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Originally Posted by ken0042
Much better for me. Still trying to decide which is worse, losing the Thanks or the long load times.  |
Both, and more. I can't say enough about the Thanks button. It is a valuable tool in the message board environment for the user's experience, as well as for the forum's functionality. Certain search and query functions have also been scaled back, including the thanks stats/searches a couple years ago, post history searches, and users viewing threads/forum lists. These were also useful and user-friendly tools.
If the user experience is being rolled back with the loss of these features, I think that CP should do one or both of the following to improve it:
1. Scale back advertising on the forum. Advertisements are always ideally minimized for users, but they have been getting increasingly annoying and intrusive (maximize and hard to get rid of if you mistakenly scroll over them, or sometimes don't function properly and interfere with loading the forum)
2. Get rid of the sponsored forums. These are intrusive, firstly and simply. While certainly they vary in their usefulness and functionality, they undermined a long existing history of business among CP members having grown organically through long-standing posting history and community involvement. Furthermore, some (but not all, mind you) of the sponsors were not, and are still not, involved with the community in more than a superficial way.
Now, I'm certainly not opposed to having things of this nature as nothing happens for free, but it's a bit head-scratching when the user experience is then hindered in the first place by the sponsored forums, and then scaled back when the demand grows.
CP's membership is of not-insignificant size and has some well-known particular demographics (heavily rooted in the Calgary area, predominantly male aged 20-50). Internet advertising can be fairly valuable for traffic of that scale. If the community's involvement is leveraged to bring in revenue (this practice very visibly and significantly ramped up with the sponsored forums), then the user experience should ideally improve a bit, and at the very least remain as good as it was. This is certainly not the case. Some of the advertising and sponsorship revenues should be reinvested into the forum's infrastructure. From another perspective, if I had paid for a sponsored forum and then a few months down the road, the forum experienced chronic problems with load times and the users had funtions disabled, I'd question things a bit.
I'd hate to see the moderation and administration team see any scaling back of any stipend, bonus, appreciation, etc. that they receive. Speaking for myself, their work is appreciated and certainly must involve a not insignificant amount of their time, and I would argue that they certainly deserve some appreciation for their efforts.
I hope that I'm not alone in my thoughts and also hope that there can be a more open discussion about this issue. I don't mean in a "let's see the books and where all the dollars and cents are going" type of way, because that's not reasonable. I'm thinking of questions like: "Could money possibly be re-invested in the community as demand grows, and presumably so do advertising revenues?" or "What does CP and the community that has grown over the years mean to us all, and what things drive that?" "Could those things be enhanced or improved?" "In order to keep or improve the user experience, would you be willing to have some sponsored forums and advertising?"
cc. Bingo