Originally Posted by
DGrant
Obviously there's many problems. I contend more then they can disclose in any thread. I haven't looked at this site in probably over 3 months, and probably all total just a few times in the last few years. So I'm going with "none of the above". I registered with this site probably a week or two after it was launched in 2001, and was a moderator for a few years or more. It really rocked, I remember when it hit 100,000 users. It was a party, with new users registering every day, and using it frequently. Sponsors were flocking to it, advertisers couldn't sign up fast enough...
Every change since about 2006-2008 has it slipping down a slope though from what I can tell. At some point it was taken over by an entity that really made it tough to use. It seems like it's just treaded water for the last 10yrs.
The Market Place is ridiculous and hard to use, there's no origin dates on any threads so you can't see when anything was originally posted without hitting on it, and the list goes on. I'm not wanting to bash here, but these are just a few of the issues I as a user have to deal with.
I certainly wish it could remain and evolve to a better site, but now today I finally log in, and there's a prompt to vote on what we think is "more important". Those kind of polls create more division then anything else you could do. I cringe when I see/hear those kind of polls. I've seen those things split clubs, churches, and organizations right down the middle, and nothing gets resolved...
How about this... You guys think about it, come up with a site plan, and if I/we like it, we'll be back. Get rid of the politics of what your users think, and be creative, do your jobs, make it work, make changes where needed, and if it doesn't work, you do it again.
If you can't keep up with it, maybe you're in the wrong business. Know though there's almost 19yrs of history(not to mention this site apparently took on the older RCOnline at some point early on also if I'm not mistaken).
The most important thing you can do is come up with something that works and appeals to your users. Don't ask users what they think, do your job and get creative. Entice us, make users(like me) want to read your site. I don't want to see 19yrs of information go up in smoke, but it's inevitable if you guys don't get with it.
I thank you for this thoughtful reply! I would like to address some of it.
I can't speak to changes as far back as 2006-2008. Way before my time, and even before IB bought the site. But I can speak, again, to the reasons for some of the changes we have made, including the marketplace.
The current RCU Marketplace is the best RC classifieds marketplace on the Internet. I know this because I've looked at the other guys, and all they are is a bunch of forum threads. They split off a subforum, called it a marketplace, and walked away. Our marketplace is a separate product, within the forum software, with features specifically for RC sales. I do get that we lost some features when we moved from the old RCU marketplace to the new one; but at this point, we are not comparing old RCU to new RCU -- we are comparing RCU to everyone else. And we're the most feature-rich, RC-specific marketplace around, period.
Now, let's talk about why we changed from the old RCU marketplace to the new. It's the same reason we are running this current poll: the site we purchased 10-ish years ago was custom-coded in Coldfusion, and is not as compliant with modern security standards, nor is it upgradeable. It's got to be rewritten from the ground up. So we did that with the forums. Then we did it with the most important part of RCU (outside of the forums) -- the marketplace. Now, we are running this poll to determine what parts to work on next... and to some extent, what parts we can just let go.
As such, we don't see asking our members to help us determine our technical priorities as a "political" act. We see it as necessity. We only have so many resources, and rather than spend them rebuilding something nobody actually cares about, we want to spend them on things that matter to this community.
Forums are hard. This isn't 2011 anymore, and people have other ways of getting their RC info. But we are sticking with this, and dedicating ourselves to making RCU the best RC site on the Internet, just as we have with the Marketplace. If you'd like to consider returning as a mod and helping directly with that, please talk to Ken. If not, I hope you'll consider continuing to give feedback -- believe it or not, nobody ever suggested that including in the search results page the original post date of a Marketplace listing was even desired until your note here. We could do that. We can do other things too; but not if they don't occur to us, and not if nobody says, "hey -- this would be cool."
Yes, this is a challenge. Stay with us for the ride.
-Paul