Post-release PlecoForums reorganization

[mikelove]

So I'm contemplating how to reorganize PlecoForums after 2.0 is officially out of beta and was wondering if anybody had any thoughts on that.

The 2.0 Beta forum will likely remain around and remain members-only, since we're going to be posting betas of 2.0.1 et al as well, but it seems like the non-beta-specific feedback / general 2.0-related discussion should probably move to a separate forum - do we start a new one for 2.0 or do we merge it into the now little-used PlecoDict 1.0 forum? Is there any use in having a separate "Future Products" forum anymore?

And is there anything else that it seems like we could use an extra forum for? "China" might be better termed "Chinese" since the few discussions in there seem to pretty much all involve linguistics - perhaps a new forum just for talking about (printed) dictionaries? Doesn't seem to be anything like that online right now, at least not in English. Maybe something for flashcard tips / discussions separate from Flashcard Exchange? And/or just a general "New User Questions" forum? In general I'd rather not overlap with areas that Chinese-Forums / ChinesePod / et al already cover well, but if there's something vaguely Pleco-related that isn't getting discussed much elsewhere we could try to set up a forum for it here.

 

[KesterN]

Yeah, I have the feeling that a Flashcards section would get heavy use.

How about a place to discuss the Reader?

Here's another thought: it might be useful to list some of those frequent requests and/or minor bugs that you plan to accommodate and/or fix in 2.1

 

[ipsi]

I'm glad to see the 2.0 forums remain. Given that most of my post count is in here, I'd be sad to see it go .

I reckon having a Future Products forum is still a good idea. It's got several good topics in there at the moment (DS, Android, Desktop I think), but could serve maybe as more of a 'wishlist' forum, with the Beta forum for discussing the actual upcoming products?

Agree with changing the forum name to Chinese. Would also suggest merging 1.0/2.0 discussion into the PlecoDict forum. Might confuse people if they see one forum for 1.0 and another for 2.0.

 

[mikelove]

KesterN - Good idea, perhaps even a Reader Exchange forum (though it might present some more significant copyright worries than flashcard lists, which it's questionable can even be copyrighted at all if they don't contain definitions).

ipsi - well we'd certainly keep it around as a locked archive at least, even after 3.0 comes out. Bug fixes and new features kind of blur together at some level, so perhaps Future Products would be for new platforms / completely new features while feature discussion in the regular 2.0 forum would be for changes to things we already do.

 

[westmeadboy]

Any chance of setting up an RSS feed???

Actually, maybe "feeds". Could have one for user-submitted flashcard lists, for example.

 

[stephanhodges]

I think now (before changing BBS) would be a good time to put up a wiki. The manual portion could be locked, with comments enabled.

That way, you will catch the momentum of all the new members coming in with the official announcement, etc.

You would certainly be welcome to have my wiki contents, but you'd be replacing about 90% anyways. Since you already have images on your server, it would go very fast to put up the user manual.

Enabling comments, and allowing new sections would be your main "work", since I know you would want to monitor it, since your site already ranks high, and it's important to keep spamming out.

Of course, it's easy to configure so that links all have "no follow", but I don't have the experience with a high traffic wiki site to give further advice.

 

[Dan_78cj5]

I understand the copyright concerns, but I think a forum on the reader, or more precisely on resources to use with the reader would be key! Especially to share information on where to find different Chinese texts in digital form that can be used in the reader. There may be many folks interested and capable of using the reader a lot, who are not yet capable of searching and finding their own digital Chinese texts. An English forum to seek Chinese language resources - hopefully links to where someone else is selling or hosting the text would be a fair solution to concerns of sharing or posting actual copyrighted material.

 

[mikelove]

westmeadboy - RSS is not built into phpBB, unfortunately, though it is built into vBulletin and we've thought about switching to that - there are also a couple of phpBB modules that add it, though I'm not sure how well they work.

stephanhodges - I'm still trying to make up my mind about a wiki versus a fixed Knowledge Base, actually - doesn't seem like we need both. We may end up just launching without either, since now that the software's ready it seems like anything more than the absolute minimum of website work can be put off for a bit - the basic product pages / store code / etc are all pretty much done now and those are all that we really need to launch with.

Dan_78cj5 - Good point, as long as we're reasonably vigilant about clear violations (and, of course, promptly respond to any takedown notices) we're probably OK, and certainly links to other sites from which to download reader documents would be useful.

 

[sfrrr]

Guys--RSS feeds are a great idea. So is an active flashcard topic for exchange and for configuration templates. I personally love wikis, but my experience with them on forums is they die a slow and painful death. It's the rare forum wiki that survives more than a year. A more standard knowledge base, with its implications of support and handholding, seems to last longer. My guess is that all but a few users want the company to do all the work. They don't trust most of the other users and they certainly don't want to do any extra work themselves.

