Styleforum Moving to New System! - Page 3  

For whatever reason I saw the huddler thread on MC first even though I never go there. Here's a copy of what I posted there: Not to be a hater or anything, but my old addiction prior to style forums, head-fi (head-fi.org) switched over to huddler and it became totally crappy. My understanding is that huddler took over head-fi and now manages its sponsorships and gets a cut of that income. It also promises to do SEM/SEO and drive traffic up and profits up. I could be wrong and I don't know that that's the case here. They brought in a lot of low quality sponsors which weren't on board before and there was an influx of really terrible posters that before would have been moderated out, but huddler moderators/admins were significantly more lenient with who they'd get rid of and would fight moderating decisions by original moderators. People hate the lay out (I don't know if huddler is responsible for this or this was the collaborative elements from head-fi's end). They also hated the interface as it was clunky and non-intuitive. Check out head-fi.org and compare it to vbulletin though. The search functionality became worse as is still is to this day as far as I know. Also other things happened like old ip bans weren't translated. The html for old posts weren't converted properly so finding them became difficult. Also several other nice moderating widgets that were built for vbulletin were not available in huddler. Many moderators simply gave up and quit. Anyway, some and perhaps all of these problems have since been fixed. And some complaints may simply be resistance to change, but yeah I leave you with this I guess. Moderators/Admins feel free to delete my post if you think I'm spreading any misinformation.: This video: http://www.huddler.com/about-huddler-new/

You're welcome to complain in this thread as well, but we have had a large number of people on the test forum, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly good. We studied the forums that they had converted, and we were very careful to get what we wanted.

Moderators will be chosen by us, and by us only (me and j), and they will moderate according to our rules, which will not change. The Huddler will have no hand in that whatsoever. We have full editorial control as well in a rock solid contract with the company. This will include veto powers over any ads. Actually, we were told that there have never been as many redlines in the contract as we put in and ultimately, got. This included a stipulation that the Huddler to build us a custom Buying&Selling platform.

We were approached by a number of groups and individuals, and ultimately, went with the Huddler platform because we think that they will be the best fit for us.

You may like the layout or dislike it, but as a relative luddite, (and j will testify that I can't do shit on the backend, nor do I use all the VB utilities) I find the PM system and the navigation a lot nicer on the Huddler platform.

Yeah in general I've always found your posts to be reasonable sounding and informative whereas I found Jude (Admin of head-fi) to be a money-grubbing opportunist even in person and I'd met him several times, so maybe your huddler experience will be much better! He would give preferential treatment to sponsors who posted and would ban/threaten people who linked to competing headphone forums. I think you are much more even handed in your moderation. It will be interesting to see if there will be an influx of new members due to huddlers SEO/SEM. I know that that was probably the biggest blow to head-fi. Head-fi already was already trending into obnoxious territory with incredibly high noise to signal ratio. I think given that Huddler had incentive not to moderate well there as more traffic = more $$ and probably more control over moderating decisions it quickly devolved into garbage. There are also differences in audience for the two forums. Audio, perhaps surprisingly, is way more prone to the influences of hype-men and mysticism and trend-slaves. When the population went up the parroting of flavors of the month went up as well. Veteran posters that generated good content fled to less populous alternatives (head-case.org). Anyway, I'm a consumer at heart personally so as long as the content is good I'm happy styleforum has given me a lot so I hope that things go well for it.

I'd like to address what you have in bold. Increased traffic is a double edged sword. Obviously, we want to have increased traffic, because without traffic and new membership, a forum dies. On the other hand, we want to make sure that the caliber of our membership and their posts remain high. In the past, we've done this through sheer luck. We've had several high profile mentions (in the NYT and in the WSJ) and the influx of good posters that stay has always outnumbered the bad.

As we move to the new system, we will have tools that will allow us to let our high quality posters lead by example. We will be giving some members special privileges to moderate their own threads. This will allow us to reward members who have consistently made great contributions, allow the forum to have focussed threads, while keeping the freewheeling feel that has always been a hallmark of Styleforum, and one of its strengths.

As for good moderators, we have recently make emptym a moderator for MC, Kyle a moderator for DT (yes, he's well suited it that,) and Brian, the original moderator for SW&D, will be taking a more active role. I've also empowered Pete (Shoreman) to build an editorial team who will be providing editorial content on a regular basis.

sorry ive been mia but ive messed around a little with the new site and i think overall its a much better experience. nothing is perfect and you cant please all parties but i think from its current form to the direction we are heading, this is an improvement

Whan is the new site estimated to go public?

We were shooting for July 1, but as you know, unless you are Apple, and your names ends with "Jobs", nothing is every quite on time. We are only slightly behind schedule, and I'm hoping that we'll be up and running in a week or so. There will be some glitches here and there, and we will be taking a month to fix that up. In addition, I've tasked the Mighty Shoreman12943462 to go to men's market in July, and to get geared up to do newsletters, so you guys should also be seeing a lot of extra content.

One thing that I would love to do, but I need to see what he prices are, is to have runway pictures from all the shows right here on the forum, so that there is no need to go to GQ, whatever. I need to get a jump on looking into prices there.

I'm not going to start criticizing other forums, and am interested in them primarily as a learning tool. However, if you look at Alexa, Styleforum is already the same size as head-fi, and this is pre-conversion, so we have a lot more experience handling new member influx. Our growth, pre-conversion to the Huddler platform, is the same as Head-fi's, post conversion.

We have, also, as you guys know, a small and close knit group of mods who have been working together for years, with the same goal of keeping the energy but limiting the chaos. The bar analogy, again.

There will be a period of adjustment for all initially, and as we settle down, we will access the successes and failures and will spend time tweaking the system to make it work better, forever (just like we do now.)

FWIW, this is not like Superfuture 4.0. The change won't be so jarring

Good to hear. Sufu's layout gives me a headache.

Are there any plans to implement an iOS/Android application for Styleforum? Going via Safari on my iphone is a pain -_-

Get Tapatalk, fool

is tapatalk the preferred app? how are the alternatives like forum runner, etc.?

if everyone uses tapatalk ill just buy that one