Member-Only Access

[graphex]

Oh no... not allowing guests to browse is a horrible idea, and I am almost certain it means the beginning of the end here.  :'(

I found this forum by searching google when I had a question about the festool angle unit (491588).
If the google spider (which is a 'guest viewer') can't index the site, festoolownersgroup.com will completely drop out of all search results within a month.

This really makes me sad. Usually when something like this happens, it is the owner beginning the process of taking down the site because of some lack of motivation to continue it.

Matthew, I implore you, listen to the words of virtually every commenter on this thread, and don't do it! I was about to donate, but I would have donated to preserve the culture here. This decision, based on my experiences as a web developer for the past 15 years, is a death sentence - albeit a slow one - for any community driven site. Matthew, I recognize that you are the 'owner' and put a lot of time into this, but it is still only driven by the community. When that community is essentially frozen in place, membership will initially spike as guests who have seen the benefit of the forum join, but then will drastically fall off in about 6 months, at which point the inertia of loss is tough to stop.

If given the choice between keeping open browsing and requiring paid membership to post, I would much prefer the latter, as it still maintains a searchable presence to attract membership. Searchability (i.e. by search engines like google) is an essential component of any website attempting to maintain the critical mass of a community. I've seen a number of community driven websites take ill-advised leaps like this one, only to either recant in 6 months (sometimes recovering, sometimes not) or quickly decline into uselessness.

If you really can't continue to support FOG as it is, please look to your users to get alternative moderation, hosting, or management in place. My gut feeling is that you're sick of it, and are trying to bow out via the route of slow decay. Please look to the members for help before going that route!

 

[graphex]

I'm trying to find reasons why Matthew would want to make a decision like he apparently just did, and I really can't find any other than to slowly kill the site. When I make a pro/con list, the only pro items are essentially exit strategies which result in no FOG in 6-12 months. After seeing (and, unfortunately, moderating) several community driven forum sites die, I've come to appreciate their fragility, and recognize the warning signs. Arbitrary and major changes to guest/membership policy without the positive input of the community is pretty high up on that list of warning signs.

Some of the folks have wondered if maybe bandwidth costs were the issue, but that doesn't ring true to me, unless the whole concept of actually hosting the site in the first place is the underlying issue. It is at least worth doing the math to estimate if, in the absence of comment from Matthew, bandwidth is likely to be an issue.

First, let's determine our guest persona. This person found FOG through a web search and linked to a discussion. Each discussion page shows 30 posts by default (I believe) and since guests aren't going to be getting the pictures, we can just look at the size of the text. Each post is typically 1-2k, so we'd probably be looking at about 40k per page (page 1 of this thread is 38k). Just to be conservative, we'll say that each page is 50k.

Now, we'll have to make some assumptions about behavior of guests. I'm going to estimate that the average guest will look at 10 thread-pages per visit. I would guess that is about a half hour to an hour of reading, and seems about the length of time a guest might stick around in a typical visit.

So, if we're looking at 10 pageviews @ 50k apiece, each guest would be 500k of bandwidth for their entire multi-page visit.

Hosting plans vary widely, but for a VPS server that could host something like FOG, the price range would be typically be something like $100-150/month for 500GB of bandwidth. If one guest visit does take 500k like I estimate it would, we'd be looking at 1,048,576 guest visits per month before hitting the bandwidth of the estimated hosting plan. Of course this doesn't factor in members, but even if we say that member visits take 10x the bandwidth of a guest, we could assume that each of the 4033 members could still visit 10 times a month while still allowing 645,276 guest visits.

