Upcoming forum changes: investing in our community's future

The "ease" of reading a thread is pretty dependent on the number of posts, and the nature of the thread. This thread is all text and requires reading and following (trying to follow?) multiple internal "threads." It perhaps demonstrates more the need for "short" threads - the 150 post limit being, perhaps, quite important. but it's an outlier.

OTOH, on other threads, like on some other forums, with no limit, image sharing, flat works fine and post count is unimportant.

Some have a high degree of currency and "rapidly" fall out of the attention cycle. We're an old forum, many of those many, many threads are sitting out there as a reference or a statistic, but there's a much smaller number that are on the active, moving, leading edge.

tbcass said:

Mbruinsma said:

reading all this again about threaded view versus flat view when DPRevived tried to save the community when DPReview was about to stop existing. I am thankful that Gear Petrol could save DPReview for the time being. I would say to them: do what you have to do. But personally I am less and less engaged with the internet in general, because the so called needed commerce is killing it (little by little).

I like DPReview the way it is, no change needed. How to get young folks over here? I don't know, maybe they have to reach certain age to get interested in the "dated" style of this site.

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I suspect people that prefer Flat view haven't used threaded view enough to realize the advantages. As some have said, most forums use only flat mode so it stands to reason many people simply aren't used to threaded and are put off by it when they see it. I have seen some say they tried threaded, didn't like it and switched back without really giving it a chance. I myself have posted in forums with both over the years and have enough experience to see the advantages and disadvantages of both. Threaded mode encourages further discussion between people while flat mode is more about someone simply giving their opinion and moving on.

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Yes Tom, threaded view is so much nicer. When I visited DPrevived at the beginning flat view really annoyed me. I understand that they could not offer threaded view, poor ‘b@stards’. But DPReview therefor should keep this gold standard. Also this website is really nice on the eye. Websites with too much clutter - like formula 1 now after their renewal - loose my attention. But hey, if Gear Patrol thinks they can gain three new members and loose only one, that’s progress to them, I guess.

-Mark-

Wboz88 said:

my concern is if the display goes from concise and easy to read to "a single post fills the entire gawshdawn screen because that's what other forums look like"

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Especially this could kill my interest for hanging out here. The official website of Formula One made a renewal lately and they lost me.

jalywol said:

jalywol said:

• martinhb wrote:

Nikon DX SLR (D40-D90, D3000-D7500) Talk .... 226,839 threads

The Micro Four Thirds Forum has 172,466 threads …..

...... & some people believe all that can be easily reviewed in Flat View. ;-)

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But, don't you understand? That's all old bickering by Boomer and pre-Boomer dinosaurs. It's boring and utterly irrelevant to the future and the potential future users.

Old knowledge is old news. Streamlining factoids is the new reality, get with the picture!

-J

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Good advice.

Future users, of course, those who adapt & actually like using the 'Blob' on their iPads.

Time to get back to the future & all its wonders.

Will stay tuned & look forward to the new format which no doubt will have a spell checker!!!!

BryanHL said:

https://cameraderie.org/

There are some accomplished photogs posting there with a reasonably large community - no where near as big as DPR though.

Visit it and see. Spiffy enough but Xenforo has its issues. It is not up 9999. I would say about 999 at best. There have been two outages (one for a full day) in the nearly a year I have been there. The admins of Cameraderie are at the mercy of the Xenforo maintainers. The messages seem odd and make me wonder about the underlying architecture of Xenforo...

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That site has the same Xenforo look as all the other sites that use the platform. There is seemingly not much distinction from one Xenforo site to another (other than the site name).

davinci953 said:

BryanHL said:

https://cameraderie.org/

There are some accomplished photogs posting there with a reasonably large community - no where near as big as DPR though.

Visit it and see. Spiffy enough but Xenforo has its issues. It is not up 9999. I would say about 999 at best. There have been two outages (one for a full day) in the nearly a year I have been there. The admins of Cameraderie are at the mercy of the Xenforo maintainers. The messages seem odd and make me wonder about the underlying architecture of Xenforo...

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That site has the same Xenforo look as all the other sites that use the platform. There is seemingly not much distinction from one Xenforo site to another (other than the site name).

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I hope DPR isn't going to something like that ... just horrible!

JohnSil said:

Dale Baskin said:

Hi forum members,

We're going to be making some upgrades to the forums and wanted to share the details with you first, before announcing them on the homepage.

How you can help

We appreciate that changes can raise questions and concerns.

Dale

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Dale, thanks for the heads-up and the opportunity to make suggestions!

I have a request though it probably won't be popular.

I feel that photography forums should be about photography. Yes I'm ok with all the gear talk about how cameras and lenses work and blah, blah blah! IF I had a forum(I don't) I would make it mandatory for a member to post a brick of 9 photos that would show up as the title page to their portfolio/gallery by just clicking on an icon. That should be mandatory for a person to be able to respond in the threads.

