Ede8 Improvement Forum

Here are an assortment of improvements which I think will apply nicely to Ede8.....

- This site, is currently, making no corporate growth. There are no ad bots, advertisements, or other non-harmful money making tools. Lars claims this is do to the site being a charity, but in reality, the best charity is putting the growth of the site first. Then he can actually afford amenities to the site, and have money to actually give. All while making things easier for us. Like bugs, they were annoying me in creating a debate, so I gave up. Those can be fixed with $$$

- Adwords! This site needs it bad. I actually searched Ede8, and traffic is so low, I got no results in American servers. This is a problem. He needs to give some slight concessions to improving site traffic. We can't rely on spill overs from DDO.

- This site, suffers from the forum problem that turns me off most sites. Some rather small forum studies have shown, that the more categories you have, the more activity you get. For a debate site, I am not pleased with the 7 small forums. Take this site for example. Not only is there 60 forums, but many have up to 5 sub forums within. All of them are high on traffic daily. Where is my precious economics forum? Why are religion and philosophy coupled together? The truth is, when people see a topic, such as health, they suddenly get urges to make a topic on health. So the more forums the better. Most people don't have a topic ahead of time.

http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/

- Theirs also the moderator problem. I stress this on every site I go to. Moderators should NOT be based on the amount of users. This ruins so many great sites. Monitors should be divided as if their is a bureaucracy. Good sites have a mod per section where they are needed. I don't care if this site has 50 active users, there is a lot to look at. On the site above, there is one mod assigned to each forum topic, believe it or not. I also recommend each forum topic has its own set of rules.

- This site relies on two current factors for success. No airmax and lots of features. Good, keep pressing this into the brand. The term, ultimate debate site does nothing to me. Use some terminology for Baha'ullah's sake.

- Make me an Administrator.

I'm sure I'll have more suggestions at a later date, but there is already so much wrong with my site on day one.

Priest of Swag: *Update - As a site that's still in beta mode, I seriously recommend appointing certain members with administrative powers. This site is in beta stage, and a lot of companies have used an outright strategy of giving beta testers the power to tinker with things. Lars should be be careful though

Priest of Swag: *Update - For Lars to make a stickied bug forum, among other things

1. Or, you know, rather than spending money I can typically fix the bugs much faster myself than anybody else because it's my code. I tried hiring a developer once to help me with part of the code - he had to refund me because the site was too complex. But I wrote every line of code that you see here, and I know how everything works, so more money won't fix problems. Telling me the problems will. As you found out

As for extra amenities, tell me what you want! Except for one notable request, the site has never had a feature on its request list for longer than a couple of months, and most get done within a few weeks max.

2. A long time ago as part of the early SEO attempts I tried a bit of adwords. Got a lot of traffic but it was very poorly targeted. I've reached the conclusion that most people looking for online debate sites will probably be searching one of the more specific phrases we're already ranking for anyway, rather than more general ones like just "debate". Also, having a large amount of worthless traffic was actually impacting server load and performance.

3. See our debate

4. What is the benefit of more mods and rules?

5. This site will not sell itself on attacking other members of other debate sites. We are not at war or in competition with DDO in any way. I don't care what happens on that site; it's not my concern. Ultimate online debating was carefully chosen as an seo phrase, among other reasons. I am looking at revising the homepage though.

6. The site is NOT in "beta mode". The site has been out of that for more than half a year. I remember when it actually was in beta, I should know. Yes I'm always adding new features and fixing bugs, but this does not imply beta. It simply means the site will keep getting better forever. I won't give anybody the ability to change the source or database unless I have personally reviewed the code to ensure total security. That said in the past I've been willing to share my code on a case-by-case basis, with conditions attached.

7. I'm looking in to it

What do you think about these suggestions, everybody else on edeb8?

The foremost thing you need to do is get adwords. You can't worry about this being a selective community, as selective communities fail to reach selective people. This sites overlying problem is it has no people, so wouldn't you rather want to attract the hordes and sort through them later. At the moment, this site has no use to me without people.

Priest of Swag: Would you be willing to pay for adwords if it failed to make any conversions?

admin: You simply cancel using adwords if it fails to live up to your expectations

Priest of Swag: And that's exactly what I did. I spent about $250, got 66,816 impressions, CTR of 1.27%, and conversion rate of 0%.

My View On the Site Thus Far
Edeb8 works, there just is a lack of sustained enthusiasm on this site(including me on occasion).

Edeb8 is unique compared to its rivals. Most other debating sites are for beer drinkers who beat their wives with rampant abuse like the sub-human meat bags they chose to be. Edeb8 is for wine drinkers who are more formal and more antiquated with debate. It is for people who are interested in debate rather than refractory incantations.

I'd also like to weigh in on this, focussing on just a couple of the points raised.

1. I would be strongly opposed to increasing the number of forums and introducing sub forums. I accept that forums have an important place in a debate site - not least of which is stimulating actual debates; but I also recognise the danger of having the forums take over the debates. The current forums provide a nice general place for literally any discussion which could take place.
If I were looking for a discussion on economics I would know exactly where to go to find that already.

2. I am also strongly opposed to the idea that success should be measured by an increase in traffic alone. Getting people to this site is not hard. Even making them stay and interact is not hard. Doing this without compromising the quality that sets edeb8 apart from its competition IS hard. And once that POD has been compromised there's no going back.
I support a slowly slowly approach that ensures the quality and infrastructure is there, rather than sweeping changes that will be hard to undo.

3. We've already discussed money at length in a previous thread so I won't repeat everything again. The nuts and bolts of it is that I hate advertising on a site like this and if Lars decides he needs money, I'd personally gladly pay to use this site as is. In my experience, a pay site is ALWAYS better than a free one, in terms of quality.

4. I agree that any site with forums needs moderators.

5. I don't agree that the number of mods should not be influenced by the number of members. I think that at this stage, given the hours Lars is awake, he is fine moderating by himself. He's already shown an ability to catch and mod several minor infractions before they became a problem which is what a mod should do.
When Lars decides he wants to sleep for more than 2hrs like a normal person, I'd support him deciding who the new mod/s should be. Aside from the obvious requirements, I'd suggest the most important thing is their timezone and availability. I would be a pointless mod for example, because even though I'm on here a lot, I'm in the same timezone as Lars.
ADOL is always lurking around here and he'd probably be a far better option.

6. I'm not a fan of a democracy for this site. Lars has put too much work into this and has shown himself to be a fair and just dictator. He runs this site as if it were a democracy and has proven many times that he knows when to let the people decide and when to use his veto.
I would be strongly opposed to any kind of system that would remove or even diminish his right to unilaterally make site decisions. Appointing a second admin would do this. Appointing an exec or mods would be fine.
To be clear on this point, I feel happy being here, under his rule as it were, because Lars has already demonstrated what his leadership looks like. He asks, he listens, he responds and explains, he's available, he chastises and punishes, he can take a joke and he's completely humble. I can't see any room for improvement on that. At all.

7. Finally, Lars won't because he's too polite, but I take actual offence at the suggestion this site is in beta mode. That's crazy. This is not even what I would call, "buggy".
The site generally works the way it is supposed to, with the completely normal exception of a few glitches that crop up from time to time.
If you don't like the aesthetics or the processes or whatever, then speak up, but to call it "beta" is to suggest that its an experiment or a first attempt. This site is like Linux, constantly evolving, but that doesn't make it beta.