Let's go another route to reverse engineer this and look at the stats reported by the website. The most useful one to me appears to be the Average Page Views Per Day, which is 9711.19 right now. If we figure a 500GB/month bandwidth plan again, that means 16.6 GB/day (in a 30 day month), which, if split amongst the 9711.19 pageviews FOG is averaging, allows for 1,847.9 kilobytes per view, which is much higher than what my estimated page size is. (I came up with about 50k based on a dozen or so pages, assuming most of the graphics are cached; even if no graphics are cached, none of the random pages I looked at came to over 1400kb, and most were around 200kb)

If there are, indeed about 9711 page views per day, a >1MB/page allotment is very generous in terms of page size. Certainly member-posted images can eat that up faster, but... once again members aren't the issue here - it is guests who can't see images anyway. To me, this calls back into my mind the question of what one would try to achieve by locking out guests, and again, the answer appears to be to decrease membership, not guest visits.

 

[Matthew Schenker]

All Right Everyone,
Wow, I knew that opening the idea of a members-only forum would create a reaction, but I have to say the response has surprised me.  Seems like a lot of members value visitors.  Well, so do I!  Which is the reason behind all this...

Before getting into the details, let me respond to the concerns Graphex raised.  This is not a comment on the health of the forum.  Not only will this forum continue to get my support, but I have plans for some interesting new features in the next couple of months.  This forum has become an essential part of my day, with all its activity, ideas, personalities, and challenges.  For those of you who don't know this, I'm a freelance writer and college professor by profession (I teach professional communication), and a hobby woodworker.  This forum has grown into a living, breathing, vital being that represents a lot of what I care about.  At the risk of sounding overly bold, a lot of what you see as patterns and signs in other forums may not apply here.

I'm just going to throw out a bunch of points and see where it takes us.

Maybe I should have opened this up for discussion, rather than announcing it.  Then again, it's turned out, unintentionally, to be an interesting experiment in how much people value the open nature of this forum.  Whether I meant it as a debate or not, it certainly turned into one!  Of course, I could have locked this discussion, but chose not to, which seems to tell me I really wanted a debate rather than an announcement!!  All very interesting...

I need to boost membership for various reasons.  This might sound odd, but I know that a lot of sales-related outfits are using this forum.  I have no problem with that, but I'd like it better if they were contributors, or at least searchable members!  You might ask, what's the big deal if sales outfits use the forum but don't sign up?  Hmm...what's the big deal?  Very good question...

Another element: I need non-commercial membership to better reflect the real usage of this forum.  A lot of people get a lot of value from this forum, but are not officially represented in the member count.  In the US, and around the world, I'm trying to make the case that there needs to be more involvement from Festool branches in the forum.  Numbers help prove my case.  How can I get more people to sign up?

I've got forum logs showing so many stats it will make your head spin, and I could use those stats to prove to anyone who's watching just how active this forum has become.  I'll say this: it goes far deeper than what you see here in the actual postings.  But looking at those forum logs is, kind of, well...deadly boring, as boring as watching dust settle in your non-Festool shop.  Much more interesting to just scroll down and see all the people from around the world, and all the dealers, showing up as part of the forum.

Remember folks, I'm just tossing out ideas here...

This gets into some complicated details, but there's a real need for visitors to become more visible.

A members-only forum seems to be one way to create a kind of membership drive...Then again, based on everyone's response, maybe members-only is not the way to go here.  Then again again, I do need to get more of the sales-related lurkers to join, and I do need to boost documentable international representation.  Then again again again, maybe there's a way to increase membership without going the members-only route...

These are the kinds of frenetic considerations I wake up with, and now that the semester has ended I have a little more time to think about them!  Mostly, I try to shield members from this sort of nuttiness.

Or maybe it's not so nutty...

Or maybe such care is a sign of a very healthy forum!

OK, it's 8:36 on Sunday morning, and my wife is gonna kill me if I don't get those built-ins done in my living room...That won't be good for the forum.

Matthew

 

[Bob Marino]

  Hello Matthew,

Phew! Thanks for the explanation and mostly, thanks for offering your time and work in creativing this most excellent of forums.

Bob

 

[Matthew Schenker]

Chris,
Thanks for your post.

It is important to say that all I'm asking is for people to sign up.  They can use whatever name they want, and they even have the option of hiding their e-mail address if they want privacy.  They can then continue lurking.

There are middle-of-the-road options here.  For example, I could make some boards open to guests, but not all of them.

