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Q: Admin Suggestion: Weekly suggestions (general)
Hello
So first before any sort of comment, this is a new person behind this account, yes i have been reading through the answers, articles etc ..., No i can do nothing about what happened, but i can try to change things.
So let's start, as many might have been noticing there's less activity in the website, we aim to change that. So obviously now we're bustling with ideas and will start to implement some changes but we would like to at least pass some of those changes to a kind of debate.
For this we decided to put on a weekly suggestions question from this account that all members can answer on. However this being a direct question from us to you, we will monitor and moderate those threads more actively.
As such, please:
- Don't digress
- While you may complain about how bad it was before, do keep your argument mostly about what/how to improve
- No personal attack or derogatory comments or answers.
- Be constructive.
As previously stated these will be a weekly suggestion question, not that we lack ideas but we'd rather give each question enough time to be properly answered. However should you have a suggestion that you feel is spot on, please feel free to post it following this title format:
Suggestion; ... ( * )
* being the aspect of the website your suggestion relates to; such as job section, articles sections, Q&A section, etc ...
Now to start if off here is the first question:
What do you think of this weekly suggestion question ? Can it help us improve the website ? Would you be willing to help us by giving us proper insight ?
So...dont want to be a hater, but your post goes on and on how the user should behave or act, and requested to give suggestions and keep being constructive and if we are willing to give suggestions. You should rewind and understand that you guys need to give back to the audience an interesting website and user experience. Askin for free advise for issues that ECC should be handling internally and professional manner, rather than asking the users how to do it. You should know what the user needs, if not ECC days will be expiring soon.
Imagine a new user, just landed on the website for the 1st time, and read an admin post stating how we should behave and to provide whole site suggestions, the new comer would think this web is run by students.
My sugestions is, use more qualified and professional staff, carefully plan and implement your strategies.
Personally I think its a good idea, especially if it is monitored by you. There have been times when feedback from Admin might have helped calm some things down. As you say, that is in the past, so looking forward would be good to have more interaction with whoever the new you is.
why cant you copy and paste anything?
ironman510:
Because you used all the damn glue on the childrens day arts and crafts man!. Oh sorry, I forgot, no personal attacks. My bad.
We have been asked for suggestions before... Nothing happened.
You ou are not going to do anything that is suggested; this is a pointless gesture.
cub:
come on spider, didnt Admin just say that things in the past cant be changed and look to the present and future here on suggestions and or actions? Lets try to give the ''new and improved'' Admin a chance if this is a ''new'' Admin ok:? only time will tell
Thank you hotwater for your answer. Just to specify in case, the moderation will be focused on the suggestions articles only, as echinacities wishes to not be a censor, except when it comes to personal attacks, or any such subjects that would result in an uncivilized discussion.
Robrocks; We have had copyright issues with a lot of our content being used by other websites, apps, etcs... hence this measure. I am sure it might at certain times prove daunting for you but it nonetheless proves to be the best solution we so far
Spider as previously mentioned, you are absolutely in your right to complain but please do provide us (me) with a clearer insight in what you mean by it, what were the suggestions about, were they clear and concise or blocks after blocks of complaints ?
Our goal here is to clearly define one aspect , per question, we would like your opinion about, we do not wish for a block of comments about everything and anything. Also please notice we have posted an ad looking for a web designer hence showing a willingness to redesign our website. Hence this new weekly questions.
philbravery:
I hope the flow of information doesn't continue to be a one way street.
Shining_brow:
Admin - the "what can we do to improve the site" has been asked a number of times - I think it comes out about every 9 months or so, though the last one was more recent than that.
Originally (and sometimes with the more recent ones) suggestions were made... and never implemented. Even some of the more basic suggestions...
This has led to apathy on the part of the long time users.
You should probably search for your username and see what threads you've posted
I think it's a good idea.I've been using this site for 6 or 7 years now .A good idea would be to open a feedback thread about the jobs section,that you allow companies on your website to post,positive and negative comments allowed.
Okay...
Jobs section posts advertisements which are clearly against Chinese laws. They ask for applicants to apply if they have no degree or experience, hiring such an applicant is illegal. Part time, or secondary, jobs are also advertised which are also illegal under Chinese law. Some advertisements are racist such as jobs that state that dark skinned people need not apply.
