Please Keep Us Better Informed About Site Status

[TQ]

Originally Posted by Dread

Is it just me? Where is the "Home" page with all the latest posts on the right side of the page?

Not just you, it's me, too.

[rjs735]

Wooper or more appropriately woopra is a tracking packages that breaks down what you were looking at on this forum and the others. I assume Sanjay is using it to track activity by forums how many users what are they looking at and or for.

Would be nice to have Sanjay respond to this woopra issue. If I can call this an issue. IT IS FOR ME.

I am just not sure where we are headed for since he wants to turn this multi forum thing into a paying business. I can only assume that there may be a schedule of fees offing in our future??

It might be nice for him to issue a mission statement maybe he did and I missed it??

The front page issue is still unresolved. I guess with the integration it's low priority. We lost some of our significance when we were absorbed instead of being stand alone. Dare I say we may have become insignificant??

[traveler]

Originally Posted by rjs735

Wooper or more appropriately woopra is a tracking packages that breaks down what you were looking at on this forum and the others. I assume Sanjay is using it to track activity by forums how many users what are they looking at and or for.

Would be nice to have Sanjay respond to this woopra issue. If I can call this an issue. IT IS FOR ME.

I am just not sure where we are headed for since he wants to turn this multi forum thing into a paying business. I can only assume that there may be a schedule of fees offing in our future??

It might be nice for him to issue a mission statement maybe he did and I missed it??

The front page issue is still unresolved. I guess with the integration it's low priority. We lost some of our significance when we were absorbed instead of being stand alone. Dare I say we may have become insignificant??

What's the woopra issue with you?

And YES ... Where is that front page ... I use the info on it constantly ... left column, news column, right column, tabs at the top ... Where is it?.

[rjs735]

The issue is when we were stand alone prior to the sale there was not at least no overt tracking other than posts etc but within the confines of abxzone.

For those that want to readup on woopra here's the link Woopra - Website Tracking and Analytics

The use of woopra may infact document for purposes of advertising. So in fact we could see a wave of ads for various tech products hardware and software in our future. Nothing wrong with that but it would be nice to be informed. But the truth is Sanjay doesn't have to keep us in the loop he does it to be kind and or courteous. He needs us for the info we provide because without it the abxzone would not be worth much.

We had to ask to be kept informed about system availability. We have to ask why is woopra tracking our movements.

I would much preferred to be told that certain things were going to happen. I may not be able to change it but I knew about it in advance.

In the old forum that we all help to build some of us both financially and also with our collective talents we had a stake and interest in abxzone. I don't think in that regard we have any stake whatsoever we just provide our talent and Sanjay will be making the money off the info we provide. There's nothing wrong with that per se. As long as we all know what's going on.

Have you look at the bootom line of abxzone it says it is member of the crowdgather community. If you look at http://www.crowdgather.com/about.cgs look for the finacial officer. Is this maybe SONJAY??

So maybe his money maybe comming from web forum hosting?? It would be nice to know but again these are his business plans he may not want to share with us.

Just my .02.

[traveler]

Thanks for the link rjs735. I'll check it out.

I (and I guess a lot of other Buds) hope the front page gets restored soon.

[rjs735]

Bottom of every page are links

about http://www.abxzone.com/forums/about.php

Legal http://www.crowdgather.com/legal.html
the above when linked to from abxzone comes back as not on this server.

Last one http://www.crowdgather.com/

So to read the legalese you have to go to crowdgather as well as there are 2 links in about that also have to be accessed from crowdgather.

Then why put the links in that don't work the way they are supposed to.

[Drufuss]

Okay....

i knew it would happen.
i understand why.
i just would have prefered to be informed and somehow involved. (not only money. if i feel it fits, if i'm comfortable with it itt'll be okay)
but i'm uncomfortable, i feel not informed.

Greetings

Dru

P.S.:If i was someone browsing through forums, i'd skip abXzone without a proper frontpage! Hope this will be restored soon.

