The new website - A failure or success.

Firstly I would like to make it clear that my following comments are sincerely meant as constructive crticism, and in no way are meant to disparage any of the hard work and efforts made by the people at IFAS that toil to bring news, information, help and a forum for the further advancement of Astronomy in Ireland.

However, I believe that the Forum on this site is slowly dieing. In large part I feel the problem is due to the lack of feedback that used to be a large contribution to the success of the site.
The previous version of the boards used to give an instant alert to contributors to posting of any activity that was taking place on a post in the form of an email to the contributor. This feedback I feel was vital to users of the site, and contributed largely to the success of IFAS. I believe this site is starting to suffer from stagnation. This could easily be turned around by providing the sort of feedback to postings on the site by email or PM or whatever.
Is there any way the situation can be turned around by returning the alerts (emails) to users when a post they are contributing to has been updated?

Is it just me or have others noticed how flat the boards have become?

Regards,
John Murphy

I blame the weather...

:silly:

Hammer, nail and hitting on head may be involved here. I know that IFAS reps no longer get any notification of new posts on the Council side WHICH has been rasied on that section.

Weather plays a factor yes BUT feedback/alerts is zero so I check the site less and less these days. I only look at the front page which shows the most recent posts without logging in so I miss anything that may be on the council side.

I tried to check if my profile was set not to get any messages but it's mostly not visible to me?

I generally check the front page once a day. I have to admit that in the last year the boards seem to be very quiet. Whether it is the recession or the weather, loss of high activity posters (like PJ) or a general lack of interest- I don't know.

While also acknowledging the great work of the 'web team' I must admit I also feel the same way.

The subscribe option is usefull to keep track of posts, but you have to go into topics first and often things could be gone for 24 hours between pooling. I do miss the new notification option.

Donal

Seanie_Morris wrote:

I blame the weather...

:silly:

The weather has always been Sh1..etc., we have no control over it and it should be disregarded as a factor.

I am sure that this new software has a statistics section, and if a comparison is done with the previous version then it will be apparent that a lot less postings are taking place.
Is e-mail feedback not a feature of this new version of the site? If not then I say the site is in serious trouble.
What has been gained vs what has been lost by converting to this new software?
Has a post conversion analysis been done?