Articles section is just plain rubbish. Articles are usually severely dated, recycled umpteen times, wrong, poorly written, or all of the above. I've written blogs before that were generally well received in the comments section and would be happy to write more on selected topics if asked nicely.
Trolls. There aren't many but their presence can't be doing the site much good. One in particular is called doejohn123 and often posts as a guest. I don't have a problem with differences of opinion but this guy just hates foreigners and has a real axe to grind.
Questions section is fine. Less moderation is better.
Englteachted:
I'm gonna disagree about the jobs section thing. Although it may be illegal it may still be useful to some. Maybe a short disclaimer about legal employment. Also laws are not uniform in China regardless of what the CCP says, some provinces, cities do really follow there own policies.
Firstly we have heard it all before and it always comes up after ECC is called into question about its efforts or lack of .
I hope this time is differnt .
can you post a time table for these change?
So...dont want to be a hater, but your post goes on and on how the user should behave or act, and requested to give suggestions and keep being constructive and if we are willing to give suggestions. You should rewind and understand that you guys need to give back to the audience an interesting website and user experience. Askin for free advise for issues that ECC should be handling internally and professional manner, rather than asking the users how to do it. You should know what the user needs, if not ECC days will be expiring soon.
Imagine a new user, just landed on the website for the 1st time, and read an admin post stating how we should behave and to provide whole site suggestions, the new comer would think this web is run by students.
My sugestions is, use more qualified and professional staff, carefully plan and implement your strategies.
I would like to change my avatar but every time I try it wont let me.is there any way you could make it easier to change?
philbravery:
maybe there should be a post purely to list technical problems with the site. it could be a long thread though
Mr_spoon:
Same, it says that there is a missing directory or something like that.
I complained about the sluggish loading speed when opening the answer section from Europe a few days ago, then the site was unaccessible for a day or two, and now pages are opening at regular speed.
Could it be that you really took action?
Shiver me timbers n plug the scuppers. Th' new capum of this rusty old barge may not be scurvy but the rotten sea dog has taken over 2 weeks to NOT REPLY to a simple request for help. Tis buggery on the high seas.
Argh, a pox on my forgetfulness. I wanted to mention - i trust ye be leavin' the sea trolls alone. A blind deckhand ken see an obvious sea slug is an obvious sea slug. Ye be wastin' solid effort chasing vermin. There be troll-baiting sport to be had....argh
I suggest to take a look at your website server... lately it is very erratic. For example, yesterday I could not at all bring up your main page [home page]. Other times I get a message 'you are not authorized to access this page' when I want to look at the 'answers' page. Echinacities does have some frequent serious technical problems. Perhaps they can be addressed and, when a complaint about some technical glitches is received by you we might get an answer.
Hello all
So first and foremost the question here was centered around "would you like to give your opinion about what we plan on doing", not any other way around, the part about opening new threads was there purely to avoid any digression, i am sorry if it was not clear enough.
Now most of the complaints seems to be technical difficulties, so as philbravery said:
maybe there should be a post purely to list technical problems with the site. it could be a long thread though
You may of course perfectly do that, however do please create a new thread for it.
However to reassure you all here is a list of the technical problems understood so far:
- Changing our avatar
- Slow speed in the answer section ( known), looking into it
- Some pages are down
- You are not authorized to look at ... page
- technical glitches complaint not answered
Also for any technical issues do make sure to describe if it happened in the answer section or elsewhere as the answer section utilizes a different system.
Full sail !
philbravery:
Ok
To answer your first Question about Questions.
there is no Question that it would improve comunication between you and us
however we do Question if anything will become of your Questions .
Hey Admincat. Totally off topic but what's with these bloody adverts across the bottom of the screen? Makes the site a nightmare to read when holding my phone landscape to increase font size.
Tell George, VERY CLEARLY, that if he keeps up with these obtrusive adverts he'll lose even more posters!
Hotwater:
Hmm, they've gone now. Back on 4G, not using a bars wifi. Will see what happens....
been a week Shrodinger , and haven't heard a meow out of you .
