Let's modernize dgrin
Baldy
Registered Users, Super Moderators Posts: 2,853 moderator
Hey everyone,
It's amazing how much traffic DGrin gets, considering that it's confusingly named so people have to be told about the association with SmugMug, the software that runs it is a decade olde, and we've been—ehem—not as active supporting it as we should be.
So what's to do to make it a better experience for you? Here's what I'm thinking:
1. Since a lot of the traffic is SmugMug support, starting Monday we'll put 3 heroes on call to watch the forums and see where they can jump in to help. We're starting this with an 8-week rotation, meaning 3 heroes get it one week, 3 the next, etc., and then they are 7 weeks on the helpdesk and not on dgrin. We'll monitor the load as we go and see if we need more (or less).
2. I will spend what time I can over the next few months on dgrin while we look for a new person to put in charge of it as dgrin community manager, now that Michael Bonocore has left (sad for us).
3. I will get engineers and product managers involved in threads like I have the last couple of days by getting Mike Diaz to post in the tools thread and Sam to start a mobile app for IOS thread for the recent 2.1 release.
4. We can direct more SmugMug customers here to join the party.
The problem with 1-4 is I ended up having to protect them against the trolls to get their participation, which is a pretty time-consuming thing for me and you'd really rather I was working on improving SmugMug rather than managing trolls.
Which makes me interested in more modern forum software that enables the community to float the best stuff to the top. That could be a very big, disruptive change, but no pain in this case probably means little gain. So far the software that has me most interested is from http://www.discourse.org. Here's why:
With the voting and reputation systems, mindless posts tend to get out of the way and the good stuff gets noticed, so trolls end up having to post useful stuff to get noticed instead of just personal attacks.
So... What think ye?
Thanks!
Baldy
It's amazing how much traffic DGrin gets, considering that it's confusingly named so people have to be told about the association with SmugMug, the software that runs it is a decade olde, and we've been—ehem—not as active supporting it as we should be.
So what's to do to make it a better experience for you? Here's what I'm thinking:
1. Since a lot of the traffic is SmugMug support, starting Monday we'll put 3 heroes on call to watch the forums and see where they can jump in to help. We're starting this with an 8-week rotation, meaning 3 heroes get it one week, 3 the next, etc., and then they are 7 weeks on the helpdesk and not on dgrin. We'll monitor the load as we go and see if we need more (or less).
2. I will spend what time I can over the next few months on dgrin while we look for a new person to put in charge of it as dgrin community manager, now that Michael Bonocore has left (sad for us).
3. I will get engineers and product managers involved in threads like I have the last couple of days by getting Mike Diaz to post in the tools thread and Sam to start a mobile app for IOS thread for the recent 2.1 release.
4. We can direct more SmugMug customers here to join the party.
The problem with 1-4 is I ended up having to protect them against the trolls to get their participation, which is a pretty time-consuming thing for me and you'd really rather I was working on improving SmugMug rather than managing trolls.
Which makes me interested in more modern forum software that enables the community to float the best stuff to the top. That could be a very big, disruptive change, but no pain in this case probably means little gain. So far the software that has me most interested is from http://www.discourse.org. Here's why:
- The community can vote things up or down
- Users build a reputation
- It works on mobile
- The notification system is great. You can notifiy them with an @ sign
- We can set it up to use logins from facebook, twitter, SmugMug, etc.
- It has great search
- You can paste images
- Links auto-expand so you can see what they're about
- Real-time updates without refreshing like on facebook
With the voting and reputation systems, mindless posts tend to get out of the way and the good stuff gets noticed, so trolls end up having to post useful stuff to get noticed instead of just personal attacks.
So... What think ye?
Thanks!
Baldy
0
Comments
I would love to see more participation from your team in the forums, great move!
The one thing that jumps out at me about dgrin right now is the very low number of people participating, let alone helping. Your plan to put 3 heroes on call to watch the forums sounds very good to me. I think having more participation (or maybe I should say more constant participation) from folks on your team would be very helpful.
In addition to answering questions I'd like to see some feedback in both the Bug Reporting and the Feature Requests forums. Sometimes threads are mis-posted there and need to be moved, but there are many items in those forums that at least some of us would like to see either fixed or added to the product. I understand that you do not pre-announce new features and I don't expect that to change. I think it would be helpful to see acknowledgements from smug on feature requests and bug reports. That hasn't happened much recently.
