Sorry, this is kind of a wall of text, but I have been reading through everyone's posts last night and today and want to try to address as much of it as possible.
That is correct: family life, a difficult marriage which led to my divorce, and depression pulled me far from the board and was a substantial reason for my absence. Even though things did not go smoothly at home at times, family still remained my first priority. What little time remained had to go into my business to keep all the bills paid, and at the end of the day I was overworked and burned out, and there weren't enough hours for Stormtrack. So here we are.
One overwhelming and recent change in my life has been my divorce, which was finalized October 14. I am now living alone, which has so far begun freeing up huge chunks of free time, and the cloud of depression/anxiety has started to fade. Of course I don't want to rush to conclusions about what this means for Stormtrack, but I am reasonably certain I will be around more, now. My first priority this week will be to get us on the right track, and then later in December I want to see where we're at and we can discuss the issue of a change in management. If I start falling absent again, I'm all for accelerating that change and making it happen. I personally guarantee that in 2015, one way or the other, the site will have an active leadership.
Ryan McGinnis: I took a look at the statistics and I think the situation with the site traffic is not as dismal as you mentioned. The numbers are indeed down but it looks mostly like people aren't posting much. Right now is the middle of the down season and this thread's activity count shows we've had 111 people looking it, not counting guests not logged in. I think there is a lot of wisdom in your comments about the moderation policies, and I'm willing to scale those way back if it helps the site. Maybe we can look at HowardForums, since they're successful, and do what they are doing. I don't know what to do about Target Area.. maybe you all can suggest whether that has too many rules or not. I also think at this point our registration queue may be too stringent and this is affecting our numbers... this isn't normal for forums nowadays. Maybe we can let people have full access once their e-mail validates. However on the same token I am also taking into consideration what you said about implementing too many changes that alienate the users.
Dan Robinson: You said
"The Stormtrack forum model isn't dead, it just needs some infusion of quality posters", and I agree. I don't think we should be concerned about trying to get back people who left for CFDG or other forums, since those forums may be serving them well. If we can fix our problems and open up registrations more, I think that will help a lot, since when people sign up they usually have something to say or ask. I read what you said about paid memberships, but to be honest we don't need that much money and I think it would scare people off. Also
Jacob Ferden had a good point:
"Another [problem] was a cultural shift in chasing toward keeping such things to yourself. There are many chasers nowadays who would sooner launch an attack with a machete than reveal their plans for a given chase day." I agree this is a major factor in why Target Area has dried up. I would be glad to entertain ideas on what to do about it. Dan, you said,
"One concern I have is what level of commitment we have from Tim to keep the site running and to keep it under community control. I'd ideally like some assurance *in writing* that after we've poured money and effort into this thing for years, building it into something great, that the site doesn't just get sold off to the highest bidder, shut down OR even just the reins of control taken back." I have no intention of selling off the site, as I have seen the destruction that happens to a lot of forums when they change hands... if it goes to someone else, it WILL be a veteran Stormtrack user who is intent on retaining all of the content. I will also honor your suggestion not to sell the site to the highest bidder. If it changes hands, there will be no money exchanged.
Shane Adams said:
"I'm all for wiping out the membership starting with all nicknames (how tough is it to re-register with a real name? I don't agree with the "grandfathering in" idea.) Next, all accounts that haven't been active for over six months." I am willing to consider this, but I do recall when we did a purge of the userlist in 2005 it did turn out to be an unpopular move among some users, so I didn't do it again. We would need to think through this idea.