If you don't want to do anything to fix Ecc you will lose support and members.
cub:
@ phil, maybe Admin and these repeated messages are pre recorded to try to stir things up act concerned.
philbravery:
I think you might be right. better start working on bereavement notices for the forum the only time admin responds is when we shame them into doing something . trouble is nothing changes. Admin will respond to this in the next day or so with some nonsense
jetfire9000:
Give 'em a few months or so. I'd guess that it takes a long time to conduct an overhaul of a website, assuming that they want it to be a good fit, and that this is what they are going for. It'd be hard, but not impossible, for a single web designer as well. I've never web designed beyond HTML and CSS (Lol) but its a lot more complicated than something as laughable as that now.
I'm interested but also a bit skeptical at what form that could take. As we've all seen mentioned before, forums are sort of outdated in a sense. I mean, how innovative can you be when it comes to making an applet that lists topics and responses to them? If that were all we wanted, then the current layout would suffice. I hope to see an aesthetic change to the forum, but I'm not sure what I'd want. Less is more in this case. A complete revamping of the forum page could not just be annoying, but potentially disastrous - inevitable complaints about how it is "worse" than the old layout, etc, we won't admit it but we're accustomed to this current layout.
So from that line of thinking I'd say that in terms of actual technical issues (HTML garbage appearing in our responses) or avatar issues, those absolutely need to be addressed.
For the aesthetics of the forum, small changes would be better than big ones. The "categories" at the top seem completely unnecessary for the amount of space they take up on the page.
As far as actual innovations, or new functions, I think the "featured response" or "answer of the day" (which, admit, is often answer of the week, or month) should be replaced with something more exciting..... Perhaps with the highest voted user of the day or something. Give us a bit of competition in here for up-votes or reputation.
I'm wondering if it would be possible for news articles to borrow a feature which really made Chinasmack popular back in the day. The fact that you could hover over the news articles and immediately see the Chinese script, which matched in length and accuracy with its source text (As opposed to having to click the link to a Chinese news page which is very long in comparison the short echinacities draft.) In terms of coding, its super easy to accomplish. It could possibly be done in a better way than Chinasmack does it (popup text could be distracting) I think that this single feature actually helped that website attract a larger number of users than most would give credit for... Suiting the readership of people who aren't interested in Chinese, as well as those who are, is a way of broadening your audience in the news section. For actual news sources, most people here can access them in English via Yahoo (though they are a week slow on the uptake) reddit (dependent on users themselves, some who post sites that require vpns... not happening since I'm not paying for one.) or various new and edgy ones like sixth tone. In other words, China news in English isn't much of a special commodity anymore. I am also sure that other sites will tend to polarize themselves in the directions off "edginess" "politics" or "culture", depending on the orientation of the particular site, and it is hard to compete with that type of specialization all at once.
However, it is still pretty rare that China news is provided with accurate Chinese-English or English-Chinese text provisions. That actually is pretty uncommon. I've only seen it on Chinasmack, and that was a motivating factor in the development, and part of the reason it became popular. That website has crashed for some odd reason, I think this is an opportunity of sorts for this site to find a way to provide a new feature, or provide a more unique update that other sites don't typically have.
jetfire9000:
I'd love to edit out all of the HTML garbage appearing in my comment above, but I will let it stand as evidence to illustrate an area for technical improvement to the site - Do something with the coding which is 10 years too old - this HTML based stuff is reminiscent of Hotmail before it transitioned its email layout, which still is pretty bad too.
Hej
So a few things:
First, i'm not supposed to post many answers hence the lack of "responsiveness", i read just can't answer. Also i need to reports answers including my owns every day and it's easy to check. Just draw your own conclusions from that.
Second, our IT guys are chinese, and speak very little english hence communication is slow and imprecise, and the forum is using a Drupal system which they are not familiar with hence the difficulty in changing things for them. Hence a lot of the issues you guys mention.
Also the second suggestion will come tomorrow, sorry we just had a big meeting today and presentation and how i can at least change things on the social medias aspects. So for example the suggestion tomorrow will be about wechat and the answer section on a mobile form.
philbravery:
i don't think a regular update while posting the next question is to much to ask for. as i said previously i hope the flow of information isn't a one way street.