While switching to Discourse sounds like it would give us a nicer environment I don't think it will solve the participation problem. We need to get folks talking to each other - and I agree, the conversations need to be civil. (I have to admit that there are some people in the forum who I stopped trying to help because of their negativity.)
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
It's a very common thing with forums as they age and scale. You either have to up the moderation as we did in our motorcycle forum, which is huge, or you have to go the way of many big forums and do a karma vote up/down thing. The trouble with heavy moderation is that can be frustrating for a lot of users too.
How to keep up with feature requests... We're thinking about that. That one is very difficult because it's a torrent, only some people are really in the know about it, and they are very busy, and it gets us into trouble when we post about it.
How do you measure participation? I visit dgrin at least once per day, sometimes more often. I don't always post a comment, especially if I don't feel that I have anything different to say. I really don't post images very often since I rarely get feedback anyway. I do always look at 'how to' questions that people ask and I always read the answers. I rarely know the answer, but will post if I have something to add. I have learned a ton just reading through those posts. I also read through posts concerning smugmug customizations, finishing school, and mind your own business. I have learned a lot there also. So, even thought I don't post very often, I get a lot of useful information from reading. I would hate to lose that. So, I 'participate' often, but as a reader more than a poster.
I have also found this community to be very helpful whenever I do ask a question. I have always received excellent (& much appreciated) responses to any call for help.
Could the forum stand some updating? Probably yes. Would I like every change? Probably not, but as long as the information continues to be easy to find and easily accessible, then I'm good with whatever works for everyone. The information is more important to me than the ability to post images more easily.
I appreciate the work you do.
Sherry P.
A couple of thoughts.
My first response when I read your post is that it’s a technology fix aimed at a people problem. That rarely works. Negativity and attention-getting are wonderfully adaptive behaviors that can find expression anywhere. At some point, off-line “back-off” comments, moderating posts from some individuals, or inviting folks out the door may be the only answer. (If Discourse allows individual-user moderation and the current Dgrin does not, that is plus for moving, though.)
I’d also note that while I’ve seen some of the problems you cite, it hasn’t seemed *that* oppressive except for a short period last winter. But then I have the luxury of not following some threads and not reading some people’s posts. Insufficient gratitude for help does seem to be a pervasive problem, but that one’s not going away. (And I hope you haven’t perceived my posts as negative when I’m raising issues. We all get frustrated. When that happens, some phrases may not be perfectly posed ... or perfectly poised.)
That said, there’s plenty of room to tune up Dgrin. This forum servers a variety of functions: getting help with basic questions, problem reporting, feature requests, discussing interface oddities, asking for feedback on one’s site, customization questions, announcements of customization tools, API issues, and lots more. There should probably be a revisit of the forum functions – both current and potential – before setting up the Discourse categories.
Finally, I’m just a little concerned about moving the emphasis to “popular” threads. It depends on how it’s done. You (Baldy) commented some time back – I’ve not looked up the specific post – that Dgrin users are not representative of the larger SmugMug community because they exercise SmugMug’s customization features more heavily and do relatively complicated things. The net effect is to push SmugMug’s capabilities. That situation is bad in that Dgrin doesn’t engage a lot of the user community. But it’s good in that you get what amounts to free testing in all sorts of odd circumstances and exposure to use cases you might not have imagined. No developer likes to hear their latest push had problems and no QA person likes to hear of a problem they didn't find, but the company really should want to hear that news fast. If you can collectively ignore the simple griping and chase out those selling paralyzing negativity – people problems – you’ve gained support in a way a small company can’t do itself. So go slow in moving too much to the center. At least leave room for your 1%.
I hope this doesn’t come off too negative. It’s just that my sense is that any structure or platform can do well or poorly. It’s how it’s managed that makes the real difference.
I agree with all of this. I love the idea of heroes actively monitoring the forum. Could I suggest that there is some way to EASILY identify who actually works for Smugmug. There have been instances of visitors "having a go" at people like Denise/Allen/Mike/ etc thinking that they were employees.
I'm feeling very positive about the future of Smugmug.
www.acecootephotography.com
I have no experience with discourse, and will continue to monitor whichever forum thread management thingo you pick, but I agree with others that twits will exist no matter which one you use, and to some extent, it will be difficult to filter them out.
