Transition from the List

[MarcR]

Why do you suppose members are so slow to transition to the Forum from the List?

[Martin Bohnet]

The question is - are they? Since the Forum went public, we had about 35 new topics in the forum, about 10 on the list - though the Alstroemeria topic on the list was quite massive. I admit I was tempted to post a summary of that topic here on the forum to move the discussion.

One reason why I "about" all the numbers above is, that topics we started in the hidden Administrative area are not comparable to normal on-list-topics - we did that stuff in horrible email band-worms before. On the other hand, some topics on the list regarded the handling of the forum, so they "shouldn't" count either. All on-topic discussions on the list were started by people not yet registered over here -so it's those we'd have to ask why they did as they did - not the range of people answering.

One aspect might also be that since we've made images visible for unregistered or not logged in users, a lot of people might wait until they really want to say something - they might cause the constant display of guests in the who's online area.

Sidenote: Google seems to find this slowly getting more interesting, it has now moved to the first page for me when searching for PBS+forum - which is not self-evident, given the size of the wikipedia disambiguation page for PBS

[David Pilling]

People do not rush out to embrace change or new things. When I was selling software, I'd produce some new product and it would be a couple of years before sales would take off.

They will come here when they see the utility - e.g. we have pictures, the list does not.

Some will never come here, they've been wondering for 10 years how to get rid of pesky PBS emails.

It is a problem that a forum is different to a mail list - pull versus push technology. It may not appeal to the same group of people.

Page views for the forum are running around the same as for the list archive at the moment - 60 a day - not bad the list archive has a lot more pages.

Ask again in two years time.

[Leo]

My opinion... because it was presented to the membership without basic instructions.

As of now there is no link in the footers of individual list E-mails, nor the list digest, to the forum, and busy people don't want to go searching.

When people do go to the Forum, they see a long list of topics they must click individually to see the posts. Yes, there is a way to get a view of all Recent posts, but there is no link anywhere on the pages to get to this. It must be explained by somebody who already knows about it. Wading through a long list of individual topics is a game stopper for a lot of people accustomed to a chronological thread.

I realize dumping a new product on the market without instructions is the favored game plan when introducing new software and hardware, to avoid paying manual writers, but most people don't want to figure out something complex when they have an alternative. We don't delight in uncovering hidden new features. It is very hard for people who produced something to write instructions for it because they already know how to use the product; already having that knowledge makes it hard to put oneself in the place of somebody nescient who's never seen the product before.

I posted a message to the mail list just now with a few basic instructions. Something like this would have helped a lot. Maybe something like this was published and I missed it.

A link to the Forum should be in every Digest and individual PBS list message footer.

[David Pilling]

Good idea, I will modify the list posts to include a forum link.

I'd like the latest posts link to be more visible.