Forum needs a makeover

This forum needs a boost to get people posting new interesting topics to get some discussions going. There has been nothing new and interesting on this forum for some time now...

You know, part of me agrees with you. I bet the biggest concern of the owner is if they upgrade, will they lost posts? They should be able to upgrade without losing anything, but you do have to be careful. My first experience of upgrading one of my scripts did not go well. Now I can do it with my eyes closed, but I must admit I do hold my breath a little every time I upgrade.


stevieb2013-01-22 11:32:45

Hi Stevieb,

Yes you are absolutely correct.  We have spent over a year looking at ways to update the forum and it is about 99% likely we will lose all the old posts which date back for over 10 years.

That breaks my heart since HairBoutique.com has been here since 1997 and many people tell us that they come to the HairTalk forum for the old threads which contain lots of great historical hair information.

Erica....thanks for your feedback.  We do try hard to keep things going, but if you have ideas please email me at shelton@hairboutique.com and I will be very appreciative of your ideas.  Or you can send me a HairTalk board message.

Thanks for all the feedback. 

We do want to keep this forum open for our visitors and we are always trying to make things better.

Have a great rest of the week & thank you for your loyalty and interest.
Karen
Karen Shelton2013-01-23 09:40:46

I'm sorry you may be loosing some past material, Karen, but I can see why you're thinking of changing things. Someone once suggested this is a "dead" forum and I replyed that I think there's plenty of life here, but it's spread a bit too thin.

I've participated in many, many forums over the years and have seen some patterns in their evolutions. Early forums were simple single thread structures from which tree topics grew. Later, software emerged that allowed webmasters to create as many divisions as they might want.

I just counted some 148 forum subdivisions here at HairTalk. To me that's clearly far too many for number of participants. I'm fairly certain you would have a much stronger group with fewer, more generalized topic subdivisions. I think this would result in a more closenit and active core group.

Ricc,

Thanks for your feedback.  The reason we have all the threads we have is because users lobbied for them.   None of the threads were added without specific requests.

In fact in some cases, when I resisted adding new threads, visitors sent me or the HB Admin private messages complaining that we were not paying attention to their topic requests.

After adding all of the various threads visitors requested, others jumped in and complained we had too many threads. 

Yep, after working hard to add all the various topics requested, others were upset we had too many.

I guess it's true you can't please all of the people all of the time, no matter how hard you try.  And we did/do try. 

At this point we have invested in new forum software which is currently being tested.  We are currently testing all the admin functionality and if it works well and up to our specs, we will put up a new test forum for long time visitors to try and give us feedback.

So yes, I could remove some of the threads, but then who will address the people who get upset when we do?  There are some threads we will always keep such as Celebrity Hairtalk since we created that specifically at the request of JerkyFlea.

We will also probably keep HairTalk, Hair Color and some of the other popular threads.  As far as how many we keep it is unclear. 

One thing that I hear repeatedly is that even though some threads are no longer active, they have so much great information, people still visit for the information contained in so many years of posts.  I guess we will had to address that issue as well.

Karen Shelton2013-02-17 20:29:32

HairTalk Is A Safe Haven In The World Of Facebook & Related Social Media

In many ways the HairTalk boards are a safe haven from what has happened to the limping along MySpace, advertising crazed Facebook, spam infested YouTube and even the dangerous hacking which goes on regularly at Twitter. 

Here at HairTalk, except for some spam that the board admins work hard to eliminate as quickly as possible, Hairboutique.com doesn't do any of the extreme marketing things Facebook does.

I find HairTalk to be a safe haven, I use the Private Messenger to send messages I know are completely safe and since HairBoutique.com has been around for 15+ years without charging for use of the HairTalk boards, I don't think they are going away anytime soon.

Although unappreciative HT users post that the board needs a facelift, think about Facebook which is huge, but is also struggling in its own way and they have millions...billions of dollars to spend.