But please continue to do what you do. I agree with your comment that I would rather see you guys work on stuff that makes Smugmug better. That's why I pay my subscription fee every year with a smile on my face!
(FeaturePhotography.net)
This is wonderful news! Not only is additional support fantastic but the new forum software should be super helpful. A couple thoughts:
Having support heroes monitoring the forums will greatly help answer easy questions and issues fast. My first thought though was "what about the hard questions?" The CSS coding questions specifically, of which I think are the most popular based on my months of trolling the forums. All too often I would see a post start with "the heroes sent me to dgrin to ask the community." If the heroes couldn't help via email they still won't help on the forums. I mean there must be a reason why Michael (Bonocore) came to me for his CSS questions and not one of the many Support Heroes (there were many late nights coming up with custom tweaks for Chris Bukards site, for example). Solution: having your technical guys pop in! Wonderful idea.
You're going to have to come up with a process for how often they check the forums... It almost became a full time job for me, helping people with code, and one of the reasons why I made my Customizations website. Perhaps your engineering team only gets called to the forums when a support here is stumped and calls them in for additional help?
The bigger picture item here, in my opinion, is that SmugMug is still too hard for the normal person to use. The questions people are asking are difficult coding questions that require deep technical knowledge of CSS, specifically. You touted the New SmugMug as "code-free" (and it's a good start) but I have hundreds of lines of code just to do simple things (like change fonts, hide sections or put borders around areas). It's coming up on the year anniversary of the new smugmug and it hasn't improved as drastically as it should have. Where's an easy WYSIWIG text editor to change fonts, colors and sizes? Where are simple toggle switched to hide keywords from being displayed, where is a navbar look and feel customizer?
Improving the ease of SmugMug will decrease the level of technical skill needed and allow for increased participation by the normal person.
So please, while these forum changes are wonderful, don't let it distract you from engineering the site to where it needs to get!
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
You instituted a "refer a friend" program for getting people to sign up that reduces people's annual cost - why not something similar for helping you guys keep happy customers? Perhaps the recognized forum posters get discounted SmugMug pricing? Recognize people like Lamah, smugocity, Allen, Mike, Denise, and others who spend hundreds and hundreds of hours helping people with tough questions, all for free. I spent hundreds of hours here coming up with cust CSS code for people (without receiving anything except wonderful gratitude), and quite frankly, as soon as my site was in a place I was happy with, my participation has dropped from hours a day to a few minutes a month. I certainly would be around more if it was going to help reduced Smuggy costs
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Great to hear from you. You've really done a nice job with your site, and I've always loved your photography. It's a pleasure to visit it.
I spent a few hours this morning looking at Amazon's Vine Program for their most trusted reviewers, and it has some parallels to what you're suggesting. In their case, vine reviewers sometimes get free products before they're released to the public.
That's one reason I'm so eager to fire up a trust system. Amazon's Vine reviewers are selected from their reviewer ratings by other Amazon customers. If the trust system works as it should, then Lamah, smugocity, Denise, Allen, etc., will gain lots of trust and we can reward them based on it.
Which brings me to the question of the day: what does Hire Me mean on your bio page? Does it mean you'd have the skillz to rally the community, deploy the software and engage the experts if only we hired you? You certainly have the technical background, the location, the photographic knowledge and the passion...
We have a good process for chasing bugs that the heroes report to us, primarily from emails we get on the desk. It takes a lot more people than you'd imagine because the QA team has to verify the bug and figure out how to replicate it, and whether it's our bug or something that Chrome, Safari, Firefox or IE has introduced. Then it goes to product management and engineering to figure out what the fix is and whether we can/will fix it and the timeline, and what to say back to the customer.
Since the hero/QA team and engineering involvement on dgrin has been lower I suspect that process is in need of some love. When the three heroes on dgrin start their shifts on Monday, I'll talk to them about that.
No, not negative at all. I agree with almost all of it.
I do know we'll have to warn, ban, etc., as every site has to do to bad actors, trolls and spammers. But I am very encouraged by how successful software innovations have been to help forums scale, from defriending at facebook to upvoting on places like Amazon, Reddit, Quora and Stack Exchange.
The guys who wrote Discourse, btw, are from the team who wrote Stack Exchange, which we love.
As for dgrin not being representative of our larger customer base, that is true on many issues, but we still get good feedback, as we did on the tools thread. But I think we can make it more inclusive so that it becomes more representative if we pour more love into it, as a community. It will take all of us, but I'll take the lead and see how far we can get.
