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Make moderators explain why they have closed or deleted threads. Some moderating is rather high handed.
I disagree. As a moderator in another busy forum I must have spent 10 hours in the space of only a few days going through the sections I'm responsible for, answering private correspondence related to the same, discussing policies, decisions and cases with other moddies - maybe twice that amount of time since a thing or two "erupted". Moderating is a volunteer job usualy taken on by busy individuals, unpaid, untrained, often thankless and a bit like walking through a minefield aided by a sniffer dog that has a head cold. I assume that moderators have adequate guidelines as well as a support system of the team at large (?) to aid them in their decisions. How much to state in a forum, and how to state it, needs to be up to the mod, but governed by the site's guidelines I think.
Make moderators explain why they have closed or deleted threads. Some moderating is rather high handed.
I disagree. As a moderator in another busy forum I must have spent 10 hours in the space of only a few days going through the sections I'm responsible for, answering private correspondence related to the same, discussing policies, decisions and cases with other moddies - maybe twice that amount of time since a thing or two "erupted". Moderating is a volunteer job usualy taken on by busy individuals, unpaid, untrained, often thankless and a bit like walking through a minefield aided by a sniffer dog that has a head cold. I assume that moderators have adequate guidelines as well as a support system of the team at large (?) to aid them in their decisions. How much to state in a forum, and how to state it, needs to be up to the mod, but governed by the site's guidelines I think.
It wouldn't be hard to place an extra set of radio buttons/check boxes for "reason for locking/closing" that have a small set of values:
- inappropriate content - user complaints - violates TOS - just cuz
and then a text entry field that the mod can optionally add more detail if they'd like.
Clicking one more box wouldn't add substantially to the mods workload and they could expound more if they felt like it.
One thing to keep in mind. Assessing a small user fee likely will diminish the number of participants (law of demand and all that), and the decrease may be substantial. In plain language (hah) the price elasticity of demand may be quite large in the neighborhood of the current price (which is zero, of course).
I don't say this as an argument against the change. I'm agnostic about that. There are good and bad points about shrinking the group of active posters.
Many people use 'nuisance fees' to reduce unwanted traffic. A small user fee here likely would eliminate people who place a low value on actually writing posts. I suspect we'd see a decline in trolling and a fall in the number of immature postings from people who can't resist offering their .02 for free.
We'd also miss some golden nuggets to be sure, and the number of young posters likely would decline. These are people, for instance, who are much less likely to have access to credit cards and check books with which to pay PW fees.
The number of posts would shrink even more if the cost was assessed per post. After all, if the cost is yearly (for instance) once you jump the hurdle the marginal cost of an extra post is again zero.
[/quote]It wouldn't be hard to place an extra set of radio buttons/check boxes for "reason for locking/closing" that have a small set of values: [/quote] Having just gone through that as mod, there are pros and cons. Sometimes check boxes hold some meaning, but it's not the same as an actual reasoned communication. Personally I haven't found it that effective though one can have the impression of having said something.
I am more than willing to pay, but (*techno-ignoramus-alert*) I don't have the foggiest idea how to do it. You may not believe it, but I've never paid for anything online ...
My other concern is that if the new format has lots of pretty graphics and moving thingies, my dial-up speed (well it's dial-up for about half of each month) won't cope, and consequently neither will I.
Piano Dad - surely your analysis only applies if subscription becomes compulsory. If Frank intends, as he has said, to maintain a free service running alongside a higher featured subscription one, then he may not see a significant decline?
But it is difficult to see how Frank can generate a significant income stream from this forum as if there is a two tier system, there will have to be significant disbenefits for non fee payers - or few will upgrade to the paid service.
The poll itself is interesting. From a claimed membership of 35,000 or whatever it is, only a couple of hundred have bothered to reply. A good proportion of those say they are willing or might be willing to pay a fee. But a few hundred fee payers will generate peanuts as most will not pay if the dollar value is above a fairly de minimis level.
And Frank will also have the issue of dealing with foreign currencies unless he wishes to turn PW into a US only forum. I volunteered to make a donation years ago, but I have no dollar bank account and my email on the subject, asking how I subscribed, was ignored.
It is perhaps a shame that there is no sponsorship from piano manufacturers. I suppose the brand bashing that goes on here (and all forums) puts them off.
A final thought. I am a member of an active motorcycle forum. It sprang into being because most members belonged to another forum that decided to charge a membership fee before anyone gained posting privileges. The result - a new, free forum, was formed and membership shifted en masse in a matter of a few weeks.
Piano World does look and feel dated and cluttered, and is in need of major rethink and update. I wish Frank success with cosmetic surgery on his baby.
Originally posted by AJB: Piano Dad - surely your analysis only applies if subscription becomes compulsory. If Frank intends, as he has said, to maintain a free service running alongside a higher featured subscription one, then he may not see a significant decline?