Skip Talbot: You said,
"One huge advantage the forum has over Facebook is the organization of posts into sub forums and threads that are sorted and searchable." I absolutely agree, and I have worked hard to make sure that our full archive going back 10+ years is available. I also am about to put the rest of the Stormtrack print issues (1978-2002) online, since Tim Marshall has approved that, and I plan to write a script to place all that content in a special subforums so it's integrated with vBulletin. That will be a major perk. Right now the first 10 years is online, but it's in a different subdirectory of the website. I agree about branching out to Facebook, and I will leave leadership of that permanently to you and others. You will call the shots 100% with anything outside this forum. You also said,
"That's exactly what Chaser's Forum attempted three years ago and it failed. I think mainly because this format is dead to chasers, driven by the migration to social meda." I agree here, social media has really split the community up, and we are definitely not Twitter or Facebook, both of which have been enormous successes and as a result taken a good piece of the pie. You may want to look at
this and
this... we are not the only forum having this problem. In that thread someone said this, which might give us an objective view on the situation:
"What brings people back to your site is content, that's true and for us the easiest parts of the site to populate are the CMS and the calendar. The blogs are also useful but the truth is we can't upgrade to vB5 because of the absence of CMS and calendar; so the truth is, it's not Facebook that's presently giving us a hard time, it's actually the amount of time it's taking for vBulletin to deliver feature parity." It might be a good idea to comb threads like this to find some proven ideas that could help us.
RDale: You said,
"What would ST on FB look like? You can't really have forum like this..." This is indeed what I struggled with. I had taken out the Facebook page a few years back, but simply used it as a calling card, as I knew filling it with content and keeping it updated was far out of my ability. We had some discussion in the admin forums about what to do with it at the time, but it died off. However Skip is taking a fresh tack with it and can probably make it work.
Dan Robinson made some comments regarding the difficulty of bringing the Stormtrack concept to Facebook, which I agree with. However maybe Skip will be able to make it work; I know that I can't.
Jacob Ferden: You said,
"Too much focus on moderating every single discussion rather than letting opinions flow freely." This echoes what Ryan said. Like I told him, I'm more than happy to scale back the moderation, but we are going to get more noise and drama. Can everyone handle that? I can step back, but what about everyone else? Awhile back in 2009 or 2010 we loosened the moderation and at some point someone signed up and began posting a series of crackpot tornadogenesis theories. I allowed this up until users started complaining about the content and criticizing my role in allowing it, so we tightened things back up. What is it that everyone prefers? Simpler rules? Tighter discretionary moderation? More freedom of speech?
Jesse Risley said,
"Other chasers left in a fury over the moderation style, yet on the flip side even more claimed to leave because they saw the moderation as too loose or the same caustic posters were turning threads into flame wars before a collective ban came along - a paradox that only seemed to subside with less traffic on the site." This goes back to the crackpot posters I mentioned above... what do we want, a loose or tight ship?
Shane Adams: You brought up some good points about dozen or so users effectively keeping the place afloat financially and information-wise.
"If this place plans to become a pay site, then it just needs to be a pay site. I think a few of you ponying up all the dough to run this dumpster fire while the other 800 sit on their collective ass is ridiculous." Rest assured I have 0% intention of making it a pay site; the trickle of donations we got was enough to get us on track through probably 2016, and frankly I'll pay for it out of pocket if needed (as I was basically doing this fall until my financial situation got complicated with the divorce). The baseline cost to run the site is only $250/year, so unless the idea of a pay site is to make it elite or cut out the riffraff, a pay site is not necessary.
James Gustina: You said,
"Kind of echoing Shane, I do feel like just going straight to a pay site would be the only reasonable way of making this forum worthwhile." I would be interested in knowing more about why you suggest that... mainly to finance the site, or to change the quality level of posts? I strongly believe going to a pay format will kill the site, but I do want to hear you out.
Marcus Diaz: You said,
"When you boil it down, I think the demise of Stormtrack can partially be blamed on chasers themselves. There's a lot of different egos that can't be bothered to post in the same thread as other chasers." I agree egos are a problem, though I don't know if anything can be done about it. There is definitely a reluctance to post chase forecasts, and I think getting those chasers to open up will have to take place in the educational forum and advanced weather forum. You also said,
"For something completely different, anyone else remember the targeting game we played a few years ago? Let's bring that back this off season!" I have been fully in support of this for quite some time, but the original programmer is in Czechoslovakia and I cannot find him anymore. I also don't want to put this code back up since it is over 10 years old needs to be checked over for injection vulnerabilities. I don't know PHP very well and cannot do the work, and though my ex-wife knew PHP fluently, I did not have success in getting her to take on the project. I am willing to take donations, make them completely transparent so you know I'm not pocketing money, and put the project up for a bid on VWorker. Would that work well for you all? Or if someone here knows PHP I can give you the code and see if you can improve it. I actually think I may have posted it in an old thread a few years ago but no one took it on.
