out of it. I'm sceptical, though I can see ways that we could use Twitter and Linked-in. But I can also see that it's going to be at least half an hour a day's work for me, to get any value out of it for us.
You could probably read all the posts to the non-article forums for one day in ten minutes at the moment...
Anyway, well done for coming on here and admitting it hadn't worked. It must be annoying when people post as if they have some sort of God-given human right to spout their opinions on every article, and it must be some sort of conspiracy or major character flaw on the part of the author if they are denied. I hope when I criticise El Reg, that I'm a bit more constructive than that. And hopefully a bit less up my own arse as well... Keep up the good work!
Toodle-pip.
P.S. - Please put an article on the front page about the Ashes, even if only to annoy your Aussie office, when they wake up.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