Pianostreet for example requires paying membership to be able to write on fora, but offers lots of free sheet music for that service fee. There would have to be some added value for a service fee more than simply access to the current fora. There are Application Service Providers who can host a much improved version of what we have here at low cost. The barriers to entry for a new competitor to pianoworld are quite low.
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But it is difficult to see how Frank can generate a significant income stream from this forum as if there is a two tier system, there will have to be significant disbenefits for non fee payers - or few will upgrade to the paid service.
The poll itself is interesting. From a claimed membership of 35,000 or whatever it is, only a couple of hundred have bothered to reply. A good proportion of those say they are willing or might be willing to pay a fee. But a few hundred fee payers will generate peanuts as most will not pay if the dollar value is above a fairly de minimis level.
It would be interesting to see a recency, frequency analysis done on the membership. I would suspect that pianoworld might even have worse active member numbers than other genres out there given the focus on one-time, big ticket purchase support leaving lots of one time users long since disappeared in its wake. There might only be a core group of a couple of hundred people across all sub-fora who would pay a longer term subscription fee -- until the content became no longer entertaining.
My guess is that any fee on membership of the current proposition would have negative impact on participation with minimal or even negative financial contribution after cost of administration, etc.
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It is perhaps a shame that there is no sponsorship from piano manufacturers. I suppose the brand bashing that goes on here (and all forums) puts them off.
A final thought. I am a member of an active motorcycle forum. It sprang into being because most members belonged to another forum that decided to charge a membership fee before anyone gained posting privileges. The result - a new, free forum, was formed and membership shifted en masse in a matter of a few weeks.
Piano World does look and feel dated and cluttered, and is in need of major rethink and update. I wish Frank success with cosmetic surgery on his baby.
The piano world is a small market. Also, particularly in the US the sales and distribution model and most dealers' business results are not benefited by what pianoworld does in the piano forum. There is little advantage to be had from contributing financially.
I can think of at least 10 other more logical and more promising revenue streams than putting a tax on the free labour of those very few persons who give pianoworld any value add at all.
In agreement with theJourney, I would say that talk of charging fees for membership is not going to be successful. About half of the posts on PW are from people who are posting for their first time, and who often don't return after they have made a purchase of a piano.
I also agree that the forums have a dated look to them. I'm not sure how a social networking feature would look, but that is certainly the direction things are headed on the internet.
I could definitely imagine a kind of 'home page' for each member, where they could post recordings, pictures and so on. I think there are a lot of members who would do that, and more members would get excited about having their own pages when they saw other members' pages. In this way I think the PW forums could really help get people excited about pianos and bring them into the internet age.
For sources of revenue it seems like membership fees are outdated. Look at the most successful companies: google, facebook, myspace. They're all free and earn revenue from advertisements. From what I understand, you can post advertisements managed by google on sites pretty easily, and earn some money that way.
Why not solicit performer tie-ins? Manufacturer tie-ins?
I bet more than 25 percent of people looking for a piano do a search on google that gives them a PW page as a result. That is a huge piece of capital that PW has right there. People love pianos. People love keyboard music. That's not going away.
PW could also do some events to keep older members coming back. Since you have the email addresses of everyone, you could send out **occasional** notifications if you have a PW jazz festival or something like that.
The piano is sometimes thought of as being on it's way out, and the internet is still on its way in, so how do you capitalize on that??
First, by denying that the piano is on its way out, (there is plenty of evidence for this, for example the coolest new bands almost all use some piano in their songs). Second, by bringing what has been though of as being old (classical piano etc.??) into the internet in novel ways. I think it has to be a success. There are too many people who love pianos and computers for it not to be. It's not like this is an internet site about vinyl records, or printed books, or some other thing that is truly becoming obsolete.
Semi-pro pianist Tuesdays 5-8 at Vince's West Sacramento, California
I hope Frank is listening. Frank, if you want to make money from piano world then there are lost of creative ways of doing it, but you really need to start adding some new, modern day value to members.
Statistics on the zillions of page views you get each month are all very well, but the reality is the number of active and loyal members who stick around, is fairly small. The challenge is to grow this number and find ways of demonstrating to the industry at large that they can capitalize on this such that they and you can obtain revenue streams from PW.
Dealers could certainly be encourage more.
The piano buy and selling aspect has barely had the surface scratched. PW could be the eBay for pianos. Indeed why not for a wider range of musical instruments.
Why does PW need to be restricted to pianos at all. Why not be a forum and marketplace for a wider variety of musical instruments? Many PW members are multi instrumentalists.
Why the continued resistance to a chat place - the Coffee Room died years ago but demand (and related site traffic) still appears to be there. It could also be a depository for threads that the moderators feel are getting out of hand elsewhere on the forum.
I fully agree with Charles Lang's thoughts about personal home pages. I can see this going down well on the PC and AB forums. And also in a new "dealers shops" forum. As for the shops side, I feel it is likely that a major trick is being missed on the digital side of things.