[rjs735]

DRU and everyone else. My feelings are that they ( whomever they are ) have some kind of surprise that they will be unveiling on a new front page. At a minimum a new look again after all the attempts we have gone thru to always come back to the one we have. But we don't have much of a voice it seems anymore. I for one am thinking of alternatives to abxzone. But I will wait and see.

I agree with a blank front page people in general will leave and not even investigate the forums.

In some ways I'd like to see the statistics to back up my guessing ( time for sharing some woopra data??). It would help the situation in this case.

[polonyc2]

Originally Posted by rjs735

Wooper or more appropriately woopra is a tracking packages that breaks down what you were looking at on this forum and the others. I assume Sanjay is using it to track activity by forums how many users what are they looking at and or for.

I am just not sure where we are headed for since he wants to turn this multi forum thing into a paying business. I can only assume that there may be a schedule of fees offing in our future??

hope that's not the case...maybe I'll use 'Invisible Mode' more often then

the merging of all these forums (with new ones being added all the time) and making it into a money making business while understandable from Sanjay's point of view has made ABX into a corporate entity of sorts...no longer the small town forum where everybody knows your name and more the big conglomerate where you're just one of millions of little dots

all the while someone else is profiting from my web browsing habits and forum clicks?...I guess we'll have to wait and see

I hope there's no 'schedule of fees' system coming...I remember a few years back when Hard Forum changed their policy and made the OT forums only accesible to those who paid a small yearly or monthly fee...I stopped visitng the OT forums after that and stuck with the tech forums alone

[PeterT]

What's going on? Where's my homepage?

[Dread]

[traveler]

Originally Posted by rjs735

DRU and everyone else. My feelings are that they ( whomever they are ) have some kind of surprise that they will be unveiling on a new front page. At a minimum a new look again after all the attempts we have gone thru to always come back to the one we have. But we don't have much of a voice it seems anymore. I for one am thinking of alternatives to abxzone. But I will wait and see.

I agree with a blank front page people in general will leave and not even investigate the forums.

In some ways I'd like to see the statistics to back up my guessing ( time for sharing some woopra data??). It would help the situation in this case.

Since 2001, ABxZone (and its former names) grew as a front page oriented forum reading Buds place where on the front page we could quickly see what Buds were online, what the latest related tech news was and what the latest thread topic discussions were. If that ABxZone community gathering place disappears, it won't be ABxZone anymore.

Heck, part of the ABxZone community feeling was discussing any possible changes to the front page whenever it happened. Remember all the design and idea contests?

[rjs735]

Since the frontpage issue is still not resolved and there is silence this is to me at least sending a strong message. Again my .02.

[k0NG0]

Let's not jump to conclusions... I would think the business model behind what Sanjay is doing is based on ad revenue (I don't know, but it's an educated guess). Mostly because pay-to-use systems generally just turn people off, and since there will always be free alternatives it's a good way of killing traffic. Also, with a central portal to a large number of forums, you can have levels of advertising, broad spectrum on the portal and more domain specific ads on the various forums. (Ensuring you can target ads to a certain type of viewer = worth more.)

As for the front page, I have no idea what's going on, but I can only assume it's some sort of hick-up what with moving servers around, software versions and whatnot.

[rjs735]

Kongo I hear you and agree with all that you say but the whole point of his thread was to keep us posted. Good bad or indifferent. And I for one don't feel that Sanjay is holding up his end of the bargain. Are they so understaffed that they can't give us a 5 minute update. I am just expressing what I am feeling. Sorry if this offends.

It surprises me that you as a mod would not be informed of the process going on. I would have thought that as a "MOD" that you would be informed and as an extension of the ABXzone staff could keep us up to date of the goings on but from your comments you know no more than we do Hiccup or not. It certainly could have assisted Sanjay to keep the info flowing to the masses on ABXzone.

I did availability management for a fortune 500 company for some 30 yrs and the one thing that works is communications. People feel frustrated when left out. Informed they may not like what's going on but at least they know that something is going on. I don't think any one here can say with any certainty that any thing is going on least of all communications.