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Website changes
Can someone who can make changes, please look at the member directory area of the website?
Consider reformatting the directory so it does not take 39 pages to go through the current 776 members. If the directory is only going to show an avatar and a name, 20 per page with a huge space between each and no way to jump into the middle of the listing makes it extremely painful to review the listing.
Also, the search feature leaves me cold. I guess I do not understand the value of the fields which are currently left as available for searching. The first thing that comes to my mind for the search would be to find kindred souls — folks who live in my area (start by searching on state) or those who have a similar faceting machine (which is hard on a good day because of all the variations in spelling — Fac-ette, Facette, GMII, Gem Master, etc.)
In addition, a similar request about the forum.
It seems there is too little activity here for the number of members. Are there things that would help get more sharing of information? For instance, I don’t see an easy way to subscribe to the forum. It looks like there is a subscribe, but it is not at the top forum level. Would having posts arrive by email be a way that more members would use? Also, would it work better if there were fewer categories? I have a couple things I am thinking about that I might post (one of these days when I have my thoughts better organized and a bit more time) but I am really not sure which category might be best suited. It isn’t like there would be all that many threads if there was only two or three categories in the forum.
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3 Replies
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I can comment on some of the questions. Members can be searched by state (if they entered it) from the general site search (the magnifying glass symbol at the upper right). The machine used (again, if they entered it) can be searched from the membership page search. I don’t know what a search mechanism is supposed to do about variations in spelling. You can try entering partial names, like “fac” to find members who use Facette, but you’ll probably get some false hits.
I agree that we have too little activity. Any suggestions will be welcome. I really doubt that reducing the number of forum sections would help.
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Probably the reason the forums see little use is that many of us now use Facebook for so much and there are some excellent pages there for faceters. Also, I still belong to the Listserve, which comes automatically in my email, so it’s convenient to access. I just don’t think about coming here for information, unless I’m coming in to view the newsletter. I don’t need one more completely separate forum.
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I must have missed checking the box about being notified by email for responses.
If USFG still supports the Yahoo list as well as this, then that is a huge part of why so little activity here. I thought that list was to be phased out. Maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part. As Gail noted, having an additional place that one must actually browse to see if there is activity is not motivating. I would really like to see the number of subforums here reduced and have an easy way to get the activity by email. Make it easy to participate.
Unlike Gail, I am not a big fan of the facebook groups. I have looked into them but they are not easy to use for someone who does not wish to spend a lot of time on Facebook. Posts get hidden, there is not a subject, and in general, it has always seemed to me to be the wrong tool for the job.
As for the search, I tried it again. This time it came up with ten members from California. Previous to the changes I was able to do a general search of the membership and was getting something like sixteen. And two of the members which showed up today are not ones that appeared previously. At least one of those who has disappeared from the search is the other individual from my area. I can find his profile if I search and get the public name right.
Obviously if it is 10 or 20 members listing California in their profile, I suspect we need to find ways to encourage our membership to get their information into the database and to participate in the group.
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