CC Updates for June 2022

Hi everyone,

Here at College Confidential, we are a small but committed team of folks passionate about student success and making CC the best place on the internet for authentic, unfiltered discussion about college admissions. Our community is uniquely suited to providing real advice from a parent and student perspective.

It’s no secret that CC has often changed hands over the past few years, and as a result has struggled to maintain the best experience for our community - both the long-time users and the new ones that come every year. I believe all that is changing for the better. I also have a few updates that I’m excited to share with you right now!

College Confidential, LLC

CC is now its own independent entity. While this might not seem like a big deal, this is a great step forward in establishing CC’s legitimate presence in the marketplace, especially with regards to our partnerships with schools.

Renewed focus on direct school partnerships

In order to make CC the best place on the internet to discuss college admissions, we need to forge partnerships with key schools to forge connections between parents, students, admissions staff and others. We’ve started the process with schools like uChicago and NYU, but want to continue it with many more schools that are talked about on CC. (More details about these relationships to come!)

Removal of problematic programmatic advertising

We realize that the addition of programmatic advertising over the past few years has provided needed revenue but also degraded our community experience. Programmatic ads use data the advertisers have about visitors to guess what sort of ads they might be interested in. Companies that know a lot about their audience (think Google and Facebook) do a better job serving relevant ads. As you might have noticed, ads on CC tend to not be as relevant to visitors. This sort of advertising also comes with a performance cost on the site, so eliminating these ads will help us keep the site responsive.

Over the next few months, we’ll be investing in improving the CC experience by removing problematic programmatic advertising from the site. Practically, this will mean the removal of sticky footer and video ads. (This does not include advertising by direct partners.)

Return of CCAdminJon

When Jon came on as Community Manager in 2020, he revolutionized our moderation and brought a thoughtfulness to our community nurturing and growth that we didn’t have in the past. Well, he’s back. I’m so excited to announce @CCAdminJon as our Head of Community starting June 13!

Better Technology

We’ve struggled with the reliability of the site over the past year. That will all change with a new web host. We weren’t able to do this in the past as part of a larger entity, but the added flexibility will allow us to drastically reduce unplanned outages once we move over!


There’s much more in store for CC in the coming year. I’m excited to be part of CC for this upcoming admissions season and can’t wait to see our community grow and thrive!

CCAdminMike

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Thanks, Mike. Glad to hear that @CC_Jon is back!

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Is this going to involve yet another set of changes in the user interface and/or login process? Every change to those (and I’ve been through multiple), we lose a solid chunk of the community here.

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It is not. This change to to improve reliability of the existing site as-is.

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What is the difference between Community Manager and Head of Community? Will there also be a Community Manager? What are some of Jon’s plans for CC? I remember he had a lot of plans for his last stint here.

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I do have plans, which I can start discussing next week. (This week I’m wrapping up work on my current, soon to be former, job.) Generally “Head of Community” is a career progression from “Community Manager” and means more responsibility. Sometimes the Head of Community has a team of community managers and I’m hoping we’ll be able to bring on someone soon. Renewing College Confidential isn’t something I can do on my own!

Speaking of which, I’m excited to work with you all, the active members of College Confidential, to explore ways we can help future generations of students reach their potential. One of the reasons I’m excited to come back is that there is so much potential to make this community work better for everyone.

More to come next week!

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Something I would like: if I press on the back page arrow, it takes me back to the contents where I left instead of going to the top. Then I wouldn’t need to scroll down. Small thing, but it would make me happy.

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Also: a “recently read” list of threads would be very helpful.
Sometimes you read a thread and want to go back to it a few hours later or next day and it’s very hard to find again. There’s “new”, “latest” and “unread, but no “recent”.

Thanks!

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You can bookmark the threads you want to read. I often do this for things I want to read again soon, and then just delete that bookmark when I want to.

Yes, true. But sometimes I remember something I read a day or two ago that I didn’t think of bookmarking back then and want to go back to it.

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