I found SDMB by plugging a search term into Google: “Smartest Forum on the Web.” This was a few years ago. I joined and as is my habit, I lurked for awhile to ascertain the board culture. Then I put a toe in the water. I tried to observe all the rules, written and unwritten. I gave respect to those who respected me – and was pretty astonished at how few chose to do that.
As Macca26 points out and others have agreed, this is not a welcoming place. I’ve had to fight hard to stick around. I don’t mind people challenging my assertions. That’s fine. But is it absolutely necessary to speak to new members in withering, patronizing, condescending tones? Could older members employ a modicum of basic human kindness and respect, be a little forgiving if newer folks violate traditional but unwritten norms?
I’ve been noodling around the web for 32-ish years, have belonged to many bulletin boards/forums/chat rooms. I understand how close people can draw to one another as a group, even if they never meet or meet only rarely. I don’t expect to belong to the “in group.” But I’ve never encountered as much arrogance and reflexive disdain for new members as I’ve found here. It really is a turn-off. And it shouldn’t be a hard thing to correct.
Lots of other good suggestions here and it’s great to see a genuine effort to make improvements. Just had to get this burr out from under my saddle.
Your “fact” is a little oversimplified. Guests, who may bring in money by viewing ads, also generate content by posting. It’d get a little quiet in here if all of the guests just went away.
This is a point that really needs to be emphasized. He’s 100% right and that really needs to change if we want the new members we’re hoping to attract to actually stick around.
I agree with this. Personally I enjoyed the board a lot more before some of the forums were virtually taken over by aggressive, tireless sealion-whatabouters. You don’t need to ask who they are; you already know. You’ve already bent over backward to satisfy some definition of “fair”. It’s time to admit that they flood the board with bullshit while contributing nothing of substance, monetarily or intellectually, and start pulling weeds.
I’ve been a doper since the column first appeared in the reader many years ago. I’m even in one of Cecil’s first books. That’s my c.v. This has always been a terrific site. I’m a denizen of g.q., primarily, and I believe it is by far the most interesting, valuable, and useful site I’ve ever found. I hope that part of the site never changes. It’s metropolitanism in its purest form. It’s also wonderfully civil. Maybe moderators help. But I love the self-regulation.
Thing is, the board’s changed a LOT since you started here. You can’t stop change – it’s inevitable.
And one major problem is that if we don’t change some things, the board is going to shut down altogether. You want to see that happen? I certainly don’t.
How would you change it? To the extent it’s in the board culture, which seems to be a large extent, I’m afraid it would require more jack-booted intervention than would be good for the board. But I’m interested in hearing about ways and means.
This is not something that has ever bothered me, by the way, but that may be because I have pretty much always been on the outside of any group and didn’t expect any difference here. And in fact my very first post was a request for information about a rather personal subject, and I was treated very kindly.
In all fairness, there are some long-timers here who don’t comment that way. That said, I agree it happens too often. For instance, the rule is that one can attack the post only, not the person; unfortunately, there are ways to attack the post in such a way that the poster is essentially attacked as well, and a very few people here are adept at skating right up to that line. That happened to me a few weeks ago, and I almost left.
You and Macca26 make some excellent points, and I hope TPTB pay attention. I’m all for freedom of speech, but the fact that there have been complaints about how women are treated here (and how many have left), how people of color are treated here, how newcomers are treated here indicates t there are issues, and they should be addressed. It makes no sense to attract new members if we can’t keep them. I have an idea on how to approach that as well.
In addition to the many good suggestions people have already given, can I suggest
A – getting rid of that 8 to 10 stickies in each forum and changing it to one single sticky.
B – consolidate all the myriad rules. There are crazy amounts of rules on this site and that’s fine but when each for him has its own rules and there’s different stickies for each for him with its own special rules, it’s highly unwelcoming to a new guest.
A new user shouldn’t have to play connect the dots across multiple fora to try to figure out the basic rules of the site
SEO? You mean Synaptic Ectoplasm Optimizing, right? Hmmm, I don’t see how that fits here. Maybe you meant something else? Could you write out what you mean to say, please? Thank you
There are two types of SEO. The first is SEO that the search engines actually approve of you doing, which is things like providing good content, using descriptive meta-tags, having a site that is easy to navigate, using a powerful enough server that you have fast loading times (slow loading will lower your ranking), and being mobile friendly. Google changed their algorithm a while back, which caused us to drop significantly in their ranking. TPTB thought it might be due to the SDMB not being mobile friendly, which is why the new mobile theme was installed.
The other type of SEO is the stuff that the search engines don’t approve of, like backlinking (creating links to sites solely for the purpose of increasing that site’s page rank). We get a lot of link spammers and profile spammers engaging in backlinking here. They may be hoping for some clicks, but they are also engaged in SEO, especially the profile spammers. They aren’t expecting people to click on profiles. They are just backlinking to try to increase their site’s page rank.
