All of you have probably noticed how NP sort of died a few months ago. I accept responsibility for this, so...

My bad.

I'm not too terribly worried since NP has died about 5 or 6 times in its history and always comes back in some capacity after a few jolts from a PHP-written defibrillator which is now due to make another appearance. I've made other sites that have picked up swiftly starting from an audience of 0 so it'll never truly be over for NP.

So here's what I'm thinking...

NP6 was okay. However content generation was closed from the public and I was getting to a point in my life where I couldn't regularly generate content. My solution for this was NP7 (this version) which had extremely high ambitions and was based on crowd-sourcing content generation. Unfortunately I was never able to finish a single feature in full with the exception of the forum. That's right. Not a single one. The various UI's across the whole site are half-cooked and giving any potential visitors salmonella poisoning. So it's time for me to make some changes.

I'd like to run this plan of action by you guys (all 4 or 5 of you) to see what you think or to let me know if I'm totally out of my mind.

The Problems:

People don't generate content

Or rather, only .1% of users generate content. With 10,000 users, that's enough content to keep all 10,000 people interested. With 100 users, that's not enough to keep anyone around. The same sort of chicken and egg logic can be applied to the Knowledge Base. Speaking of which...

The Knowledge Base is inherently flawed

On a site designed for people considering themselves intellectually superior, it's kind of intimidating to post a question that could possibly show a breach in nerdiness. There's always the fear of getting a pompous let-me-google-that-for-you response.

Browsability of blog posts is terrible

It is. I never finished the UI. On purpose, actually. I wanted people to post a bunch of articles first to see what kind of content was rolling in which would help me determine the best way to present that sort of information. It's been a while and even though I have a small set of data, I really need to finish this.

Incomplete features obscure discoverability of things that are actually working

Learning Graph, Pulse, Nerdiverse, and Contests have quite a bit of screen real estate and definitely sound more exciting than "Blogs" or "Snippets" or "Search". It's easy to feel like the whole site is under construction and to give up on it. Anything useful is buried, even when you happen to click directly on them.

Solutions

Removing stuff that doesn't meet the quality or completion bar

I'm going to remove the Learning Graph, Pulse, Nerdiverse, the Nerdity Test, and Contests completely. For now, at least. I'll post my Convention-Logic-Art Learning Graph Node as a regular blog post and be done with it. Pulse and Contests are nice and help keep the community entertained but only work when there are at least a few hundred active people to propel them. I never really had a concrete idea of what I was going to do with the Nerdiverse. The Nerdity Test was novel when I created it in 2002, and although it still has a small ounce of traffic, it doesn't carry any of that traffic over to the other features of the site, which is the focus of NP. I'd like to re-invent the Nerdity Test into something new and novel and not just another spammy facebook feed-esque quiz. Perhaps the best way to describe the ideal incarnation of it is a cool feature that is actually "nerdy". But I don't have the energy or the users to justify focusing on that right now.

Redoing the UI of important things

I'm going to redo (and by "redo" I mean "actually finish") the UI for the Blogs/Snippets. The idea of NP7 is it would present itself like a tech/academic magazine. There would be thousands of half-assed articles written, of which perhaps 20 or so gems per month would float to the top of some hand-picked or user-rated ranking. These would make it to the snippets page and the front page. A random user visiting NP would see the front page and be presented with the best articles and a browsing experience that resembled flipping through a magazine. The other posts would still be picked up by search engines and would hopefully lead the user to the front page and eventually to the forum. I don't entirely know what this UI will look like, but I'm going to work on some mock ups and post them here for feedback. I would like it if someone nagged me each day that I don't do this.

Automating how articles "float" to the top

The current means by which an article floats to the front page is an admin has to hand pick it and manually post it on the front page. We are all lazy, so this needs to be automated somehow. By a user rating system, a traffic heuristic, or some such.

Actually writing stuff

Users don't come without content and content doesn't come without users. When I posted regularly on my own people came, so I will attempt to post regularly. If you feel the urge to write something, go for it. If you have the urge to read something you know that I know about, please let me know and I'll see what I can whip up, since I do spend a lot of time wondering what people wonder about.

