I don’t feel “overwhelmed” and I am not against sitepionts commercial tactics. Hawk was looking for some feedback on the community aspect of sitepiont so I am just pointing out for me the commercialism and decisions based on earnings takes away from the community feel for me.
This is just me and my viewpoint, Hawk seemed to be feeling a little puzzled why the lack of member support and lack of shirt sales. So these are the reason why I would not go out of my way (spend $30. on a tee shirt) to support a forum that I feel is taking advantage of members and free volunteers.
Again these are just my feelings and I am not attacking the site I am just giving some feedback.
Like you said “they built it and they can do whatever they want to do with it…” Notice how there is no WE in there ? Community is always about Us, We, As a Group, As a Community.
As far as what I am looking for on this forum is just some info I study web design and the Internet and sitepiont has some decent info sometimes. Every month or two I come here and read a few articles and look at some threads. To be honest after a few hour I run out of decent or updated info to look at and leave for a couple of months. Over the last year or 2 I have noticed a big drop in good info and a loss of a lot of more knowledgeable posters.
If I owned a forum I would want to know why.
Personally I have sold a couple of site through Sitepiont and Flippa and paid some high fees for it which give me the feel I have already spend enough to pay for the info I occasionally come through and read. So I will spend most of my volunteer time and donations at opensource and community run sites.
A couple of years ago the market place was a part of sitepiont it got profitable, it became the basic place to sell a website they had the market cornered. So the owners took and turned it into Flippa.
Did they ask the members ? No. Was it a Community decision ? No Was it a design and move by the owners to make more profit ?
So the owners took a part of the forum that members built and took it away to make it a whole other business model. That’s OK it is their forum. But that’s the point it is Their Forum. Not a Community Forum.
“All decisions to do with the SitePoint forum have absolutely nothing to do with profit.”
Ads, spam emails, more ads, taking traffic from the forum to create new sites for profit, taking buyers and sellers and general traffic from the forum to other sites for profit,
Are these Community decisions or the owners of the forum decisions?
In a community the community decides in a private business the owners decide (usually with profit in mind).
I am not trying to put sitepoint down here I am just laying it out how I see it As a private owned forum geared for profit. Which is much different then a community forum.
Well, there are RULES to be followed (like the specifications, WCAG, etc), that many people including allegedly experience developers can’t seem to be bothered to learn or follow… as such a common answer is going to be “Ya can’t get there from here”. When the site has dozens or even hundreds of validation errors, nothing remotely resembling semantic markup or coding practices, or just plain broken code the BEST advice you can give is “throw it out and start over!”
It’s a lot better than throwing silver bullet fixes at it and hoping it doesn’t break when the next flavor of the week browser comes along.
Though it also depends on your definition of friendly – if meaningless platitudes and pointless back-slapping hugfests is your definition, then you might not fit into a workplace scenario where thing that are wrong should be labeled as wrong, and actually FIXED! Personally, in a lot of these cases the “heres a silver bullet don’t even mention everything else that’s wrong” attitude is much more offensive and certainly less helpful… But I view every pointless smile with suspicion and distrust, that’s how you avoid a dagger between the ribs.
Not every problem can be fixed with rainbows and unicorns.
Facebook is a free place to put up some info and do a search of others basically a directory listing with some ads.
A forum is a place to share info, knowledge, tips, discussions, etc When a forum becomes commercialized the owners try to make money off of the accumulated info so basically they are exploiting free labor. Yes forums have expenses like hosting etc which in Community forums are covered by the members through donations maybe even some ads if the site is coming up short and the if members agree on it =Community.
A place like Facebook is basically a directory and they make money off of traffic and ads. very different types of sites. I don’t know about these “Facebook groups” you are talking about. ? I must be out of the loop.
For me, it’s a community. I’m not so long on this forum here… but I’ve always have been helped quite good.
But for new visitors, they knów it’s a .com url that stands for commercial, like every .com website. So don’t be dissapointed if there are ads on the website, if they sell stuff, etc… It’s NORMAL.
Apart from that, the community is still fun for me… to be honest, I still haven’t found a better webdesign forum around…
I created a virtual society website a few years ago (which I sold to cheap later) and it now has 2 million members and 200 million page views a month.
After a few months of establishment website costs skyrocketed (a few dedicated servers etc.) and I could not pay the costs. So I started putting banners, advertisements and permium membership. The website started to produce some revenue after 1 year. Anyway now, under new management, the website produces $50,000 a month (it is in a developing country).
Every move toward monetizing is being condemned by users but anyway, in order to compete you need to make innovations and expansions. For that , you need money.
You may say forum contributors help in creating content for SP and also in gathering and keeping members (which translates into ebook sales, course fees and premium subscription). But the company is also enriching the website (including those books, courses etc.) which makes it more precious to members.
How many facebook communities are as useful or even comparable to this website? I personally have always got my answers from this website and it has been among my top 3 resources. People here have always been kind to answer my questions.
Another alternative to SP is to allow bigger websites like facebook eat all the cake, become billion dollars rich without giving back much of the value to the users.
I support monetizing of the website (and the forum) on the condition that it still remains an open source of information to the users and provides free useful content along with the fee based. I prefer this to a NO-SP anymore scenario.
BTW I hate facebook like general interest websites (in comparison to professional communities like SP) when it comes to technical discussions and resources.
I thought all the emails I received from 99designs when they were up for a web design award were particularly bad; just made you seem a bit desperate imo.
