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The most common misconception of communication is that it actually occurs, and that's when somebody actually tries to.

I think there was a more going on the behind the scenes than was apparent..

So why pay up again? Threads by OceanSky make it all worthwhile.
http://www.thebestemployee.com/forum/showthread.php?t=377955 (Fchat link)

Besides, we need guys like you John.















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Good points made.

 

Quality over Quantity. Damn, maybe I ought to do that with my posts, like back in olden times.
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Tom,

Though you said FChat never gave you much, it's clear from all the rapid feedback that many, many people (including myself) regularly check here for info on the next event.

I've tried your website directly and found the calendar to be blank and no specifics on upcoming events (Ferrari Day, a Veyron making an appearance, etc.).

So, this site isn't as dead as you think.

I've also noticed that a large portion of the Ferrari Club refuses to use Facebook (myself included).


Rob,

Thank you publishing your position as moderator. I agree with your comments about many hits in a single thread adding interest, but it appears nearly all who commented preferred the single post method because of the "breaking news" type of updates needed before the event each week.

If Tom agrees to continue here, please consider allowing the individual posts to continue each week. It's clear from the mobs of feedback generated that none (who speak out loud) considered those posts spam.

Thank you.
Don Weidner
Northwest Regional Director
Ferrari Club of America

 

We've had a single thread about the Portland Cars & Coffee event for years... seems to work fine.

The Seattle guys need to remember that this isn't the Seattle section.

 

That is not at all what I said. If you read the posts, our position is already stated. At no time was there any discussion with us PRIOR to Yin making a change and telling us about it. Read his post where he announces what he did. Wham! Done! No prior discussion, no asking is what we'd think, nothing. It's done, over, we know what's best for you.

We've had prior discussions about the fact that discussion on FChat has died down considerably over the past four years. We had discussions among the volunteers to keep more chatter going, but to no avail. It's in part a lack of volunteers who are active here. We often post here about upcoming events and get no response. We also posted some months back about how important this site was and we only got a couple of responses that people got their information here. Those questions are in there somewhere earlier this year.

Furthermore, when I said that this created less of a reason for us to post here, we were invited as Yin put it, "to take our marbles and go home". Again, another slap in the face. The thread is all there which states our position, followed up with others who hold similar views.

We didn't start this problem. We were not involved in the decision. We split out the threads because it was our participants that asked us to do it. It was not our original idea. We didn't try and look like we had a big viewer count because our intention was to serve participants and not try and over-promote who we are. We do our best to serve the needs of the exotic community with E@RTC, but seriously, if you looked at the threads going back several months, you'd see there was little to no weekly chatter in response to our posts and fewer and fewer follow-up photos, outside of Ferrari day and a few others. This bothered us because our fear was that people were just not that interested in us on this forum.

Keep in mind, we need to keep things simple on our end because we have only so many hours to spend on E@RTC. It's all volunteer and we have other sites to cover. When we post details, we typically don't have to deal with as many questions as the answers are usually found on that page. By combining the threads, it never works that way and we get far more questions via PM. The individual threads were working well and we initially got lots of praise for it. It's why we held off on our decision, but in our weekly volunteer meeting, nobody had much apatite for dealing with this so the decision was to move on to where we're far more welcome.

We've never known of any issue with FChat, we've been doing this for four years now then suddenly we're hit with this when we've always been very supportive of FChat. We never had a single post complaining about our split threads, or anything related to how we post. Yes, we regard the treatment as a giant slap in the face all the way around, and it's turned us off considerably. If you read my last post, I said that were here in part because FChat was with us from the beginning. We were the loyal ones who feel sucker-punched by all this, regardless of how it's now spun.

 

I agree with all of Robs points.

One thread would create interest and keep people subscribed so they don't miss posts.


Also if people are watching NEW posts and not searching specific areas they are more likely to click on a 100k view thread than 10 view thread. This would also generate more fchat following for Tommy's weekly event.

Possibly even generate some out of state participants down the line if visiting.


Hindsight
I think the mods should have contacted the Thread originators prior to merging to ask if it was ok.

 

Don, we follow what's happening in Portland and we don't think it's worked that well down there either. I don't want to get into what I think would improve your event as I've posted my thoughts before in an attempt to help you grow.

We do what we do because our participants prefer it. If FChat doesn't do what they like, our participants go elsewhere for information and thus we go where we find our participants, not the other way around.

 

Why not just give the "single thread" a shot? With all due respect, you're sounding
like "take my ball and go home" when not enough time has passed since the merge
to know that "your participants will go elsewhere". Just post your updates in this
thread for a while and see what happens. I don't see the big deal.

I was on the fence on this issue until Donv posted - and I have to say I agree with him.
It's not the "Seattle" section or the "Portland" section - Alaska posts in this section too.

Just give it a week or two before getting all PO'd and whatnot.