IF I'm gonna have a guy giving me advice or telling us how great they are, I want to be able to confirm that by seeing their work! Their work will tell ua anything we need to know about them!

Maybe even a small thumbnail in the opposite corner to their avatar of that brick of nine and we just click it to see it, then unblock to come back!!! Thanks

John

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I don't confused the breadth of one's technical knowledge with one's ability to produce pretty art or vice versa. A physicist who's very knowledgeable in optics and has a working history with the likes of Nikon/Canon, etc.. who doesn't have any photos to post, has nothing to do with whether his/her knowledge base can be useful to people in a forum.

I judge people on the merit of their knowledge if I'm seeking technical advice - I couldn't care less what their photos look like, because "great photography" to one person is "same ole typical crap" to another; opinion-based. Technical knowledge is predicated far less on opinion. Likewise, if I'm interested in one's business knowledge as it relates to their photography, I don't care about whether or not they're making jaw-dropping beautiful art, but rather how much money they're able to command from their work based on their business / finance / tax structure.

Conversely, if I'm interested in making "pretty pictures"... then I'm going to peruse a person's profile for what I feel are "pretty" photographs and can feel comfortable asking for "aesthetic" advice from those who shoot the kind of work that I'm interested in.

Photographs/profiles usually tell me only one kind of story. Other information (income, business structure, gear knowledge and how that translates into time savings and or income is usually far more important to me than whether or not I like their particular aesthetic, regarding their photography.

Photographers missing out on good information just because someone hasn't posted some of their work, isn't practice I'd want forums to embrace.

Best in photography to all of you

mfinley said:

jjbinx said:

are YOU using fiat if threaded view ?

which do you prefer and why ?

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I don't use threaded but if it was the only choice I'd adapt. Personally I don't think I use the forums like many of those who are complaining, for one I stay away from those long 150 post threads as they are almost always the same - 10-20 relevant posts at the beginning, somewhere in the middle they turn into a requote slug match between 2 or 3 people endlessly requoting each other and dissecting every sentence, then the thread goes off on tangents, I really find nothing of value in those long threads that people say threaded view are the only way they can navigate them otherwise they are scrolling through 14 pages. Most of anything important is typically in the first 20-30 replies and I lose interest in the tedium of some people as nobody is going to change anyone's mind so I move on.

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What this paragraph doesn't resolve is whether flat view is good enough for you because you choose to be a shallow dipper in the photographic pool or you are a shallow dipper because you use flat view.

mfinley said:

I really don't see the end game for those here who are trying to dictate what DPR decides to do.

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DPR's business is to sell some of the attention of the guests to the advertisers: no guests, no attention to sell, no income.

mfinley said:

We are all guests here putting our feet up on the furniture for free and I think many who are making threats of storming off probably don't realize that many times your host is probably glad to see you leave but they are just too polite to say so.

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This sentence may answer the dipper depth question.

Dale Dalrymple

"If you are not paying, you are what is being sold." an internet meme since the 70s

• Threaded / Unthreaded

1) I'm a flat user, I used threaded 3 time in DPR
2) I'm born with eidetic memory > can locate anything I've visually impressed
3) Low level of normal memory and BAD MEMORY INDEX are the worse part

That means that at school I was able to read the book's pages related of what I've studied >>While I was been interrogate
That also mean that if I look at one of my shot, I do remember everything about how I shot it.

Teila Day said:

Teila Day said:

I VOTED FOR A THREADED DPR

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.

• Losing users

From my personal experience as explained in my First post in thread ended in page24

1) you can loose 5% or 10% of users, no issue ?
2) Users 95% - Permanent Participants 5%
3) Heavily Involved Participants 3%

Heavily Involved Participants aren't the shouters, these read, shout and leave soon.
They are People that WANT to share their knowledge and help others when needed. They express their opinion and become Pillars in discussions for their long time-permanence.
5% Participants are also composed by news people that comes, stay few months/more then one year, and then disappear.

Why these are the most important users not to lose ... it's easy to understand?

Teila Day said:

Teila Day said:

The life of Social groups like a Forums rely on 3% of it's "users"

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• Human Ambience/UI Interface

1) Human being react to what is around them in a predeterminate way
2) An established ambience is prone to allow adaptation for slow changes
3) Nobody can predict what detail's modification will hurt more the Ambience Pillars

Once upon a time ... we met on Thursday in the same BAR, I did 30Km to join.
Other much less ... after some years, the barman said to me:
"it's two weeks I see less Customers at evening during the week, I did not change anything".... I said "Hmmmm ... well, you had to change the chandelier when it broke"...
... next month we stopped meeting there on Thursdays, and the group dissolved
[we are still friends and meet once a year after 50 years]

Teila Day said:

Teila Day said:

Contours are more valuable then contents to keep up communities

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• What to get after 29 pages

I voted Threaded even if I dont use because I know it's useful for somebody I respect, "the other Members"

If we miss some of the Pillar in Nikon Z Sub-Forum it will be an empty spot, full of questions, yes! ... but no member will anymore respect each other when answering
[shouters do that]

UI and appearance is for me more important that what I've read from fellow Members
DPR IS CLEAN ... never a Forum has been so clean.

