Melting Snowflakes

[scianiac]

I do want to keep talking about how things are changing but something just happened a day ago that I think is relevant to people leaving the forum. I got an email from spudfiles, a forum I haven't been on in probably a decade. Just a random email out of the blue from the admin being like, we're still around, I know hobbies change but hey maybe you want to come back and look around. It did get me to go look around, unfortunately it's not doing so hot and I have too many other hobbies to get back into building air cannons but I wonder how effective such an email is.

Like hobbies are weird in that some people are still into them but not enough to be on a forum, you may still have ebikes and use them all the time but maybe don't follow development so some may take just a little push to get back into tinkering.

Like generally I'm against out of the blue emails but just as a one shot email, if someone hasn't logged in a long time we (well nep) sends a friendly reminder email. I expect the conversion won't be great but even a few people coming back and being reminded that we both still exist and are still a nice place to hang out, unlike much of the rest of the internet. To steal an idea from another forum it could also include like the 10 most popular/interesting threads from the last year. As in threads sorted by activity excluding news, arguing, off topic, etc.

 

[E-HP]

I think I may have mentioned this before with respect to the changing nature of questions that we get on ES. It reflects the fact that ES was primarily a DIY community, before factory ebikes became more abundant, and the subforums are geared toward DIY. I know at least one subforum, Ebikes Electronics Hacking was created, that somewhat supports factory bikes, but it might be time to add at least a couple of subforums to better organize the content given the shift.
Something like Factory Ebike Troubleshooting, or Factory Ebike Upgrading/Modding could help keep the related content in a place where it's more easily accessed, rather than housed with mainly DIY issues in the Ebike Technical or Ebike Troubleshooting subforums. They would be more focused on the type of questions that come up or situations and challenges more unique to factory bikes or factory ebike conversions. Once the content is segregated, will be easier to identify the more common issues to allow creation of stickies or KB entries that address them.

 

[neptronix]

I'm open to it.

I feel cautious about catering to that crowd. Our aesthetic would need to be altered to strongly indicate we are a DIY focused website so that we don't gradually become electricbikereport's forums. Our angle would be right to repair, hot rodder, and hacker friendliness. In the same vein that endless sphere was & still is with DIY.

And you're right, it would help sort the existing posts better.

 

[neptronix]

I do want to keep talking about how things are changing but something just happened a day ago that I think is relevant to people leaving the forum. I got an email from spudfiles, a forum I haven't been on in probably a decade. Just a random email out of the blue from the admin being like, we're still around, I know hobbies change but hey maybe you want to come back and look around. It did get me to go look around, unfortunately it's not doing so hot and I have too many other hobbies to get back into building air cannons but I wonder how effective such an email is.

Like hobbies are weird in that some people are still into them but not enough to be on a forum, you may still have ebikes and use them all the time but maybe don't follow development so some may take just a little push to get back into tinkering.

I set the system to email people a lot less than the stock configuration.
The system does send an email if you haven't been active for 30 days, once a month, for up to 3 months.
Just now i modified this to 6 months, but i don't want to bug people more than that.