Topic: Is CRO as a forum finished.

[Yousef]

I trust the three of us posting to this thread already may be prepared to take shares in the purchase of the forum if it is made available to us. Please correct me if I am wrong! Would anyone else be interested? Yousef - are you interested in selling the forum?

Maybe, depending on the offer. Btw, the forum is not owned by me alone, i am a part of a company.

[Yousef]

The strange thing is we tend not to have many bust-ups on the forum these days and when we do it's inevitably the same few forum members - the last few posts being a point in case. So we can't really point to that as to why the forum has been effectively dead for a good while now.

Because through out the past days we tried different things that reduced the attacks effects for a while, but wasn't effective in eliminating it.

The simple fact is, as Garp pointed out, that there's a glut of BIR info out there now, in many forms, and I think that is a major factor. It is weird though because there are many other forums covering a variety of topics which thrive despite there bring a plethora of other sources for the same information. And I doubt a co-operative ownership would advance the cause one bit. In fact it'd probably lead to more infighting.

Good point. Great place to start anyway.

[Peripatetic Phil]

I'd be interested to see the number of posts per day plotted on a graph from day one of the forum to see if the drop-off was gradual or whether it dropped substantially at one or more points. Is that sort of thing possible Phil?

I cannot see how it could be achieved from the web interface without a massive amount of work, but it might be possible for Yousef as administrator.  My feeling is that things started to go downhill around the time that Domi shipped out, which was 2012.  Interestingly I see that Razor last visited the forum in late 2020, but he has not posted since 2015, CBM visited this very month but last posted in 2018 & Haldi last visited in December of last year but last posted in 2018.

** Phil.

[Yousef]

I cannot see how it could be achieved from the web interface without a massive amount of work, but it might be possible for Yousef as administrator.  My feeling is that things started to go downhill around the time that Domi shipped out, which was 2012.  Interestingly I see that Razor last visited the forum in late 2020, but he has not posted since 2015, CBM visited this very month but last posted in 2018 & Haldi last visited in December of last year but last posted in 2018.

Sure Phil, it would take a massive amount of work, and tbh that won't be needed. I have worked with other communities through out my career so I can guess, it's all about

1) Environment
2) Engagement

The first one can be achieved through out a mutual agreement from all/most active members.

While the other one would be achieved by adding and discussing a lot of new topics, related to curry, cooking and general discussions. You as members can figure out the curry and cooking stuff, I can give some ideas about general topics, for example, here are a Juventus soccer team fanbase general topics:

https://www.juventuz.com/forums/off-topic.26/

I think it's fairly easy, the traffic is here, we just need to give them more reasons to stay. I will tell you why:

Current Avg. Sessions 30k per month

9% from members
91% from new users

[Secret Santa]

Current Avg. Sessions 30k per month

9% from members
91% from new users

Is an average session a unique browsing session? So there are 30,000 unique browsing sessions per month? If so how can the interaction with this forum be so abysmal?

I could understand it if the  search facility was brilliant - which it's not, and the index was perfect - which it's not, but when you have 91% of 30,000 sessions from new users, how can they not be asking questions? There's something very amiss here.

[Peripatetic Phil]

[W]hen you have 91% of 30,000 sessions from new users, how can they not be asking questions? There's something very amiss here.

I would ask "how many of those 27300 sessions resulted in someone joining the forum ?".  Some other statistics that could be of interest

[George]

Current Avg. Sessions 30k per month

9% from members
91% from new users

Are these figures from people or robots simply visiting the home page of curry-recipes.co.uk, or visiting the forum?  I suggest the forum is close to a backwater these days but, for regular users, it must be the only thing we are interested in. Until a few years ago, the site was the forum - much better. Who on earth is interested in a selection of recipes on the home page, let alone a request to submit new recipes? It may even have a different log-in. How does that make sense? If anyone here wants to upload a recipe, they post it to the relevant section of the forum. 

[Yousef]

Is an average session a unique browsing session? So there are 30,000 unique browsing sessions per month? If so how can the interaction with this forum be so abysmal?

I could understand it if the  search facility was brilliant - which it's not, and the index was perfect - which it's not, but when you have 91% of 30,000 sessions from new users, how can they not be asking questions? There's something very amiss here.

Yes exactly, because that is very close to interaction rates in most forums, most users just enter the forum to read, take a recipe or get some information. Again, it's very close to 99% of forums, but if we can improve engagement by 1 or 2% that would be considered a huge success on the long run.

Search, index and even forum style simply doesn't matter on whether a site get organic traffic or not. Most relevant factor here is content and links, in this case is very rich.

I would ask "how many of those 27300 sessions resulted in someone joining the forum ?".  Some other statistics that could be of interest

[Hugoboss]

"SMF does not help a lot with numbers and analytics"
I run a motorbike Forum using SMF and there are detailed stats in SMF which we make available to all Members. Our Forum is "very" active  ( 83 million + page views in the last
8 years with only 5k Members ) and we have Members from all corners of the world and its run on a "help each other" attitude unlike on here where my initital impressions is that everyone is aiming to prove they are better at making curries or have better techniques and everyone elses methods are rubbish etc etc.  Our Yamaha Forum does not tolerate "any" abuse of Members and we quickly eject anyone who oversteps the line. Oh, and one last point, our Forum is run by myself and a few other volunteers who gain nothing financially as the Forum was built from scratch so it was never bought/sold and is "owned" by the Members and will never be "for sale".

Feel free to check out our stats : https://www.aircooledrdclub.com/smf/index.php?action=stats

[Yousef]

"SMF does not help a lot with numbers and analytics"

Feel free to check out our stats : https://www.aircooledrdclub.com/smf/index.php?action=stats

That's cool, to be honest I didn't know this is available, anyway anybody can check it know.
https://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?action=stats

While it seems it stopped counting on 2017, maybe an error? anyway I'll check the log.

I run a motorbike Forum using SMF and there are detailed stats in SMF which we make available to all Members. Our Forum is "very" active  ( 83 million + page views in the last
8 years with only 5k Members ) and we have Members from all corners of the world and its run on a "help each other" attitude unlike on here where my initital impressions is that everyone is aiming to prove they are better at making curries or have better techniques and everyone elses methods are rubbish etc etc.  Our Yamaha Forum does not tolerate "any" abuse of Members and we quickly eject anyone who oversteps the line. Oh, and one last point, our Forum is run by myself and a few other volunteers who gain nothing financially as the Forum was built from scratch so it was never bought/sold and is "owned" by the Members and will never be "for sale".

Exactly, environment is very important