Danny Neal: You said,
"You are correct. The minute I stopped trying to cater to other chasers and catered toward the general population is when my "stock" significantly rose." This is an interesting perspective...perhaps we should be serving the public at large? This also ties in with what Marcus said about the chasers who won't participate: instead of trying to solicit their involvement or bring them back, we just need to open the gates wider. But
Shane Adams said,
"I for one do not want anything to do with a forum full of bots, nicknames, lurkers, or forum-joining junkies who join just to join." How do we strike a balance here? I'd like to hear Shane's thoughts.
Jason Persoff: That was an extremely insightful post concerning where Stormtrack stands in relation to social media. The takeaway from this is social media has fractured the chase community and the veterans are operating mostly in private groups on Facebook (maybe tying in a bit to what Marcus said). I won't address the Facebook issues since that's Skip's department, but as far as the forum and working with what we have, it appears that we will need to expand our scope but create a somewhat tiered forum structure.
RobH said (and agreed with by
Shane),
"I've had one person publicly state it, and one person in private, the lack of a real name policy is a core reason why they don't contribute anymore." Granted this is a small sample, but do others agree? I can go either way on this but I'd like to hear what you all think.
Patrick Marsh said,
"one thing I miss is the "like" or "thanks" option." I agree. As was mentioned further down the thread, the problem was it was a mod pack that wasn't supported anymore and I didn't see any replacements when I looked a couple of years ago. I found that to be really surprising, but because of the demand for such a feature, perhaps that has changed. I can take another look and see if we can figure out a replacement that will work. This will be a high priority, too, as this is essentially a social media feature that we need. In fact, users are welcome to look through the
vBulletin mods for 4.2.2 and see if there's anything that could give us more of a Facebook-like experience. Of course I don't want to install anything that changes the board significantly or add items frivolously, but features such as a Like button are exactly what we need.
Rob H said:
"I think I speak for everyone when I say that no one wants Tim to go - the ideal solution is that he sticks around, lends insight, tells us about the Bangladesh project, fixes the server within a day of it going down, and is generally our fearless leader. But we all understand that he's got other stuff going on and that ST might not be high on his list of priorities. It needs to be someone's priority or it could fade into obscurity." I very much appreciate the thoughts, also echoed by
DNeal. I should emphasize that I was certainly not absent out of choice and have always tried to do the best thing for the site while I'm here, even if some disagreed with my choices. For instance I know Shane has not agreed with most of my choices over the years. I also recognize my absence was a problem starting around the time I moved to Oklahoma (2008) and that there probably are people here that want me to go.
Sean Ramsey said:
"The more I think about it the more I like the idea of submitted articles by active participants, magazine style within the forum - maybe once a month or so. There is sooo much talent here with the core group on so many different topics." A magazine format is a LOT of work and requires a large degree of commitment. But if someone wants to do it I would be more than happy to hand the stormtrack.org front page over to somebody. I don't think this should replace the forum, since like I said it has value as long as people are using it, and doesn't harm the front page, but there's no reason they can't coexist.
As for everyone else, I am sorry if I didn't mention your name, but I did read your post. Quoting everyone would be too much to write here.
I think someone also said something about the Stormtrack Twitter account. Does anyone want to take this over? Again it is just another calling card right now but it could be something more.
To add to this, I think once we carry out the changes needed for 2015 and are satisfied we're on a good course, we can send out a mass e-mail that will go to thousands of current and past members. This could then be done once again in 2015 as chase season runs up. This does go against the grain of what I said above about trying to cater to chasers who quit Stormtrack, but there are probably old users out there who just forgot about us or got caught up in life. Mass e-mails are something I seldom do, so they will have a very real impact and I think it will be very effective in jump starting the site. I don't know if we there are any incentives we can tie in with this, but it's something to think about.
Also back around page 11 or 12 there were a lot of comments about what to do with Target Area. That's probably a topic for a whole new thread (which I'll start now and move those comments into that thread) and we can change the things in Target Area that are not working or are working against us.
Tim
