John, At 03:10 PM 9/12/2002, you wrote: >But, why does the list need a full time moderator? > >Compared to some lists I have left a long time ago, the users on your list >are responsible, helpfull and very timid. Sometimes heated, but no profanity >or other, what I would consider, a pattern of abuse. > >Unless you have deleted them I see no posts that would cause me any offence. >Not really an issue as you can add a lot to the 'bad words list' & rules in >Dolist. But I am a pretty hard guy to get angry anyway. <snip>
I agree, there are not too many instances of flaming or abusive posts. The real problem is that the signal to noise ratio is much to high. The [PEDA] forum is intended to be for "how to" discussions. So often the good stuff is lost for all the whining, me too's, virus warnings, and OS discussions. This [OT] forum is the place for everything other than the how to's. In the past we tried to politely (and off-line) ask subscribers to move their off topic discussions to this forum. We were often ignored and quite a number of times have received rude responses. We don't want to block any of the discussions, just separate them into a couple different forums. We started this forum for that purpose quite some time ago. It gets very little use, even though the membership is reasonably high. There are many reasons for this and I believe we do understand most of them. But we have not come up with any reasonable solution other than a moderated forum. > > TechServ is a small company and we do not have the resources to provide > > permanent full time moderation of such an active list. If subscribers of a > > moderated forum are not willing to volunteer some time and they are not > > willing to pay for someone else time to do the moderation, then there will > > not be a moderated forum. > >I do not mind spending some time doing it. > >I even replied to your form on your web site over a year ago as it asks for >some people to volunteer time to develop it, I never got a reply! > >My company is not what you would describe as big either, but I am willing to >help to develop user based support for the product (as are others) for no >other reason than to get myself (company) better and more productive tools. >The time I invest in it, although not paid, I do see as a commercial >investment, just the same as the placement machine or format translators we >write for the factory every week. > >I have tried to create an enviroment for a user group elsewhere by myself, >to provide topic grouping & moderation, private lists and file attachments, >but people prefer the mail list method, despite its limitations. <snip> We give a very high priority to maintaining the servers and fixing them should a problem occur, but correspondence from forum subscribers sometimes get put off for a good time. This is simply because we give our paying clients priority access to our time and resources. Also, we do have a several people administering the forum from time to time, so I imagine some items to fall through the cracks. Most of the volunteers we've talked to in the past were unskilled when it came to anything on the Internet. So to date we really haven't taken up any offers of assistance. It just takes too much time to train and oversee volunteer labor, especially across time zones. > > The purpose of the questions was to measure the interest and to see if > > there is enough critical mass to support either a volunteer moderated >forum > > or a paid moderated forum. We would much rather use volunteer moderators >if > > possible. > >Honestly, I beleive your forums do not need moderated, it is the pure >content & volume of the threads that make it seem 'noisy' but there is no >real way to format this in any other way than leave it to the user. > >If you look at the reasons for the decline in active users you will probably >find that these users may have just given up with Protel (especially with >the DXP fiasco) or had no choice but to change tools. Also the fact that DXP >is being supported by Altium directly, and this is really the 'hot' product >for now, some attantion has been diverted to it by users with a real >interest in product development. > >But, with no commercial agenda (gain) the issue over the number of acive >users is really mut. The reason I brought up the decline in forum membership was because we think it is directly related to the "quality" of the forums. The number of new members each month has been steadily rising almost since our start. Even so, total members is at a three year low because fewer new members remain and more and more old members are leaving. >When it comes to paying for stuff regarding Altium, I think you will get a >very negative response. I agree. Protel (Altium) users are notorious for being thrifty (you can read this as "cheap and short sighted"). Generally, you don't get what you don't pay for, at least not for long. Because if you don't pay for it, someone else has to. And if its the software vendor, they'll probably go out of business, which means you will be paying the price in a very big way! >I already told my VAR that I won't pay ATS for my other seats, I got my >'free' DXP copy (I bought 99se lic in May) and wont use it, it is relageted >to part time work only. My feeelings for now is that unless I see a really >good product out od DXP by the time my DXP maintainance runs out, I will >just change tools as the company already uses Pads & Cadence tools anyway. >Protel is easier to learn and control, but only if it works properly! > >Short answer, if you want help I am here, no fee needed, especially as I >have seen very few posts in the forum ever, that I would actually delete or >edit, and very few users that I woudl even think of warning, never mind ban. There are two major projects that have been put off indefinitely for lack of time and resources. Maybe we can discuss these with you but it will have to wait for another day. I'm already several hours behind schedule for today. 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