Reply To: Dedicated JoCo Cruise Crazy Shadow Cruise website
I’m on record in the past as being in favor of improving our existing forms of communication over starting a new one, mostly for pragmatic reasons, but also because clearly these forums were intended as my own personal fiefdom and threats to my power must be quashed.
In seriousness, though, I have a few questions. I don’t bring these up to discourage this endeavor, honestly; if we can come up with good answers, I think it’ll make this better.
Most basically, my sense of the problem we’re trying to solve is mainly that what we’ve got now’s too fragmented — there’s info in these forums, in the Facebook groups, on the wiki, and maybe other places I don’t even know about. (It might have fringe benefits, like reducing the crowding out of non-cruise JoCo talk around here, but that’s incidental.) Is that an accurate statement of your goal here? Have I left something out?
It might be worth understanding, then, why our existing solutions aren’t enough.
- I’ve been on Facebook Temperance for a few years, but maybe you guys could fill me in on what’s missing from the Facebook groups. My sense is that it’s not a great place to archive information, but my last contact with Facebook was many redesigns ago.
- I do know some general problems with fora — as welcoming as we try to be here, they can be a little intimidating to join, and with this many people, threads get really long, so it’s hard to know if you’re asking a question that’s been answered already. (Plus, the search function in this forum software is terrible, we all know.)
- Wiki similarly has a bit of a barrier to entry. Also, so far, it’s better as a repository of information than really a good place to communicate and collaborate — it’s hard to have a conversation in a wiki.
(I think I’m cribbing some of this from a conversation I had with @julievil on the boat.)
How will this new CMS be better than these? What specific flaws in the current systems will be handled in a better way here? For instance, if overlong threads are a drawback to this forum, how will we fix that in the new system?
I understand the Platonic goal of one website to rule all Cruise stuff, but in order to get there, we need to do a lot of groundwork to make sure people know about it and choose to post there instead of / in addition to in the social networks they already use today. My sense is that it’ll take a lot of effort and buy-in before this is comparable in utility to the groups we’ve already got. What do you think?
And (sorry if this question seems pointed, it’s not meant to be) is it more useful to spend that effort on creating something from scratch, as opposed to improving the flawed networks we’ve got? I realize we can’t really “fix” Facebook exactly, but we can make these forums (and the wiki) better. (I do want to discuss how we could improve these forums, but that’s a subject for a different thread.)
Fundamentally, in trying to unify fragmented cruisetalk, how do we avoid fragmenting it further? If I’m someone who wants to talk about the cruise, then if we can actually get all cruisetalk moved to the new site, then my life’s easier, sure. Until we get there, though, if I’ve got a fourth place I’ve got to check now, and I’ve got to worry about making sure I crosspost my stuff to yet another place, then my life hasn’t actually gotten easier. Do we need to kill cruisetalk in the forums/wiki/Facebook for this to be effective? (Basically, this.)
Again, I’m not trying to dismiss this idea! I’m hopeful that whatever does result from these questions will help make this more useful.
Thanks for taking the initiative to set up the site, @sapphiremind! It was great to meet you on the giant boat thing. (Completely off-topically, but while I’ve got you — if you want an instrumental version of the Elements Song, you can always go to the source material.)