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Print ArticleSo, I have a little free time on my hands... what to do with it? Improve the site, obviously! I have lots of ideas of my own, but I want to have your input! After all, I didn't built this commenting system for nothing! Something you want to see? Something you would change? Browser specific bugs you encountered? Is the site easy to read? Drop a comment! Don't be shy ;)
I'd love to hire a professional designer to help me, but obviously, I'm a poor PhD student, so I think I couldn't afford it (maybe I'm wrong? If you know about this stuff, feel free to email me!). Everything on this website was done by me on my spare time, and I'm no graphic artist! I'd love to give a Mac style to this site, at least for icons (you know what I mean, the OS X kind of icons with glare)... even if I hate using Mac computers! If you feel you could do better category icons or site logo feel free to contact me (email at the bottom of the page).
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One thing I've noticed is that there are few stories with more than two or three comments.
It could be that the news is coming so quickly that there are too many stories to discuss, and the ones that are discussed are swept away in the flood.
In addition, while registration prevents spam and other forms of abuse, it also raises a barrier against impulse posting. Slashdot (a prime example of a blog that gets a lot of discussion) allows posting as an 'anonymous coward'. It also has an extensive moderation system to weed out the junk.
So, what to do? If you can make discussions hang around longer, and relate to more than one story (perhaps done by category instead of by story), that would concentrate the comments. Additionally, if you allow anonymous posting (at least until the community has reached critical mass) you would get more involvement. You're using CAPTCHA-based authentication for registration; you could use that for anonymous posting, to allow only humans to post stuff.
Anyhoo, just a thought.
Yeah I noticed that too (and some users notified me of the situation by email too) and it saddens me a little; I spent a lot of time integrating phpBB in the site (not just adding a forum, but integrating the comments as phpBB threads IN the forum).
We had anonymous comments for a while, but the spam we were getting was outweighing the insightfulness of the anonymous comments ("Its cool!"). The problem is, I can't mod the forum that often (being a PhD student and all) and even with CAPTCHA-based security, some trolls always feel that it's worth their time to post some links to some odd fetish sex site.
This being said, I think you're right. We don't have the necessary critical mass of people willing to share ideas about the news posted here. Can't compare to Slashdot, tough; they get millions of hits per day, and we get about a thousand. Their moderation is also #1, but require lots of interested people.
Another problem is, there's lots of news (too much?) being posted here. The stories stay on the front page for 2 days - after that, they are on the left sidebar for 3 additional days, and if they're popular enough, they show up in the "Top Biology News" section. There's also the Recent discussion box in the right sidebar. I implemented these things to favorize comments posting.
Even then, we get the occasional comment once a month, so something isn't right - or people don't want to talk about the news. As I said, I'm making some changes in the site design right now - I hope that some of them will help discussion here, cause one of the primary goal was to develop an intelligent biology centered community here, where people exchange ideas, talk about current events in biology, etc.
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