Like slpollett and kimbomac I check DGRIN every day, particularly the support and new customization forums. - I do a lot of reading but not too much posting. The challenges, gear and "how-to" forums don't interest me too much.
I came to the forum shortly after I joined SM (a year ago) and found the SmugMug HelpCenter to be incomplete and geared for a much less technical user than me. A couple of times I sent questions to the help desk but was unsatisfied with the quality of answers I received, so for quite some time I've just stuck to the forum. One of my first e-mails to support was asking for documentation of the CSS styles - had there been a downloadable SM CSS class description, it would have saved me many hours of hit-and-miss trying and forum-reading.
It would be my preference that instead of spending personnel resources on installing and programming forum software, that these resources were directed toward better technical documentation so that I wouldn't have to spend hours searching a user forum trying to find the answers to questions that would be contained in well-organized technical documentation. Leftquark says that the SM is still to hard for the average person to use - I'm not sure that it's too hard, but it's certainly not complete. We wouldn't need to be searching here for answers when the fairly straightforward options that we need already existed in the customization interface. (And just as an aside: why oh why no javascript?)
Having SM support "heroes" read and respond to the forum is a definite plus - and please oh please (as already requested) could there be an indication under the person's avatar that they are a SmugMug EMPLOYEE a special logo, perhaps? I really want to know if I am "speaking" to an employee or to a helpful volunteer. And the term "hero" is meaningless to me - does it really mean employee or can it be any volunteer who helps a lot?
I can't wait to see what happens next!
Cheers,
Sara
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
I noticed that too. Good for Smugmug, but bad for me....I get bored.
Images in the Backcountry
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http://www.moose135photography.com
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For what it's worth - I thought I would share a couple of my observations in regards to Dgrin, as someone who is a (relative) newbie to Smugmug (joined Dec '13).
My background - this was my first time setting up a photography website. I have a techy background, but not as a dev. So I maybe have a decent grounding for customisation, and potentially more (too much?) curiosity/confidence to try things out than, say, a non techy person.
My observations:
My thoughts (some have already been raised by others in this thread):
Hopefully you made it through all that!
I am slowly becoming an addict to SM (and Dgrin) and am excited by some of the changes already suggested. I really think a modern, clear "Smugmug" forum, for the entire community, led by SM staff and recognising valuable contributors will go a long way to re-engaging people and re-enthusing the forum situation.
regards,
Sam
Sam
______________________________
SmugMug site - samuelmcdowell.com
I not only made it all the way through, I admired every photo on your SmugMug and facebook sites. Great customization, wonderful photography, and I pretty much agree with everything you wrote.
Which is one reason I'm on so passionate a hunt for forum software that will allow single sign-ons. It would be great to rebrand dgrin as SmugMug Community and let you use your SmugMug credentials to sign in. It wouldn't be exactly like Flickr, where if you're logged into Flickr you are logged into their forums too (they write their own forum software). It would be like sites who let you login with your facebook credentials. Once you click an agree dialogue, from then on it's one-button sign-on with either your SmugMug credentials, or facebook, twitter, Google, etc.
The other thing is we use software called Slack at work. It's both public (within SmugMug) and private chat, with link expansions like facebook has so you know what someone's link leads to, notifications, a lightbox, etc. We have a chat room just for cool photography stuff where we share news about cameras, cool photos, etc. We should be sharing that on dgrin but we don't because this software is not as cool as Slack. Gotta find some that is.
Thanks,
Baldy
I agree with not going down the Flickr path, and I would MUCH prefer it if you guys didn't spend your valuable time building your own forum solution!
I am scratching my head for examples in other products that I use. If I have a suggestion you will hear about it!
regards,
Sam
Sam
______________________________
SmugMug site - samuelmcdowell.com
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NodeBB SSO can do this! You'd just need to build an OAuth endpoint on your end, and a corresponding plugin on our end hooks up to it.
We do a whole bunch of link expansions already... youtube, vimeo, github... oddly, not flickr, but that can be rectified.
in [code][/code] tags? Will all that transfer? And how would this be done in any other type forum?
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BB Code Tests
Here are the options it gave me in the editor:
When you choose Code, it gives you the choice of php or html.
Also will this block remove white space so it would be difficult to indent lines?
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