I do want to respond to one of your statements:

...it seems that Festool tools have become a smaller part of the discussions here.

A quick look at the FOG stats page will show that the ratio of Festool to non-Festool discussions is about 5:1.  Far and away, an overwhelming number of our discussions are Festool-specific.  And a large part of the non-Festool discussions are at least related to Festool (like taking photos of your projects).  Other than that, it is natural for any vibrant forum to have an "off-topic" zone, and that zone will grow over time.  I think what you're noticing is that off-topic discussions have increased, and that's true, but Festool-related discussions have increased about five times as fast.

Matthew

 

[Per Swenson]

Matthew,

I know as much about running a forum as I do about

the Madagascar Bugeyed Aye-Aye.

Which leads me to the big question, when and if implemented,

how long until you realize it was either a good or bad idea and what will be the consequences

if the decision wasn't so good?

Per

 

[Matthew Schenker]

Per,
I'd probably be able to tell in maybe a couple of weeks.  I could watch membership numbers -- did they go up, down, stay the same?
And the decision can be reversed or altered any time.
Matthew

 

[ccmviking]

Matthew,
      You'll need a good login/register page that quickly explains what this site is about and WHY people have to register to enter.  My thoughts are that many people don't wanna spend much time filling out registration forms, and don't want to give out personal information.  If you can quickly, up front welcome folks and explain that you don't need much info from them but it is important for the board to run correctly/efficiently you can probably get folks to sign up.  I know that initial contact could make a big difference in whether someone "clicks" the "Register Now" button or little red X in the upper right.  I support you in whatever you do with this as I'm for some reason not emotionally attached.  I'm registered so I guess I can continue as normal, huh?  Thanks for everything.

Chris... 

 

[honeydoman]

I think it is neither a good idea or bad,  big deal just sign up and go at it.  if you decide to sell advertising in this site, which I think is one reason you might be doing this, which is fine, maybe wrong.  however, never do the pop up adds that block out what we are trying to read.

 

[Michael Kellough]

1. I need to boost membership for various reasons.  This might sound odd, but I know that a lot of sales-related outfits are using this forum.  I have no problem with that, but I'd like it better if they were contributors, or at least searchable members!  You might ask, what's the big deal if sales outfits use the forum but don't sign up?  Hmm...what's the big deal?  Very good question...

2. Another element: I need non-commercial membership to better reflect the real usage of this forum.  A lot of people get a lot of value from this forum, but are not officially represented in the member count.  In the US, and around the world, I'm trying to make the case that there needs to be more involvement from Festool branches in the forum.  Numbers help prove my case.  How can I get more people to sign up?

3. A members-only forum seems to be one way to create a kind of membership drive... maybe there's a way to increase membership without going the members-only route...


Matthew

There is a very simple answer to all of the above, raffle tools to members.

Better yet, raffle tools to contributing members only.

I am interested in knowing the answer to your question in number 1.

 

[Steve Jones]

Mathew, speaking as one satisfied customer to your forum I thought I'd throw in my two cents worth:

You havent made one bad decision so far in running this forum that I can see, which seems to be proven by the general quality of membership and discussions. The only slightly tiresome thing about the whole experience is the feeling I get occaisionally that I'm actually in a meeting of old ladies who don't get out much.

My only suggestion to the forum design is a slightly toungue-in-cheek idea that you change the button currently labeled as "Post" to "is this really relevant?" 

 

[Cannuck]

While I may not be the most active contributor, I have to say that I wouldn't have joined this board without first seeing the value as a guest.   I have resisted joining Facebook, despite the huge pop culture phenomenon that it has become, for the very same reason - that I will not join something that I haven't at least viewed.  I am not going to join the lemmings as they jump over the cliff, just because everyone is doing it.  I won't buy a car without test driving it.  Furthermore, I probably wouldn't have bought as many Festool tools as I have, without having read the contributions to this forum first.

I'm all for contributing to support the expenses of the forum, but closing it to guests will put a severe chokehold on attracting future contributors.