Jedi

 

Don, read my prior posts. I'll go back and read too to make sure I didn't misstate something, but we never said it NEVER gave us anything, we've said the discussion has died to nothing. It has.

Keep in mind we use chatter to get some sense of what kind of Saturday we think we'll have so we can plan the lots. All of the forums are down overall, but this one section especially for whatever reason. Consequently we have no visibility into its impact and don't hear from that many people on this site, one way or another. Fchat was once a vital part of our discussion and source of participants, but that's dwindled considerably. We get lots and lots of chatter on Facebook by comparison and we just put up the new website and more components are coming. We did not add a forum out of respect to this and other sites that were with us from the beginning, even though we could. We intentionally designed our site to not make it the discussion point, again out of respect to the forums who were there from the beginning. We get the stats on Facebook and just one post will get read by 1,200 in twenty minutes. It would take us weeks to get that here with a similar post.

Our mission has always been to grow the exotic community and we've grown 10X from our humble beginning with no leveling off yet. We've accomplished this by remaining clear about our mission and focus and we do listen to our participant base, especially those who show up and participate. Everything we do is around bang for the buck to help the community. Again, we didn't start this problem. We were never even a part of any discussion. It was shoved at is after the fact. Read Yin's first post. Are we still a bit pissed? Yea, who wouldn't be? We didn't deserve the treatment.

 

We don't nor have we ever controlled the thread. We post updates and we do it by starting a new thread because members here asked us to do it. When we asked the question on Facebook we only had one in favor of the single thread. You may think it's worth the shot but I'm telling you, the majority will go where they can get what they want the fastest, which is if we're on or off and what's coming. The other chatter is usually after the fact. When that have to hunt for it, like anything else, they go elsewhere. Part of Facebook's success is the convenience factor and that's a bit part of it. FChat competes with other forums and people will go to those forums to get that quick answer.

 

So your mind is clearly made up. Got it.

I've never seen the posts on Facebook - I don't use Facebook.

Jedi

 

If we get enough support to do things differently we do it. It's not about me. We follow our participants.

 

Got it

 

Guys, I'm heading to Monterey in the morning and won't be as timely in my responses.

 

Have a great trip! One day I'll try to attend Monterey

Jedi

 

Thanks!

 

One can't argue with logic.

I was going to say , "Good points" but then, I would be "sucking up".

 

For those who haven't read, I suggest starting on page 55 of the E@RTC forum when Yin announces to us what he did.

From our first post on page 55 we said we'd do what the participants wanted. Up until we posted our plans to not post updates, we had very little support to remain, and we were already wondering if we should be here because of a lack of posts. It was Rob's decision to close the E@RTC thread without any discussion, forcing people have to start a new thread if they want to post something about E@RTC, which ironically was the central issue in the first place.

E@RTC is entirely participant-driven. As volunteers, we only have so many free hours to post and wade through questions, etc., and we therefore have to think about bang for the buck. It's the same reason we don't post on some other very low traffic exotic forums.

 

Some C&C's run every week rain or shine. Due to weather we didn't have a single one in June. With our weather please keep up with the individual posts. I consider it a "notice" not an ongoing discussion. I check Facebook every couple of months so that notification venue doesn't work for me.

Next time I suggest moderators use a poll to check with those who would be affected before implementing a change like that.

 

There are a few points that I wish to comment on:

Obviously given the strong reaction by those interested in E@RTC, this would have been a nice call. However, not doing so was not intended as a slight; it's longstanding practice that the board reserves the right to reorganize and consolidate content in ways which are consistent with existing policies or to implement changes in policy. As an example, there have been a dozen or more threads started regarding the 458 Italia driving over a NY cop's foot; you only see 3 (private forum, Ferrari Discussion and NYTS region) because the redundant threads were merged as they got started. Users get annoyed when they see the same topic everywhere. If it was typical practice to discuss with each thread starter the reasons why and gain their agreement, it would take hours or days to accomplish a simple moderation job. All of us are volunteers and none of us would do this if these things took hours or days. What we do try to do is to leave a note on thread explaining why we did something and leave re-directs of sufficient length that users can easily find their thread or post. None of this is done with intent to slight or abuse users, but to be efficient in managing a board with 10-20K active users and tens of thousands of posts and hundreds of threads per day.

This is a good personal characterization of the underlying reason for the strict management of repetitive content. TommyJames is focused on his event, we are focused on the users entire experience here. We are always mindful that users find content in many different ways, that there is a lot of content, and that users get annoyed when they see things they don't want to see unnecessarily. Yes, they accept they have to filter, but they don't want to filter more than they have to.

So in reference to Don's comment, it's not only NW region users, it could be the entire board. Some users search out content by sub-forum, hitting those sub-forums they favor more frequently. Other users hit the subscribed thread button and they automatically get updated on everything they chose to track. A third group of users search for new posts. So these weekly E@RTC threads can show up to any user on the board, depending on how the user searches, not just NW region or Portland or Seattle. Users ***** to us enough about repetitive threads that we're sensitive to that and tend to be proactive in moderating such threads.

