Howdy folks,
As you guys know, we had our Community Conversation earlier this evening at 8 PM EST. I'd like to say that it was a success. We proposed a few opportunities for Forum Promotion going forward, and also discussed a couple of potential major changes that could be on the horizon. I was very happy with the turnout we had. Despite everything going on in our world, it was really nice to see participation in this event. I know that the timing of this event didn't work for everyone, especially for those in the UK. In the future, perhaps we will look to have this event earlier in the day to try and appeal to individuals outside of the US as well?
Anyways, I'll quickly recap some of the topics we discussed:
All the best,
Cam
As you guys know, we had our Community Conversation earlier this evening at 8 PM EST. I'd like to say that it was a success. We proposed a few opportunities for Forum Promotion going forward, and also discussed a couple of potential major changes that could be on the horizon. I was very happy with the turnout we had. Despite everything going on in our world, it was really nice to see participation in this event. I know that the timing of this event didn't work for everyone, especially for those in the UK. In the future, perhaps we will look to have this event earlier in the day to try and appeal to individuals outside of the US as well?
Anyways, I'll quickly recap some of the topics we discussed:
- Coronavirus/COVID-19
- This may sound silly, but this is the subject we started off with. This is a pandemic that so many of us are being impacted by, and even if you don't realize it, it's drastically changing our lives each day, and not just health wise. This disease is making the lives of members of our community much more difficult financially as well, whether that means being laid off or crazy working hours for our individuals working in healthcare, retail, pharmaceuticals, etc. At the same time, remember what truly matters. We care about everyone's well being. You need to take care of yourself. If you aren't taking the threat of this disease seriously, you need to start.
- New Promotion Directory Structure
- We are working on implementing a new system of promoting when it comes to our advertisement topics, thanks to our Technician, @Malcolmjr96. You can view a preview of the Directory page here. This is a project that is still in the works, but the idea is that you will now be submitting an advertisement of your site through this page. This will create a listing on the Directory page, but it will also still create an advertisement topic in the Promotion Directory on the forum itself. Then whenever you bump your advertisement topic in the Promotion Directory forum, not only will it move your topic to the top in the forum, but it will also move your listing to the topic on the Directory page as well. With this change, we also plan to reduce the amount of forums dedicated to Promotion Directory. Given that we will now have the advertisements categories on the Directory page, we plan to reduce the Promotion Directory from five forums to one individual forum. All participants in this chat were in favor of these changes, so the plan is to begin implementation of this soon. You're welcome to go ahead and submit your site to the Directory page, if you'd like.
- Proposed Forum Layout
- Given that we will be turning five forums into one forum, the hope is that this will give us a little bit of flexibility in creating a few more discussion forums, potentially related to the webmaster niche. I've proposed a potential forum layout, which you can view below:
- Staff
- Admin Workshop
- Admin Offices
- Admin Archives
- Staff Chat
- Team Leader Room
- Community Team Hangout
- Staff Archives
- Admin Workshop
- Front Office
- News Center
- Auction House
- News Archive
- Community Matters
- Staff Vacancies
- Solved Archive
- New to FP?
- FP Hot Seat
- News Center
- Promotion
- Promotion Directory
- Offline Websites
- Posting Packages
- Completed/Rejected Packages
- Package Garage
- What's Going On?
- Website Battles
- Completed/Rejected Battles
- Job Center
- Seeking Employment
- Exchange Central
- FP$ Exchanges
- Affiliate Links
- Affiliate Swap
- Marketplace
- Advertising
- Websites/Domains
- Forum/Blog Services
- Miscellaneous
- Promotion Directory
- Webmaster
- Website Management
- Community Feedback (might as well tuck this away now that our review service is disbanded)
- Marketing & SEO
- Web Hosting & Domains (Software & Hosting Discussions)
- Web Hosting Offers
- Website Appraisals
- Software Talk
- WordPress
- XenForo
- IPB
- vBulletin
- phpBB
- MyBB
- Other Software
- Content Creation
- Monetization & eCommerce
- Graphic Design & Web Development
- Technical Support
- Graphics Showcase
- Graphic Requests
- Website Management
- Non-Promotion
- Intellectual Talk
- Forum Fun
- Debate Corner
- Entertainment Discussions
- Computers & The Internet
- Intellectual Talk
- Not counting the staff forums, this brings us to 20 forums displaying on the index page, which I believe is a reasonable number. We are once again tucking Forum Cash Exchanges within the Exchanges forum, and we are also tucking our Community Feedback forum as a sub-forum as well, given that our review service has been offline for a while now. We're basically seeing the implementation of four new webmaster discussion forums, which are Web Hosting & Domains, Software Talk, Content Creation, and Monetization & eCommerce. Everything else is something that already exists. For example, Promotion Tricks & Help is being renamed to Marketing & SEO. I really feel like we are missing out on lots of webmaster discussions, especially in Web Hosting & Domains and Software Talk.
