Ruth, it does eat into your bandwidth. First the bandwidth to upload 10m+ files. Secondly to stream it to you as you listen to it. If you didn't want it eating into your bandwidth, use Windows Media Player to listen to it from your own machine. And really, lets ask ourselves how many people will own the copyrights to post music? And again, how relevant is that? Do you choose your bank based on who offers music players on their website?
Whistles and bells are fun to play with and generally attract people who want to play with them before they get old hat. However whistles and bells are not meat and potatoes and as such leave you a little hungry for something more.
Over the years, we have introduced many whistles and bells. Those that provide long term value to the community stay and become folded into the site. Others go.
Unpacking an off the shelf web package like SocialGo doesn't suddenly create a community no more than unpacking any off the shelf community software. Trying to poach people from here won't create a community either. The many sites over the years that have taken this path in a vain attempt to recreate our success generally get populated by disgruntled self-exiled geeks who form rather... hollow shells that bustle in activity complaining about here (like Steve's comment on tweet about not wanting tweet to get biased like we all are over here
). Well, thats all good and fun for the whiners, but when the dust settles, well... Whats left to do apart from spam each other?
So about once a year, another site pops up trying to duplicate what we have here. One day I am sure someone can pull it off and create a real compliment to SalonGeek, but in the meantime the mods and I will have a new URL to forward the banned users to instead of the
traditional one.
Since I am on a roll here. I'll take a minute to address a couple other points that have been brought up in this thread.
We will discuss a tanning forum again, but I'll share with you the reasoning behind the lack of one now. Less is best when it comes to forums. More forums means more searching and sifting and duplicate content. You also split activity between multiple locations which has an odd effect of decreasing activity in both areas. Obviously if activity has gotten to the point where it isn't beneficial to have them lumped together, then that is the point it needs to change, however it must benefit the majority of the users while respecting the needs of the rest (aka the 6,000 people a day that come here). We have split forums up like this before (The Nail Geek forum) but got better synergy when we merged them.
Geekmolians were fun. The reason they left is because of a couple security holes that were identified in the system that handled them. I looked into fixing them, but it wasn't my code and tbh, it was written so poorly and so messily that it would have been better to code my own from scratch. I simply don't have that time and the reality is that they didn't add much value to the site other than they were kind of fun (which is still value). One day they may return, but it isn't a high priority.
Geekbay. Think I covered that earlier. I still wake up in a cold sweat on that one.
Chatroom. Covered that too. It isn't top priority to get fixed because the reality is that it wasn't a heavily used area of the site. Better visibility and usability would make this more of a core feature, but that bridge will have to be crossed after the major update later this year.
Pager. I actually miss this one the most. Like Geekmolians, security issues were identified in the system (which I didn't write). I spent a great deal of time reworking and rewriting the system from top to bottom, but sadly had to shelve it for awhile to focus on other issues. Ideally I would want to combine the Pager functionality and some chatroom functionality.
Links, articles and tutorials are all getting royally revamped later this year along with the social groups and blogs. My goal is to integrate these areas far more to simplify communication and give better, relevant exposure to the user in a more intuitive fashion. These changes may be phased in after the upgrade, but a lot will take place during it.
I am also looking to revamp the calender and events system, but not sure yet if this will take place in the big upgrade, or come later. The team have also discussed plans for event notifications/model requests/salon space area for interim use. We will see how the upgrade progresses first.
Music player. No. Won't go there. :lol:
Think that about covers the waterfront and after creating that overview, I think I need to spend less time blabbering in this post and more time working on the next version
Rock on Geeks