Teila Day said:

Teila Day said:

Conserving ... Aspect & The Roots of the Community will be a hard task

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I dont care to have to read one thousand posts, I have done it before...
...it's an interesting experience

( if that can help somebody else reflect on the matter )

--
___.............................!............................ ___
-------- Mid of French/Italian Alps --------- I Love my Carnivores. >https://eu.zonerama.com/AlainCH2/1191151
.
Photography ... It is about how that thing looks when photographed..
( Avoid boring shots )

dbdalrymple said:

DPR's business is to sell some of the attention of the guests to the advertisers: no guests, no attention to sell, no income.

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I somehow doubt 20 people are going to move the needle much, but I wish your mutiny success.

mfinley said:

dbdalrymple said:

DPR's business is to sell some of the attention of the guests to the advertisers: no guests, no attention to sell, no income.

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I somehow doubt 20 people are going to move the needle much, but I wish your mutiny success.

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What happened? Counting on your fingers and toes until you reached digital overflow?

Dale Dalrymple

dbdalrymple said:

mfinley said:

dbdalrymple said:

DPR's business is to sell some of the attention of the guests to the advertisers: no guests, no attention to sell, no income.

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I somehow doubt 20 people are going to move the needle much, but I wish your mutiny success.

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What happened? Counting on your fingers and toes until you reached digital overflow?

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Haha, this made me laugh. :-D

dbdalrymple said:

Dale Dalrymple

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Mathew Anderson said:

drynn said:

...

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Automatic locking of threads is a possibility. I've discussed this with our volunteer moderators and they've expressed some interest. It may end up being a per-forum section application.

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People who revive zombie threads are generally new users who have found the thread by googling something and not realised the date on the post. Sometimes this is funny, more often it's sad, but new blood is what keeps these forums alive and relevant when long-standing users lose interest or start pushing up the daisies. Age doesn't matter for some topics (specifically adapted lens talk and some of the more technical forums where the principles don't change even if the hardware does). ARKIVE posts have been suggested for that kind of post, which would be a useful new feature when moving to a new platform.

As someone who generally posts by phone I really hope you do not move to a system until it can support a threaded view that doesn't rely on lots of pages if there are more than a dozen posts on a topic.

Dale Baskin said:

How we’re making this happen

To make these improvements possible, we’ll be migrating the forums to a modern community platform called XenForo.

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A twenty-year old PHP codebase? What could go wrong!

I wonder how much Phil Askey got for DPreview when he sold it back in 2007. $6-10m? Epic exit, I'm guessing, all things considered... So sad what Amazon did to this wonderful group of photography enthusiasts.

gary0319 said:

MAC said:

Sagittarius said:

jjbinx said:

If you can do it, DISABLE threaded view just for this thread and then let’s see how well YOU can work with it.

Or better still, disable threaded view for all of the forums for 48 hours and see how well it goes

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I do not use threaded view ever (for 20 years) and it goes quite well.

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Well, the voting thread shows up to 60% of the community is looking at leaving over this.

They seem to have already sunk their future on this change.

I wonder if they've alerted the parent company on potential substantial loss of site hits and revenue

If it were my company, I'd tell the new site developers that until we have threaded view, we're not implementing, versus telling us they've asked that it be a future option - well future implementation doesn't generate site hits and revenues needed now.

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My guess is that it is the parent company, Gear Patrol (which has other sites, but IIRC none have discussion forums) are mandating the switch, and the DPR “management” doesn’t have a choice, for whatever reason.

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I might refine that a little bit.

It's possible that someone from marketing at Gear Patrol has insisted on the change.

Marketing is often the dept. behind these sort of calamitous changes.

Similar to politics, marketing is too often a race to the bottom.

Management 101 should include the concept of keeping marketing on a short leash...

I don't feel like I understand the motivation for changing the forum. Am reading more messages of approval for the existing by a factor of about 10:1. What is broken today / what will be improved?

it better not be: more adverts. you can of course forgive me for being cynical there, though i expect the best from you all..

How far back are you going to go with the forum migration? Five years? Ten years?

Scottelly said:

How far back are you going to go with the forum migration? Five years? Ten years?

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Good question

J.K.T. said:

Ralf B said:

Having posted in this thread has resulted in notifications galore, which often show one point for improvement: A single notification informing about multiple responses to a thread leads to only one of these responses when clicking it. Hence, finding the next new response isn't supported by the notification as of now. In a thread as busy as this, that is lost information.

Maybe have separate links to all new responses in a notification about them?
Cheers,
Ralf

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In the threaded view you just scroll through it all and see which of your (handle shown in yellow) comments have unread comment below it. Very fast.

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Handle shown in yellow would be a great new feature for the mobile site. As would EXIF data and gear lists be. Or the ability to skip pages in flat view.

Please keep threaded view, it’s what I use all the time.