I'm sorry I don't having any answers, but I do have reservations....

Rob

 

[Michael Kellough]

My only suggestion to the forum design is a slightly toungue-in-cheek idea that you change the button currently labeled as "Post" to "is this really relevant?" 

I know what you mean Steve. This FOG on FOG stuff is really frustrating. Sometimes I muster up a thoughtful reply, sometimes just a few words. And sometimes I just have to shutdown the computer.

 

[Per Swenson]

My only suggestion to the forum design is a slightly toungue-in-cheek idea that you change the button currently labeled as "Post" to "is this really relevant?" 

Sometimes real life funny is way better then the shmutz I make up. ;D

Per

 

[The Dude]

I am going out on a limb here with this post.  But I just couldn't be quite on this.  This is merely an observation, and I have tried to remove as best I can my business from the post.  Posting still as a business man, but not as a Festool Dealer.

Matthew, perception is reality to most people; to expound this idea into a virtual world of "on-line personas" I can only imagine the "fun" you must have looking into your screen.  Thanks for getting back to us on your original post.  On Mother's Day to boot; I will say that Darlene is looking forward to having her name in Green.  At breakfast this morning, my phone notified me of your post and we scurried home to read the onslaught of replies that were sure to ensue.

Colloquially speaking, as a "sales-related outfit" the FOG represents a significant tool in acquiring information about a dealer, a tool, a repair issue, etc.  to many lurkers / no posters.  The sales and marketing objectives, be it direct or indirect, that are realized is not so much pointed nor felt by to those who are "major contributors" with regards to posting.  Judging from the Forum stats, the VAST majority of posts come from an EXTREMELY small number of people (if truth be told, a truly negligible percentage of sales with FJ are attributed to this minority); but, rather the lurkers, non-posting members and occasional posters that are on the forum looking for advice / guidance with purchase or tool usage, etc.  The issues with ?sales-outfits? that don?t register, but still utilize the power of the FOG, is that they are NOT playing by some fairly finite rules that have been set within this forum?so I applaud you for "bringing in the reins" so-to speak.

Numbers don?t lie.  If plans are in the works to present statistics on the Forum, the first step is to get accurate numbers.  As an operator, I simply can't say to an institution "my number are... x...I think."  We deploy tremendous resources to get accurate numbers on our website.  I agree that matching an IP address with a log-time and click track is well.  I would use a few more colorful words placed in front of the word "boring" but it would be necessary if the goal was to gather information.  There have been numerous instances that have required me In order for me to follow a referring link, I have had to join a forum to view it's content.  From Stereo Speaker forums, to Electrical repair forums, etc.  and YES, even some woodworking forums.  This is just a thought; If support from Festool branches (I am not sure if you are alluding to current dealers on the board as branches?) is your objective, then  empirical data is crucial ...so I applaud you again.

Side Note:  I have tried in the past to contribute to the forum cause (long before the membership donation thread).  The answer to my request was no.  I must say that the FOG has shown remarked restraint in keeping the FOG free of the possible perception of favoritism; I strongly commend the Forum administration for keeping to their guns on this objective. 

From a business aspect, as the owner of website that sells Festool products, I must say that I am respectfully not in favor of the "sign-up or don't view" strategy.  I am not sure what the answer is to obtain the Forum goals would be, but I do think that this would inhibit potential guests from peeking around the green curtain.  Furthermore, it may inhibit them from returning at a later date when they want to get on the slippery slope.  If FOG's goal is to drive membership, but the goal of the Company that you champion is to sell their product, this may be a double edged sword.

On a more personal note, neither  for nor against the "members only" idea.    I don't have any objections to this type of action, other than, in my opinion, it may deter many folks.  The FOG is such a wealth of information and ideas, Festool and otherwise, it may be a shame to limit access, but again, I understand the considerations.

A few suggestions if I may be so bold:
1. A New Member must endure a moderation period.  A new member may not post and run.  There must be a criteria met prior to being given un-moderated posting privileges.

