To me, the sentiment among the staff is "we want more members, but we don't want to change Wordforge too much from what it has been for so many years." It's the idea of preserving the spirit of Wordforge while making room for new members and getting their attention. I think that's the goal anyway. That's my goal.
If we are putting out the "nobody should know about this place" vibe, that's not intended. I just think the twitter account shouldn't be left in the hands of every random thread title we mange to throw up there.
I think the "nobody should know about this place" thing comes from many of us not wanting our real-life acquaintances to follow us here, because WF is where we cut loose, play around, and don't have to worry about whatever interpersonal politics govern the other aspects of our lives. There's probably also a feeling among many people that we need to make sure we don't treat growth as an end unto itself. But neither of those are incompatible with sending stuff out on Twitter to see what interesting people might happen to stumble across us.
I think part of that feeling is due to Google's all pervasive presence. Post something to vent here, and it's possible for that information to find its way back to others. I mean, you expect Facebook to lack privacy, but a small message board, one of millions, proverbially out in the middle of nowhere? But thanks to Google, the tiniest website with a handful of posts can be linked to other pages or people, and before you know it, that site which gets a hundred views a year is in the top 20 listings of Google's results page, and that's without somebody making those connections on purpose.
I like that the owners are trging new things to try to attract new members and raise the site's profile. That said, some of it might need some fine tuning. The targeted tweets or trending tweets sound like good ideas but I have no idea how to do such things.
As I said above, I'm not opposed to some automation, we just need to close the loophole exploited today. And in the mean time, it's not critical that any of the three people with access to the account be on top of manually matching the frequency abilities of the bot.
Ok, I was thinking of human readers. If we're mainly using Twitter for SEO, I can see how the automated tweets make sense.
I'm also curious. There does seem to be mixed signals here? Should I stay or should I go now? Etc (good song)
The owners care, the staff cares. No one gets paid to do this, it's done out of the sense of community we have here. As for membership, the optimal thing is to have people willing to join in and read, think, and discuss. We, and by "we" I mean anyone invested in this board whether it be emotionally or financially, want to not only grow but flourish, and that only happens if good stuff goes in.
I didn't mean to offend. As I said, just received some mixed signals from members. I have, fortunately met with a few friendly's, so I'm not giving up!! Thank you for responding and all your efforts.
You will find, no matter how long you are here, that there will be people telling you to leave, even asking you to kill yourself. This smilie is sometimes quite popular: But it's just a form of community humor. It isn't really a thing, least not from most of us.