I think that’s the case. I don’t venture much outside the GC and Community forums as I much as I would like so take this with a pinch of salt. When I do leave the Community forums, I see a lot of newbie questions… which it is not really bad in itself but my own development and learning is important too.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t interesting threads or new interesting stuff to learn and practice. It is simply that it is harder to find for me unless it is featured.
True, I don’t do that much effort to search for it so it is my own fault, partially.
I’ve been around on Sitepoint for a long time too, sometimes more active than others. I’ve never felt like the community has turned into some “money machine using volunteers”. In fact, the only thing I could think of that used volunteers to create any type of money was the T-shirt project and the community book. Even those I don’t think are meant to make money.
I think the T-shirt contest was more to create some cool community shirts than to generate a profit.
The book I see more of a means to become a published author than as a way to make money for Sitepoint. Sure, Sitepoint will likely make some money from it, but they’re also going to be spending likely hundreds of man hours editing the whole thing.
Aside from those two things, I don’t remember anything even remotely close to the community being meant as a money-machine.
I know over the years I’ve gotten help with many questions I probably couldn’t have found on my own, and I know it’s never cost me a cent.
I actually can’t think of any thing that could be changed to change this attitude in others. I actually didn’t even notice the book banner at the top (I had to scroll up to see what they were talking about when a previous poster mentioned it). I think most of us are well trained at ignoring ads.
If I can think of anything though, I’ll certainly let you know.
Wow… What’s with all the whining about the books? I’ve been here for a while but I haven’t noticed it change into a less inclusive community or turned into a money driven machine. Maybe I was off-line when that happened :fangel:
That said, I do belong to a couple of other online communities that are definitely there for the money and perhaps my tolerance to advertising is a bit higher as a result.
I joined SP because it was the place to come to learn and discuss cutting edge technology. I spend most of my time (when I’m here) in the development forums discussing problems here and there or if I can, trying to help out people with things that I know about. As far as I can see it hasn’t changed much since I started. Every now and again I run across someone who has a different point of view but 9 times out of 10 we come to terms on some common ground and usually we end up learning something new in the process so it’s not a bad thing.
The Books- I have lots of reference books from Wrox, O’reilly, Samms, Microsoft, etc… I also have about a dozen SP titles. A few of them are fantastic. My PHP and .NET Anthologies have a permanent spot on the bookshelf right along side my Simply SQL. I also have a couple of SP’s CSS books… I think the CSS Anthology will be another that will command a special place in my reference library when I get it. I don’t mind at all when I get an announcement about a new book but then again, that’s my interest… More info and tech.
I’m also quite happy that SP has online courses. I’ve actually directed two people I work with to the one on Practical CSS that ended this week and recommended that they get some CSS books too (I should get royalties). This will go a long way in helping get them up to speed with standards based web development.
On the pseudonyms point - I certainly haven’t noticed people hiding behind them.
As molona says - everyone just picks a username. Some use their names, others pick nicknames, others (like me) picked something unique that has a personal reason behind it.
On the point of people talking the talk but not walking the walk, then I see that as less of an issue. Firstly these forums are for development and design - not everyone is a designer or wants to be. Also, if someone has chirped up to answer a question then that’s great - that is what the forums are for. If the answer helps out the person asking the question then everyone wins - why does it matter that that user hasn’t used that technique on the sites in their sig?
I’ve been a member of SitePoint since 2006, but have rarely ventured into the SitePoint forums in 2010. I left due to a variety of reasons. I originally posted here in an attempt to learn HTML/CSS, but I’m quite happy with my knowledge base in that area now so don’t feel the need to contribute in that area anymore. I also felt the spam onslaught and prevalence of “SEO experts” was just too much. Sometimes 90% of the responses in a forum topic were just spam posts and it made reading the forums very difficult.
The only policy of SitePoint which I’ve had an issue with, was one which I assume was implemented by the community itself. That policy was of non self-promotion; I found it quite infuriating not being able to help people because I wasn’t able to simply link to my own site to demonstrate a technique or process, but that wasn’t something that changed over time, I’m pretty sure that same policy was in place back when I first started posting here.
In a nutshell - apart from more annoying advertising, I haven’t seen any real change in the way SitePoint has treated the community over the past two years (bearing in mind that I’ve barely posted here in 2010).
The upfront in your face ad banners really kill it for me
Although I don’t feel SP is a tightly knitted group of knowledge sharers, due to a few people (keep in mind I only browse CSS forums) barking at everyone and telling them they are idiots (not in those words per say)
But it’s kind of off to the side and not all that obvious (you have to search around for it). I’m talking about a listing kind of similar to the featured posts, where you see the title names, which may spark interested, rather than having to go off hunting on your own.
I remember perfectly that a few weeks after I became a member (and ordered the PHP Anth books) I read someone making the exact same comment as the one HAWK posted in her first post.
I don’t think that “money obsession” was spf motto back then, and I don’t feel it’s the case today. And even if it were, well… how would that be a problem? I get all the help I need. If people can get richer thanks to that, I don’t mind.
Off Topic:
My only concern is always the same: the mood in the CSS/XHTML forums isn’t particularly friendly, and most people posting in those forums aren’t fun (pickiness, semantic purity and all the things you have to face before you can actually get an answer ). But it’s been like that for a long, long time.
but anyway, in order to compete you need to make innovations and expansions. For that , you need money.