Evaluating the forum after one year

[Kees]

If this forum goes offline, I’ll work with @kublermdk to arrange a static copy of the forum. If possible of course. But indeed, we shouldn’t erase history.

I would like to continue the forum as well. But it seems it won’t be missed if it would go down, due to its use the past year. Reddit would then be an okayish free replacement.

I’m financially able to support the forum. But if the forum isn’t used, then it’s still a waste and the money could be used to host an amazing yearly ZDay without an entrance fee, maybe even a free drink

[Kees]

It’s been a year now since the forum went public. We already did some evaluation, this is the last time I’ll bump this topic to collect some more feedback to work with.

But I’ve got some good news. I’ll continue to support the forum for an undefined period. In other words, last time I defined a minimum of 1 year dedication to give the forum a fair chance. I won’t rehash it to another period. This year has provided enough insight to how valuable this forum can be. The analytics of Plausible convinced me even more. We have way more visitors than the dashboard of Discourse itself shows. Which makes sense, because the data of Discourse is only about logged in users. It’s still sad to see many people don’t sign up, and those who do, don’t really post or interact much.

I personally still think the forum is the best platform to support and grow our movement. Of course the forum can be used in combination with other solutions. Such as social-media to build up an audience and group chat to discuss short term plans in the moment. But what we need as well is a persistent knowledge base we can contribute to as a community and develop projects and goals, that’s where the forum comes in. Below are some of the main reasons I think the forum excels, there are more reasons, but I value these the most:

• True community decisions which are accessible to everyone, no matter your timezone or busy schedule. Which are also persistent and categorized so that they are easy to find in the future and by search engines.
• Integrated mailing list functionality to automatically inform everyone of popular topics when people don’t visit the forum (which can be customized by users).
• Moderation by the community (not just a few appointed mods) and assisted by true AI that can detect toxic language. This makes moderation much more time efficient than in a group chat or even the big social-media platforms.
• The forum acts as a knowledge base and can also work with #wiki topics, this way documentation can be kept up to date and we as a community own and control it. No small group that has this responsibility, we all have.
• We own the data, which greatly improves privacy and control.
• Runs on open-source software and uses renewable power.
• Many, many more! See e.g. the docs.

[dadadies]

Hi. I just got here as you can see. I assume the question is how to get more… So I just got disconnected and the forum refreshed the page and so i lost a good chunk of my post. Somehow it kept my first 2 sentence.

Anyways… I’ll keep it simple. As a new user it was hard for me to find this forum. Maybe I was just searching for a zeitgeist forum improperly. Another issue is I don’t know if this is even ‘the’ official TZM forum. I can only assume it is. Another is this forum just seems a bit hard to figure out. I don’t know where to look. But then I’m not really sure what to look for. I bring this up because maybe a lot of users have some of these issues. Then everything I see seems empty. There are threads but not much of replies.

So it gives me the feeling that there’s just not much here, and maybe in TZM itself. That’s what I observed.

The other issue is perhaps more inherent in TZM itself. Most people who are actively doing something we’ll likely not be in the forum much. Those who would be active on the forum are likely not doing anything and are probably just people who would like to bicker away and ao it wouldn’t be much a benefit anyways.

So even if this forum was somehow better. Or there was something better, I don’t know if it would be of any good in moving TZM forward. Now if you just want traffic then that’s another subject/issue.

I am sure the forum can be structured differently to promote traffic, interaction, progress. Etc but I haven’t tried to design that structure myself. That’s my input on this threads question.

The one thing i can say I like is the random threads apparently mostly posted by a bot about emerging tech and news. However they seem out of place.

Alright that’s my post.

Oh yes. One more thing. Typing and navigating this forum has a lag to it. I noticed that with some services, not all, typing is just very lagging. I can only assume this is due to buggy designs for Android users in my case. Or there is a monitoring process going on with each typing and movement. I dont know.

[Kees]

Hi and welcome to the forum! Thanks for your feedback, this is really helpful. Although I need some more info to be able to act on it. First of all any reply is auto-saved while typing, as long as there is a stable network connection. It’s strange this happened in your case. Full page refreshes do not happen, these are dynamic, for new content a refresh is not needed or triggered, it would simply only reload what’s new without the loss of data. Maybe an unintended browser gesture caused a refresh?

The thing with a new platform is always to get used to it and figure out the workflow. To help people with this we give some advice. When signing up you’ve received an introduction message. Over time you’ll get more that will tell you more about how to start on this forum. There is also a tutorial, send to you as well. Have you read these? How would you suggest to change this introduction? Also, there are a few pinned topics those are a good start as well. Furthermore, each category has a “about” topic pinned, which explains the goal and use of that category.

People visit the forum, but don’t interact much with posts. This is true and it would be cool if people would do this more. If you have specific ideas, please share them.

This forum is as official as any website initiated by an activist. Be it a chapter website or a TZM project one. We are however listed on thezeitgeistmovement.com for the chapters overview.

Please share some specifics about the structure of the forum and how you would change it. What are you looking for and what are you doing to try and find it? Have you checked the docs too?

Which topics are out of place and why? With some more information we could perhaps improve things or explain the reasoning.

The forum works snappy for me. I use Android as well. Both Firefox and Chrome work great. From where do you connect? Is your connection usually stable and fast? Can you perhaps create a screencast and share it with a speedtest?

Looking forward to hear more from you!

[dadadies]

I haven’t looked at the intros or docs. Generally I would expect a basic guideline introduction for a forum and that’s pretty much it. Anymore than that and it might mean that the forum is a bit complicated. But I understand that TZM requires more than just discussion and involves how to create chapters, projects, etc. So by that it probably is a bit more complicated. Again I am new and haven’t looked too deep but if I am correct. That does make the forum seem a bit complicated.

Just visually for me personally the sub categories that are colored differently for example under the catogory activism, are very eye catchy but kind of annoy and distract me. I didn’t know what they were until I decided to click and check them and realize that they are a sort of subcategory. I see their use but maybe there’s a way to make it more obvious what they are rather than just being colorfully distracting. That’s just a minor critique.

Another visual confusion is the Indication oF time to the right of each catogory. They mostly say 9/month, etc. Making me think no one has posted in months. But if i do click the catogory, there are indeed very recent threads and post. This to me is just a visual confusion and I don’t know if others are seeing it the way i am also! Again another minor critique.

But like you SAiD, with anything you have to get used to it.

With the topics being out of place I am not sure. Maybe I was just trying to figure where things were and not seeing why one thread would be here and not in another catogory. this might have just been me trying to get familiar withe the forum.

I myself am just looking to see in general. Where TZM is at. How many TMZ projects are active, and how far are they. I think it would be nice to have a sticky thread somewhere listing all known projects, brief description, and progress in one page/post. Rather then looking all over the forum and other plaes to get an idea of that.

Overall I think the amount of activity and traffic maybe is just as it is. Its just not much. I’m not sure how to drive/promote more activity myself here.

Extra info. My connection is through Psiphon, a VPN, that does not protect your info or activity, but allows you to appear somewhere else, and most importantly provides you free internet, but at max 2mb speed, with constant Evey few minute disconnections. So my connection is not too great.

[Kees]

Thanks! This is great. This is what I’ll do, I’ll rewrite the introduction message when people sign up and work with you to see what works better. In the meantime, is Projects (https://tzm.one/projects) perhaps what you’re looking for? You can filter for open/unsolved topics, those are still projects that are being worked on. I’ll add more details to that new introduction post. I’ll try to make this this weekend. Stay tuned