Also, people who tend to write about this stuff in blogs anyway won't do it for another blog for free. That means I'd usually have to pay them in green pieces of paper that I don't have. The other means of compensation is back-linking to their site. I'd be paying in free advertising for them. This is how the very successful Zen Habits blog works and I'd like to give it a try. This was actually my original intentions. Notice the empty column on the right side of all blogs posts. That space was going to be a customizable mini-profile/bio/back-link-shout-out of the poster.

Using the KB

It's not just about adding more content, but also lowering the "fear bar" of being a first poster. If you have a question, go ahead and hit the KB up before Google.

Set clear goals for blogs and make a workspace

If people think it'll be useful, I'll create a drafts dashboard/workplace page or something.

The one problem I didn't address is the inactivity of the forum. I don't think this is something I need to address specifically and will take care of itself once the site starts building enough momentum to perpetuate itself. People will naturally find their way over here. In the mean time, everyone go create 5 threads!

Let me know what you think or if there's anything else that you think I could do that would liven up this place.

Thank you!

Please, keep the contests, though. They are fun....

I accept responsibility for this. (Granted, it was a forum instance, but still, learn from my mistake people.)



I feel that the best system would be doing this sort of float to the top for general posts and then hand-picking them to get to the front page from there, to weed out any ones that are popular but not so great, but to do that this sort of framework would be needed anyway, so I say go for this for now, and implement a "to front page" admin button again later if need be.



And I keep not writing any of the articles that I promised. Stupid lazy thing. The blame for this is on all of us.

Before you go busting your butt to write new stuff, it might help if you fully transitioned the old posts from NP6 over, since there were quite a few good ones there. Less work with a nice reward.

As for the forum, I wonder if the weird timestamps might intimidate people enough to push them to "I don't want to stay here." But I don't know. Perhaps having the timestamps all have a question-mark next to them leading to a translation of that particular time and an explanation of what it is? (Granted, that's more work for you, but if that is a problem, that's my only idea for a solution that doesn't involve ditching O'Harian time, which we cannot have.)



What contests? We've had one or two since NP7 launched, we used to have one a week. The interface is just going away for a while, the contests are already gone. It'll return when the contests themselves return.

It makes me a little bit sad to see some of the features disappear. On the other hand, I completely understand. Setting out on something this big was a little ambitious, and with all the other stuff you're doing, it's become a little too much. I feel as though this is going to make good progress, although I still don't know what, exactly, is going to get this site going in the first place. I have tried on many occasions to drag my friends or family to NP, and they have never listened.

I've been kicking around some content ideas myself, but haven't bothered to start putting them together. This sounds like a good time to start on them. Also, as Deckmaster mentioned, we do still have a lot of unported content on NP6. At least some of it is worth bringing over.

I noticed the navigability problems with blog posts a while back, but I also knew that categories were supposed to precipitate out from the posts at some point. Now seems like a good time for that.

The Knowledge Base seems to have a small but occasionally interesting stream of questions. I think it's worth keeping, but it does probably need a UI overhaul (and probably some category restructuring, too).

As Blake noted, Drengnikrafe, we have a bit of experience reviving the site from near-total user collapse. Once, even, we had the site totally shut down for a month during a nuke from orbitrewrite. Content, forums, nerdity test, all of it. Only the IRC channel was active.

Overall, I'd like to see fewer features in a finished and usable state (maybe even polished and shiny) than a sea of orange barrels and gravel. That said, though, are there any features we're cutting that you'd like to see kept, or any from previous versions that you'd like us to bring back?

EDIT: I've also added a content suggestion thread.

All of this sounds fine to me. The only thing I would add is that you would probably at least want a notification to the admins when something makes it to the front page, if not using Deckmaster's idea, just to make sure nothing stupid gets there.

As a newer user who has watched the progression of NP for a long time, I can see where a feature like the Learning Graph has potential, but at the same time, the type of articles included may as well be instructive blog posts or lessons from the past.

I would also like to mention that the precedent should be set that the Knowledge Base should be for the advanced user with a technical issue down to the novice that needs a step up, even if it means showing a weakness. Just because you can Google it up doesn't mean that you will easily find a helpful solution, as often times I find that a human explanation from someone who had learn it can be much more helpful than a textbook explanation.