- FP$ Reset
- Given that this was recently suggested in our Community Matters forum once again, this was an obvious subject that we would discuss. We have made no plans to reset the currency, but will be making more changes to work on improving the overall state of FP$. I do not wish to take away anyone's FP$, but the bottom line is that we price out our new users by offering services for hundreds and hundreds of FP$. That's nothing to all of our veterans, but anyone from the outside looking in would see that as a quantity that is unobtainable. For starters, we plan to reduce the amount of FP$ that you earn per reply/topic. Instead of 2 and 4 FP$, we're thinking 1 and 2 FP$. We're also sending a lot of FP$ out for individuals that win Site Battles. We will be reducing the prize from 100 FP$ to simply 10 FP$.
- We will also be completely removing the bank, and this will occur two weeks from today. We did have it where members earned interest for having their FP$ in the bank for a little while, and a lot of us were definitely taking advantage of that benefit. We removed the interest rate a few months ago, so the bank serves no purpose at this point anyways. The bank will be deactivated at 6:00 AM EST on April 5th, so please make sure that you do not have any FP$ in the bank at this time. Any FP$ within the bank beyond this deadline will be lost for good.
- There is also a feature in our add-on that allows us to introduce a taxation rate of sorts based on how much FP$ you have over a certain amount, so we are playing around with the idea of periodically taxing users who have over a certain amount of FP$, such as 1,000 FP$ perhaps. This is an idea that is still very much in the works, so we have determined a concrete number.
- Site Battles
- We have went over this subject time and time again. Do we still wish to have this feature on Forum Promotion? It doesn't exactly generate content, and it seems that most of us utilize this function as just another avenue for link sharing. We plan to keep Site Battles, but we discussed introducing some potential restrictions like limiting the amount of times that you can enter your site in a certain time frame. Ultimately, we decided that if we have a few members that are enjoying this feature, then why screw with it? Site Battles will continue to operate with little to no restriction, just keep in mind that the FP$ prize has been reduced to FP$. Remember that you members can always bet their FP$ between each other though!
- Package Service
- Our Package Team has been struggling to meet the demand of our members here lately, and we discussed some temporary changes to help with this. For now, we're thinking a temporary raise in pricing by like 100 FP$, and then also raising the amount of per post/topic rate that we provide to our packagers. We have also just seen the resignation of our Package Team Leader. We want to continue offering this service, and we will do what we can to continue it. Still, this is a difficult service to offer, so please bear with us. Also, special thanks to @Kaynil for leading our Package Team as well as she did. She was a joy to have back on the staff team, and we hope to see her return soon.
- Community Team
- As you guys are most likely aware, we didn't have much of a Community Team for quite a while. It literally just consisted of @Lämmchen. She's awesome, but you know, it wasn't exactly a team. In the last few weeks, we have brought on both @Puppuccino and @Thomasss, who we are so glad to have on our staff team. With this trio of awesomeness, we are working on getting the green team back rolling better than ever before. Anyways, we are also reintroducing the Community Team Leader position. Please congratulate @Lämmchen on her promotion to CTL. If you don't know Kathy, today is the day to meet her. She is fantastic.
- Auction House Expansion
- Wouldn't it be cool to see more items going up for grabs in our Auction House? We've been regularly doing our Forum Redirect Auction each week, and we've been able to remove a ton of FP$ from the system with this offer. We'd like to continue this, but also offer some other cool prizes as well. We discussed having a rotation of a number of different items in the auction in this week. We primarily discussed offering digital gift cards, especially related to gaming. This includes Steam Keys, Nintendo eShop Cards, PlayStation Plus, etc. We also discussed potentially offering webmasters apparel/swag of their own website, which is something that we discussed in a Staff Conference Call a while back. Imagine being able to spend your FP$ on buying a t-shirt with your forum's logo on it. Doesn't that sound cool? These are the plans for the future, as we work on improving our currency.
All the best,
Cam