2. Put a session limit on Non-Member activity.  Let them get a taste of the FOG, and then shut them down after 3-5 minutes of lurking.  During this session limit, allow all privileges,  excluding posting, so they can see what we are all about.
 
3. Turn on the security and the cookies.  Gather IP addy's and DNS

4. Make new members run the hoops.  E-mail confirmation, Password sent, log-in to change password, etc.

Our Forum regulates itself.  By putting the FOG police on patrol, we will be able to check on corporate / "Sales outfits" working the FOG unchecked.  If there is suspicion of "wrong intent" we will catch it.

Whatever the decision  is, I am in full faith that it will be an equitable and fair decision.  That is not to say that I will like it, but I will certainly accept it and abide by the rules.

Sincerely,

Tim Colwell

 

[Daviddubya]

...I need to boost membership for various reasons....Another element: I need non-commercial membership to better reflect the real usage of this forum...How can I get more people to sign up?
...Matthew

Matthew - I understand that you are attempting to boost membership by requiring registration.  I'll go out on a limb, and make a prediction.  There will be a surge in new members shortly after you close the forum to guests, simply because those interested in continuing to view the forum will be forced to register.  After the initial surge, the new member count will drop off, because potential members do not have the ability to check out the site before joining.

I am a member at a number of sites, both forums and commercial sites, that offer something I want.  I cannot think of a single case where I joined a site the first time I visited that site.  I always want to browse first, to see if the site interests me.  I am suspicious of sites that require registration from the start.

I suspect your objectives will be better served if you can find a way to allow guests on a limited basis.  Surely, guests are your primary source for new members.

 

[clintholeman]

Matthew-

I've seen quite a few members only lists.  Many, many lurk for a while then join.  If one can't look around, it is difficult to decide whether or not to "buy".  Even FesTool has dealers where folks can try the goodies.  Lists need to have that kind of feature as well, IMO.  You will likely see a bump then a long slide.  Perhaps the technology is such that you can allow short term lurking [sampling] and then require a membership.

That being said, I would agree with an earlier poster that you have made a lot of good decisions about this list, and it is yours to run as you see fit.

 

[graphex]

Well, Matthew, I'm certainly glad to hear that your intentions are to improve the improve the board and not to stem its growth. Now I'm going to try to give some advice from one "webmaster" to another instead of acting like chicken little yelling the sky is falling.

Ok, I hate the term 'webmaster' and rarely use it, but it does seem apropos when talking about the person running a forum with 4000+ members. Back in the BBS days, the term was sysop. Oddly enough I was a member of a woodworking BBS back in the day (i.e. when I was 12). But I digress.

So metrics are certainly an important thing to get ahold of. In the more typical large website, whether it is e-commerce or a blog, the goal is frequently to get people to sign up to the 'e-newsletter' or the 'coupon mailer' or whatever, so the user can get marketed to more directly. Usually there has to be a value proposition to the user before they get any response, so any amount of enticing content is created to encourage signups (I just finished this site for the IZZE drink company for an example of this). Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting those value propositions in place just to collect a few thousand names, but before that conversion happens there is a whole lot more information going into the stats machine for commercial purposes. There is also a whole lot more value for guests that comes directly from the company (and their marketing budget).

Tracking doesn't just have to follow signed-up members around. You can actually get a good number of metrics just from the HTTP headers - IP address just being one of them. It sounds like you are getting some stats, or actually, it sounds like you are getting too many stats and one thing that may help you is to get a better package in place to give you fewer, better, more marketable stats. If you don't already have it in place, I would highly recommend google analytics to help better understand and market the overall readership. It is easy to set up, they just give you a line of code to put in your footer, and it also tends to improve your search engine result ranking.

Which brings me to my main point - search engines. To a web developer, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is this voodoo cult where these witch doctors come in and give you all this advice which is supposed to improve your search engine result ranking, and usually it does this while also making your website look like crap. Nevertheless, there is an entire (voodoo witch doctor) industry built around SEO, underscoring its importance, and - from time to time - actually issuing good advice. In the case of this forum, that advice would be to note the single biggest problem with member-only access: the fact that you'd be shutting out the search engines. There are some voodoo witch doctor things you can do to open up the forum to search engines but not to guests, but they're not easy and change frequently, and often involve animal sacrifice.