I don't know what you had planned for lesson type articles, whether as blog posts or formal contributions, but as blog posts, make sure there is a way to keep the helpful articles, fun posts, and everything else separate, or easily separated.

I can't wait for some of the stuff to be finished.

I left for a while, due to the lack of technology and stuff, but I'm back. I cant wait to use the KB more, since I'm graduating early and therefore have a lot of gaps that need to be filled.

Hopefully my stupid questions will make others feel better and erase that bar you speak of.

I think the contests are good, becuase they keep people interested. If we start one and start spreading it around, maybe more people will join for the contest and eventually start browsing the site. It has a lot of cool ideas and such, we just need more people. With new people come new ideas and also the forum goes up.

Blake and Admins, keep posting notices too on what some of the users can do to help get NP more popular.

When I first read the 'types of learning' node for the learning graph, I was pretty excited to actually try it out. If you choose to just drop the learning graph, I recommend you keep making interesting, new features that nobody has seen before. It seems, however, that as you've begun to add more and more features, they all sort of get lost in the wind. When I first came here, the site had a defined focus (contests, nerdity test, and articles). It would be nice if the site had a specific feature it focused on, and then everything else sort of trailed behind.

I think NP has far too few active members (I only visit once in a blue moon) for the KB to work. At least for me, none of my questions have been answered (correctly), and I've ended up going to other sites. I used to pose all my questions to NP first, but now, I only do when I can't find an answer anywhere else. If you look at sites like yahoo answers or stackoverflow, their sites have fully developed question/answer systems. Plus, they have thousands of more users that can answer your question. If there were more users and the KB turned into a major focus for the site, it could have great potential.

I've noticed that the site's design has steadily been going downhill since I first came (sorry if I'm being blunt). The theme for the site pales compared to some of the earlier versions (even those really old versions). I mean, the design is good for some business site. Let's face it, every web design company uses the same design as a cookie-cutter for business clients. The earlier versions of the site were nerdy and exciting. But if I were a newcomer visiting the site, I would probably think it was boring. I think since most of the survivors are long-time NP-goers, the site design hardly matters anymore. But to newcomers, the design of a site can make a big impression. I think a large reason why I never use the blogs feature is that it looks terrible, and I'm sure you'd agree and didn't intend it to be completely finished. Personally, based off of first instinct with NP7, I didn't want to use the blogs because it was boring to look at.

Going a long with that, I think a major portion of the loss in users is the illogical navigation. Not necessarily illogical just... difficult? I liked how organized everything used to be, especially the articles. Now that most of the content is user driven, the organization has lost importance. If I was a first-time user coming to the site, I wouldn't know where to go to look for an interesting article on Java programming. Its not obvious that they should look in Snippets to get to any articles, nor are the snippets categorized nicely. Plus, I don't think that any newcomer would want to click all 11 navigation links only to find half of them are under construction or have hardly any content. As they say, on average, the internet surfer will only stay on a site for three seconds, just based off of first impression.

Okay, I probably told you everything you already know, so, I'm sorry if it felt like criticism. I hope that helps a bit.

This is really great feedback.

Step 1 is out of the way. The links have now been uncluttered. Now I'm working on a navigation system.

What about the front page?

I liked the idea of the "nodes" it seemed really cool. Once your done working on the site, will you continue to work on a lot of the ideas that were incomplete? I was looking forward to those becoming part of the site.

It is my impression of the nodes that their problem was that: A) Nobody was working on them, and B) They were effectively just blogs about interesting information, and then questions about said blog. The same thing could be accomplished in blog form, and then tied together with a much simpler code.

There was no way to work on them. The Learning Graph was never completed.

<Insert long nag here>

Thanks.

<nag>
Please, full speed ahead!
</nag>

Nag!

You should probably take of the 'learning graph awards' from the user profile page.

NAG!!

Nagging isn't working, we have to move on to torture. Moongirl! Bring me the Uwe Boll movies!

*hands you the movies* GREAT IDEA!!!

I thought those were banned by a Geneva Convention.

Also, NAG!

When did the US start caring about the Geneva Conventions?

We could also get movies that were covered by MST3K, only without the MST part. I hear those are pretty bad.