I apologized to you in a PM for the comment:

I would take the fact that you continue to bring this up as a refusal to accept my apology.

In so far as the reasons I referred to, I will quote my two PMs to TommyJames for other readers as it clarifies what I explained to him:

and

The last paragraph refers to his offer to allow me to read comments posted on the E@RTC private forum. After I rejected that offer for the reason stated, we continued back on the thread and he began soliciting Fchat users to comment on thread. I was also receiving private comments at the same time. As these comments were still coming in and getting posted, it didn't seem necessary to make proposals while that was still happening. Every mod has a different style, but mine tends to be to gather information then post when there's something definitive to post.

Ultimately TommyJames probably knows the E@RTC users and is only trying to serve their desires. Conversely, in pursuing fulfillment of those desires, he would have us ignore the interests of our total base of users in order to prioritize serving a more limited number of E@RTC users. That didn't make sense to me. Despite that, I went to Rob and asked him if he thought this was a case that warranted an exception. As we were discussing that TommyJames announced his decision. Result - end of thread.

 

Yin is right, my responsibility is to our event and serving the needs of our participants. His job is to serve the needs of his group. He says there were complaints. We've never had a single complaint in a post or PM of any kind related to posts ever. Again, not even in a private message. I have to take his word they are there. We've only seen one person post so far in this discussion out of the Portland area. We've never once had anyone ask us to merge the threads, it was the other way around.

Yin, it's not a matter of accepting your apology, which I do accept, it's our not feeling welcome here. We try and be a good citizen in what we do and we thought we were helping, not harming, the Northwest section. We were shocked to hear we were an annoyance to some and it implies that we somehow have some responsibility for driving traffic away when we were asked to be here.

We took a pragmatic approach to posting on forums and look for bottom line results which include chatter here, and showing up at E@RTC. We consider them to run hand in hand. We're not trying to take over anything, we're just out to make the strongest car community possible. On our printed materials, we use FChat and other forums as the place to get updates to promote this site as we always wanted to give back.

Yin talks about their "policy", which has a negative result- this! From our point of few it's in essence to shoot first, ask questions later, especially on such a large thread. That's the rub; a lack of consideration for our particular community. If FChat was actually interested in serving the needs of the Northwest section, then why close the E@RTC section at all? Who did you serve there? To me it looks like another shot at us, regardless of everyone else who may want to post something about E@RTC, forcing a new thread, which started this whole problem in the first place.

We are not out to cause trouble and this came out of nowhere. It's hard to maintain and monitor and update multiple forums, and nothing stops one of the readers here from continuing to post about E@RTC, except I guess they will need to create a new thread.

I feel like we're all walking around the elephant in the room myself. The reality is that we post each week and often there are no comments prior to the event. It looks bad for FChat and it looks bad for us, and it's not the reality of the situation for either side. FChat has eyeballs, and we have participants, but it still looks bad. We have no way of knowing where someone reads if we're on or off to decide to show up, we just see the cars show up. We tried to remedy the lack of traffic by harping on AppleSauce to post. He's my co-founder and more active in car circles, which explains the chatter on page 54 or 55. We believe FChat has less and less influence in our growth as evidenced by traffic and chatter across multiple sites. Even YouTube has its own unique chatter about E@RTC.

Adding to the rub, E@RTC draws more Ferraris than any other Northwest event. We've gathered more Ferraris for Ferrari day than anyone north of San Francisco and we keep drawing more and more cars. We have a lot of Ferrari enthusiasts involved in E@RTC, however they are not nearly as active in this section as they once were. In part, the relationships among participants are now more personal. People actually know and hang out with each other so there are many different forms of communication other than FChat. The conversation is different because it's far more transparent and cordial. This is the draw to Facebook- civility. We just kicked out someone from a private chat group for the first time, and that kind of stuff happens on forums every day.

People post to broadcast to many, they now text or IM to broadcast to few. Media is changing and it's not the fault of FChat. Many have left for a variety of reasons, but we never hear any one thing as the reason, other than over moderation.

Bottom line- we are certain the individual thread will drive more of our participants away from FChat. When we see so many people against a common thread, we know what that really means. It's no different from our event when we get chatter about something our participants don't like. We change it.

Anyone who attends E@RTC knows we're fussy as hell about making it the best possible event, right down to the smallest detail. It's why we've grown so fast. Spectators run anywhere from five to ten to every car, depending on weekend and theme. I spend time here responding when I should be sleeping because we care very much about small details. But, as I keep saying, we're not paid to do this. We do it to have fun. When it's not fun, we don't feel like giving up our time to be here. Dealing with single thread confusion is not fun for us and it's time consuming. I could put that hour somewhere else and better serve our community. If someone else wants to do it, and manage it, terrific. We'd be perfectly okay with that.