Roger Dooley’s comments were helpful, and they fit with CCadmin Soren’s comment about relying on “functionality from a vendor, so not all issues are addressable and items that may “seem” easy to fix are not necessarily quite that easy.” It sounds like there are 2 issues:
- Why the update happened in the first place and what this reflects about the current forum management/ownership, including how the forum is valued and the future of the website.
- What can be done to improve the current situation.
Regarding the first issue, there are lots of websites with articles about college admission, many of which are have articles that are far superior to the basic articles on CC. The articles aren’t what makes CC unique and valuable – it’s the forum. CC had the most popular college admission type forum that I am aware of, with hundreds of quality posts each day, and many interesting discussions, full of knowledgeable posters contributing content. No other college admission forum I am aware of came could approach CC in this aspect, including Reddit. CC was in a class by itself. These quality threads were indexed and well ranked in Google, which led to new posters frequently joining and making quality contributions to the forums, further increasing in the forum’s size and dominance in market share. That’s how I originally found the website, as I expect did most quality contributors on the site. I found the forum threads, not the articles.
It sounds like the RoadTrip Nation/Strata Education Network management may have different values. Upon RoadTrip’s acquisition, there appeared to be more a focus on the articles by “experts”, perhaps in an effort to better compliment and link to RoadTrip Nation’s more career oriented content. This includes the new careers section, hiring editors, and making editor content prominently linked including more recently showing articles on the first screen length of the forum home page, rather than the forum index.
There have also been a history of technical issues since the acquisition from RoadTrip Nation. For more than a year, the seemingly highly valued articles and much of the non-forum content did not display with Firefox – the 2nd most popular desktop browser. I’d expect any quality, professional website designer to test with Firefox before deployment, and if somehow a failure occurs with Firefox to quickly address and resolve the coding issue. The fact that the Firefox failure occurred and remained in the content for more than a year makes me believe that there were serious problems in handling the technical and design aspects of the website. Perhaps the tech stuff was handled by a not stellar vendor, and updates were not made in a timely manner due to some combination of poor communication with forum users (many users mentioned the FireFox issue, including the article poster) and avoiding high costs.
This does not bode well for the 2nd issue – what can be done to improve the current situation. Like the earlier issue with FireFox not being supported, the new forum design updates have some critical design problems that should not have occurred with a quality vendor – issues that make the forums difficult to use and are driving some quality posters away, ultimately making the CC website less valuable. These problems have been described many times throughout the thread, yet many of the critical issues have not been addressed, nor have there been any message about correcting the most critical existing design issues in the future.
I’ve owned multiple websites with popular forums in the past. Forum expenses beyond hosting costs can be quite low, and problem/design corrections can be near immediate. If the current vendor solution isn’t working well, or the custom integration with the website content is too expensive, then I’d suggest looking for a new solution. I expect most users would be happy to use a primarily default coding forum, without extensive customizations beyond the subforum divisions, so long as it had a similar format to the earlier structure.
A summary of post counts in the College Admissions and Search Subforums is below. Looking at previous years, the past 7 days appears to be have had the fewest posts for this week (6/27 to 7/3) of any year during the post 2005- history that is available in the search function. I’m not sure what the goals of this update are, but I’d be very surprised if it is meeting those goals.
Post Count in College Search And Selections Subforums
Week Before Update – 465 Posts Per Day
Past Week – 340 Posts Per Day,