 

[Mao Zhou]

I agree with most of the suggestions except about setting up a wiki. I live in Beijing and for some reason I am rarely able to access ANY wiki's. Wikipedia used to be one of my favorite sites before moving here but since I can't access it I go elsewhere.

As an aside, do you know, roughly how many of your users are on the Mainland, HK and Singapore? What percentage are in the big two, Shanghai and BJ? I learned about Pleco from an old article in That's Beijing. Just curious.

Cheers,
Joe

 

[hairyleprechaun]

I am definitely for "Document Reader", "Flashcard Exchange" and "Custom Dictionary Exchange" sections. As for the other suggestions, I could go either way, though it does seem like merging the 1.0 and 2.0 topics could reduce some clutter, though there may be some potential for it to confuse new users.

 

[radioman]

I believe StephanHodges mentioned before about having a place to submit and view new feature requests, prioritize, etc. While maybe too much of a reach right now, having this type of function such that that others could see and maybe even vote, check status (e.g., Atlassian's JIRA). JIRA allows the tracking, but also supports commentary by members, RSS feeds (or automatic emailing), etc. But it is obviously not a marketing tool.

 

[mikelove]

sfrrr / Mao Zhou - appreciate the thoughts on wikis. One possible compromise might be to have a moderated forum specifically for people to post tips / guides / etc; there have been some excellent posts like that that have been buried under replies / other posts, having a forum just for that stuff (to which frequent PlecoForums users would be given moderator / admin privileges) might make it easier to find. While the KB could remain a place for bland, official tech support answers and the like.

Mao Zhou - we're not that sure about the sales breakdown for Greater China, actually; it's tough because so many expats use their home addresses (since that's what their credit cards are under). Singapore was a huge part of our sales early on but is much less so now, I think mostly due to changes in the PDA / mobile phone market there. (though we'd really like to get back into their good graces - when I was in Singapore last year I got into a 20-minute conversation with a taxi driver about the poor state of electronic Chinese dictionaries; probably no other place on earth with as high a percentage of the population speaking English and studying Chinese).

In terms of web traffic, Taiwan/HK/Singapore each generate around 10% as much traffic as the mainland, though that's distorted a bit because (amusingly enough) some people in mainland-based aquarium fish discussion forums have started using images from our website in their signatures / posts / etc (which we see no reason to discourage) and our web stats software doesn't provide a good way to filter out those hits; we're rolling out Google Analytics with the new site design and that let us come up with some better numbers.

hairyleprechaun - yeah, the confusion's what I worry about with 1.0/2.0, particularly given that we're still going to be selling 1.0 on Palm OS for a while at a substantial discount; we've opted to do that instead of offering a "Lite" bundle, since it's less work on our end and saves people more money as it can run on cheaper hardware than a stripped-down version of 2.0. (1.0 is officially dead on WM as of the day we launch 2.0, though you'll still be able to re-download it - if anyone really wants a copy of 1.0 specifically for WM, buy now or forever hold your peace)

radioman - I'll take a look at JIRA; some more organized system for new feature requests would be nice, right now most of them are just kept in a very large text file.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Great idea to use 1.0 as a lite version!

 

[stephanhodges]

...appreciate the thoughts on wikis. One possible compromise might be to have a moderated forum specifically for people to post tips / guides / etc; there have been some excellent posts like that that have been buried under replies / other posts, having a forum just for that stuff (to which frequent PlecoForums users would be given moderator / admin privileges) might make it easier to find. While the KB could remain a place for bland, official tech support answers and the like.

I agree that most people won't take time to edit anything, but there's nothing inherantly wrong with that, since it doesn't create extra work in and of itself. I would say, rather, that does not mean wikis aren't a better solution for tips, ideas, how-to's and any overall documentation. Wikis are much better for documentation style presentation, organization, searching, etc. (That includes search engine results - although only by a little, IMO)

For small / low volume traffic sites it's no contest, and a BBS wins hands down, but for a large volume, active site like Pleco the consolidation and organization of a wiki will be a big plus. A moderated forum will mean either constantly editing a post, reformatting, etc (if you want to keep it organized) or reading through a lot of stuff (bad idea to waste a customer's time this way).

For newcomers, a bbs is inviting because of being connected to other people, whereas a wiki is like going into a department store and seeing all the items organized and searchable. They are both good options, and synergistic.

 

[mikelove]

A simple RSS feed has now been added (just click the RSS icon in the top bar) - this is forums-wide as I can't seem to find a decent phpBB3 module for forum / topic-specific feeds.

 

[stephanhodges]

Have you looked at phpDigests? http://phpbbservices.com/digests/

They have two products SmartFeed and phpDigests (I use them both on phpbb 2), one for RSS and one for email digests. They both allow customization for selecting feeds, and will also handle closed forum (password and registration required) feeds.

 

[mikelove]

That's only for phpBB2, unfortunately - they have an alpha version for 3 but they specifically say not to use it on a production site. Though I'm still weighing the possibility of a vBulletin switch.