The only non-animal sacrifice way of allowing search engines to index your site is by leaving it open to be readable by them. It is important to keep in mind that search engines only update about once a month, so if you're going to experiment you won't see what actually happened for at least a month. If you shut out the search engines for may, then turned them back on in june, and google was working off only your public pages for may during june, you'd notice a drop in june, after you'd already turned guest access back on. At that point you would have trouble separating the loss from search engines from the gain by having the guest access on again. So if you're going to even get useful metrics, you'd have to perform an experiment for 2 months, essentially losing the membership you'd get from people searching google for the whole summer. You'd lose the Kapex bump!

I'm trying to read between the lines a bit here and see what some of your underlying goals are. Certainly more commercial involvement is a goal, and my points of better metrics for non-members and better search engine presence can help with that. Now you want to increase membership. Or, as some might put it, you want to convert more guests to members. This has to be a win-win marketing savvy value proposition type of thing, and the points that cutting out the guests would chop that conversion process out completely should be carefully considered. In my opinion the best answer is to provide a benefit (in addition to the ability to post or see media) that a person receives for going through the trouble and privacy invasion of signing up. You guessed it, ads. No, not the annoying cover-everything ads, but the simple text-only ads that appear between post #3 and post #4 on a page. Only for guests. Getting a username turns them off and is just another reason for a guest to convert to a member.

Of course, you are limited by what SMF can actually do, and I haven't used it before, but it looks pretty customizable. Even if you have to pay for customization, it could be offset by the ad revenue. I wouldn't expect any member push back on this, either, as there is no difference to members, because members to not see ads. (I won't get in to your third tier of member vs contributing member just yet)

That's about all I've got right now. Just to recap: non-member metrics, search engines, animal sacrifice, value proposition, ads. Don't forget the animal sacrifice (preferably on the altar near the googlecano).

 

[Michael Kellough]

Now you want to increase membership. Or, as some might put it, you want to convert more guests to members. This has to be a win-win marketing savvy value proposition type of thing, and the points that cutting out the guests would chop that conversion process out completely should be carefully considered. In my opinion the best answer is to provide a benefit (in addition to the ability to post or see media) that a person receives for going through the trouble and privacy invasion of signing up. You guessed it, ads. No, not the annoying cover-everything ads, but the simple text-only ads that appear between post #3 and post #4 on a page. Only for guests. Getting a username turns them off and is just another reason for a guest to convert to a member.

Now this is an interesting proposition!

Sean, the Izze site is very cool.

 

[nickao]

okay I am making another comment in this thread.

Graphex you are a pro, what about this idea?

Matthew only need find the most used pages. Put together a mini suite of info open to anyone. Maybe ten of the mostly informative pages. Must include what the site  is about and helpful threads abpout Festool solutions to common Festool problems and questions and the benefits of membership. At the end of the ten pages you must sign in to be a member and actually participate in the forum. If the ten pages bring people in and keep the FOG in the Google search, it works.

The sampler should be enough to wet the appetite of anyone wondering about the forum or Festools. This could even be a small separate site that just links to the membership forum at the end of the read. Linking these two together as well as letting my web site and others link to the forum "sampler" and actual FOG site will increase the google hits.

I am no pro, but I definitely get over 15000 different Ip's hitting my web site every month and I am just one guy working in his garage. Honestly, I can not handle anymore leads or work created from my simple home made web site. So I never considered getting a professional designer, I am completely buried now. I do not think Matthew needs a professional web designer to increase anything.

A small sampler web site linking to the membership forum would be simple to implement and maintain, I know because I do my own. And what I propose is far simpler than what I even have. The sampler site only need  be updated every month or two to keep hot in the google search.

What do you think? I do think your ad idea for guest is a good idea.

Nickao