If whomever runs the group reads this, I went ahead and applied for membership…or…however you phrase it
My bold.
It’s “whoever.”
Back to normal…
About the Facebook group…
I also found it via GB during the outage.
I requested membership and it was granted in less than a minute. I think it was at its most active ever.
However, it uses your real name. I spent a couple of minutes trying to edit it to list me as Steatopygia without any luck. So I reluctantly unjoined.
It’s not that I don’t want to use Twitter. I have a real problem with Twitter in that it keeps on locking up my password, saying that someone tried to hack it. I don’t joke when I say it’s happened 10-15 times, so after resetting my password innumerable times, I concluded their security sucks and just gave up.
Well, you don’t need a twitter to read most twitter feeds and since it looks like the SD twitter feeds right into the SD main page, if what happened recently ever happens again, you could just go to the main page to get the update.
True dat. But most likely I’d forget and wander off to the FB page again, or just ignore it. I admit I don’t think about twitter too often!
The last Twitter post I have on the SDMB home page is from Oct. 27 2015. Am I missing something?
No, you’re not missing anything. The people in charge did not use the existing Twitter account to update people on the outage, relying instead on a closed Facebook group and the Giraffe Boards. So those of us without access to either were left in the dark. Note that, as far as I can tell, the Twitter feed is accessible even without a Twitter account, so I would think it would be a better way of communicating news to people.
It’s very likely that the twitter feed is only controlled by one or two members of the staff and given its less than favorable reception at the time, it’s not surprising they didn’t think of it during the outage.
Twitter is the first place I went. I saw the date of the last post and was disappointed. It would have been simple to post something like "the board is down, we’re aware of it, and we’re working on it, stay tuned for updates.”
This is all volunteer-driven to my knowledge, so I’m not riled-up. Just a suggestion, really.
^^^^^
This.
I’m not aware of (or don’t remember) any controversy here on the board over the Twitter feed. But if there was any, if shouldn’t matter what people here think of it. Because I don’t think the audience for it should be people already on the board. Instead it should be used to market the column, the board and the brand to outsiders.
Whoever was behind the Twitter feed started off OK with frequent posts, but then the tweets petered off. If you want it to be successful, you need to post at the very least weekly, but ideally daily or even multiple times each day. You can start with a post on Thursday that teases the column that will be available the next day. Next, you can tweet links to interesting threads, both new and old ones. (A couple of suggestions; tweet links to the thread in which people wrote the Lord Of The Rings in the voices of other authors, or tweet a link to the “horror of blimps” thread.) Just like the Weird Earl’s and the threadspotting things solicit suggestions from board members, the Twitter feed can solicit suggestions for threads or even posts that are interesting enough to tweet.
If all of this sounds like work, that’s because it is. But expanding the social media presence of the Straight Dope column and the message board will bring in new blood and strengthen the brand. Frankly it’s always bothered me that Reddit is much younger than the SDMB but it’s much bigger and has a greater presence in the wider culture.
The twitter handle for the dope is bad. It’s not obvious and it looks amateurish. Something like @realStraightDope would be preferable, I think.
Reddit is more popular than the dope because it’s an aggregator, not a forum. Also, the Dope prides itself on being an iconoclast. You can’t be both niche and mainstream.
What are the giraffe boards?
Giraffe Boards. It’s run by the former moderator Giraffe.
The last post was from October last year. An inactive account seems worse than mo account, to me.
Does this site have a good facebook presence, in the sense of people sharing the articles here? The whole idea of the column is to answer interesting and strange questions, which seems to be (one of) the things people like sharing on facebook.
In terms of new members, the one thing I’d do is change the re-direct from the straight dope column to GQ, rather than Comments on Cecil’s Columns as that is a rather empty forum. (I guess that would mean amalgamating the two forums, but I’d also be in favour of that for the same reason.)
@realCecilAdams