I've read all the responses in this thread. I think change is needed to keep the dpr site interesting and in line with demand.
However I think a way for forum regulars and mods to have articles or sticky posts that can be endlessly edited is an important factor to help build and support the community.
Taking away the good and great articles from their respective owners (as I understand it) and make them 'official' takes away their repeated and constant efforts to update and maintain the articles. In the case of Wilba's FAQ it has grown considerably over the months adding new stuff with newer cameras and technologies covered. If DPR takes over, will these be equally maintained, is your staff capable and knowledgeable, and more importantly do they have the time to maintain them? Why not add a select few like moderators and regulars the opportunity to maintain a forum/subject specific article/sticky post for them to update regularly without having to repost every week? A select few to prevent the spam and nonsense posts.
Another way would be the wikipedia way of collaboration and review, a way for the community to self regulate, like you did with moderators in their respective forums. If a writer of the article abandons his/her article another author could take over, maybe by vote of the community or by permission of a moderator.
Something like:
- User prepares article/propose sticky thread for review. Remove 5000+ character limit, upgrade to 1MB or something for longer articles.
- Moderator gets a message stating an article/sticky is requesting a review
- Moderator reads article and clears/denies posting the article filtering all the nonsense. DPR provides guidelines to which user articles must adhere to. Borderline cases can be discussed in moderator forum.
- In the case of a sticky post, the moderator could be granted the power to assign a user to the article/post to maintain it, or reassign someone else to take over abandoned articles/posts/threads.
- Moderator is empowered to delete abandoned and/or articles that lost their relevance.
Otherwise I think this site has been at its peak lately, it's fast, accessible and love the interface/editors/image viewers, inserting images in a very user friendly way etc. Gear lists, lens reviews, challenges, user reviews, man you haven't been sitting idle! It was a huge effort to build all that and I appreciate it very much!