Come on Frank, lets have a radical rethink. Before someone else does it and pinches your members. (The Larry model is an irrelevance here. It was never marketed and was too focussed on entrenched views of a few).
While I'd love to see chat (amoung many of the other suggestions), I think Frank is right to consider changes cautiously. There's always the danger of diluting PianoWorld to the point that it's original devotees would no longer be attracted to the site.
Yeah, I went back and looked again at Frank's original post. He wasn't talking about compulsory membership in order to post.
Nonetheless, if the options available to a free rider are minimal we might be in much the same situation.
And yes, I do think the benefits to Frank of charging might be quite small compared to the hassle, especially if the fee is designed to sweep up most current posters.
If the premium membership is good stuff, but inessential for basic participation, it might induce more of the regulars to pony up.
Good feedback everyone, thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts.
The barrier to making improvements to PW and the forums isn't lack of desire or ideas (although I've certainly read some great new suggestions in this thread).
It's lack of funds. Sure sites like Facebook are primarily advertiser supported. They also had millions of dollars in investment money to play with, and most sites like theirs didn't make a profit for years (in spite of spending millions).
I don't have that luxury. I built PW out of my own pocket. A few of our regulars have been kind enough to donate/subscribe, and we've made some money from the online store.
Advertising revenue is beginning to grow and become more viable, based in part on the fact that our classified advertisers are seeing results.
And yes, page views are still a measure of the popularity and "stickyness" of a web site, and used as part of the decision process by online marketers.
Unique visitors is the other important metric, and we average over 11,000 unique visitors a day. So no, we aren't relying on just our core membership of the forums to drive the viability of advertising on PW. And yes, the industry is starting to take notice (albeit slowly).
I have lots of ideas for changing/improving PW, and features I'd love to be able to offer. But it all costs money, and can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars.
This leaves me in a catch 22.
I think redesigning PW and the forums, and adding more features (including some suggested in this thread) would certainly help us grow and attract more people.
It would also require money, and I don't see any VC's stepping up to shower us with capital so we can expand and grow.
It is evident that only the core group would consider supporting any variation of a subscription model, and they already have stepped up a number of times.
I will continue to chip away at improvements as funds and time allow. We may grow slowly, but we will grow.
Again, thanks for all the suggestions ideas and opinions.
I hope you all enjoy the coming holidays.
This will be my first year in a warm climate, a little odd to me. I moved away from "home" in August, starting a new life that I hope will include eventually making PW my full time concentration.
My Keyboards: Estonia L-190, Roland RD88, Yamaha P-80, Bilhorn Telescope Organ c 1880, Antique Pump Organ, 1850 concertina, 3 other digital pianos ------------------------- My original piece on BandCamp: https://frankbaxtermrpianoworld.bandcamp.com/releases
Me banging out some tunes in the Estonia piano booth at the NAMM show...
Several months ago, Frank upgraded the system and some new features were added. A spell-check is one of them and if people don't use the "Full Reply Form' they do not know it even exists. At that time, he requested voluntary contributions. There was a drive, in several threads, to help out. I have no idea if it was successful, or not. I do appreciate the increased speed of down-loading pages and photos.
I think of Piano World as I do of National Public Radio or Public Television. I don't have to contribute to receive the service, but I choose to.
Have you? Have you ever contributed financially? If you have, are you current or lapsed? (Ahem, some are visibly lapsed.)
The basic format of Piano World should be kept free and open to all. This is where people come with questions about buying a first piano or learning out about prep, regulation, or voicing. There is nothing else like it.
For all of us regulars, wouldn't it be worth it to help with a membership fee so that this fundamental service can be maintained? Do we need a ton of bells and whistles?
I sincerely hope this does not become "Piano-FaceBook" or "PianoTube." I do not need a homepage or a friends list. It is about pianos, not about the latest IT technology.
It is for the sharing of information about pianos and our joy of playing, and owning, and cherishing them.
One huge asset of pianoworld is the amount of knowledge in the forums and also given freely by members. Why not organize it? Wikipedia won't allow pages for very specific things like a certain model of piano. But pianoworld could have a 'pianopedia' function.
As a model, take a look at http://daviswiki.org This is the first city wiki, with pages for individual restaurants, even pages for individual street signs and telephone booths, believe it or not.
Wikispot has sprouted many city wikis modelled on the wiki from Davis. From what I understand, the software is there, and either free or very cheap, so starting a pianopedia would be something that could get going within days or weeks for little more money than server space.
After some time there would presumably be a page for each of those obscure old American pianos that people keep asking about, along with all the rest of the invaluable knowledge that the techs on the forum have.
As far as performance, you could have a page for each of Mozart etc. works. Pages could have links to famous interpretations that have been posted on youtube, and of course historical information related to the pieces and scores when copyright has expired, (or lead sheets for jazz pieces!).
Semi-pro pianist Tuesdays 5-8 at Vince's West Sacramento, California
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