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New User
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| Nicely done, gentlemen |
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Admin
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Location: Dallas, Texas | we aim to please. glad you like! stay tuned for further developments.... |
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Member
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Location: Poland / Switzerland | a couple of ' must-haves':
- some sort of 'combined list' - all books each year, from all the pools, including nominees (I understand that it may get wide, but nevertheless, you guys figure it out)
- quick vote / read / reading / taggin - as a hovering, ajaxy widget when you select a book (for instance, from the abovementioned list)
- a separate listing of read / unread / reading / on my reading list items for the user to get organized easier
- what about hugo/nebula short stories?
- what about other major non-english awards? french? german? spanish? russian? polish? (just to name a few important sf&f countries other than the english speaking ones) |
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Admin
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Location: Dallas, Texas | luke,
thanks for the feedback. let me answer your points:
- some sort of 'combined list' - all books each year, from all the pools, including nominees (I understand that it may get wide, but nevertheless, you guys figure it out)
this is in place already. if you go to any award report you can click on the year in the left colum and get all award winners and nomnees for that particular year. you can also get to that report by clicking the award links at the top of the novel page in the details section. we'll be adding some kind of direct link to the main books page eventually as well.
all the column and row headers on the reports link off to other reports or details for the awards themselves.
- quick vote / read / reading / taggin - as a hovering, ajaxy widget when you select a book (for instance, from the abovementioned list)
- a separate listing of read / unread / reading / on my reading list items for the user to get organized easier
these 2 items are on our list. we have a member section called "My World" under development that will have all the stats of the books you tag. you'll have in one place a favorites list, reading list, favorite authors etc. as well as some charts showing all the books you have rated etc. look for that in the coming weeks.
- what about hugo/nebula short stories?
our goal is to cover novels right now. we starting with the award nominees and once we get decent coverage of those that are in the database now we will open up to other novels by the award nominated authors. (phase 2) after that we'll open up to all SF/F novels in phase 3. short fiction will come some time after that.
- what about other major non-english awards? french? german? spanish? russian? polish? (just to name a few important sf&f countries other than the english speaking ones)
well, we only speak english. no plans to cover the other languages at this time other than a vague notion that in some far off future we will investigate the possibility. we really have our plates full right now just getting what we have shaped up. as you may have noticed we're a little threadbare on some of the content.
our plan is to make the site a wiki site in future so the content will fill in much more rapidly then. baby steps for now.
let me know if you have any more questions and thanks for your interest! we'll be letting you know about new features as we add them in the new features thread.
- dave
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Member
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Location: Poland / Switzerland | Thanks for your extensive reply.
Now that I see how communicative you guys are - KUDOS, GRATS & THANKS. The site seems to be extactly what I've been looking for for quite some time. Since I am a fan and an aspiring writer (though with my non-native English, don't expect me to contribute to New Voices anytime soon), it's always been a great help (and fun!) to read and study the best works. For the time being I had been keeping track of my reading list by other means. With WWE I can hopefully get rid of all those notebooks and spreadsheets. 
The site has a lot of potential, so I'm pretty sure fans will flock quickly and contribute a lot.
Keep up the good work. |
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Admin
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Location: Dallas, Texas | luke,
thanks for the kind words! we're really excited to be opening up finally after years of work on the site. i'll be doing my best to keep the communication lines open especially now in our beta phase. we've got lots of great ideas and features in store and we're always looking for ways to make the site better.
WWEnd came about because we've been looking for something like this ourselves. how many mediocre SF/F books have you read? i've certainly read too many over the years. picking off the bookstore shelves is a bit of a crap shoot. with WWEnd i've got at hand the best of the genre (in english at any rate), reviews and ratings from serious fans (hopefully these will start filling in) and a forum in which to discuss these books. if i use all the stuff on the site i should end up with a pretty good read every time.
i know what you mean about spreadsheets and notebooks! i suspect a lot of others out there have done the same for years. it's one of the most exciting features for me. my personal goal is to turn the whole page green with a smattering of blue!
- dave
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Admin
Posts: 288
Location: Irving, TX | Thanks for the comments, Luke. We're working on most of your suggestions already, and will get to the rest eventually. We really hope you use and enjoy the book tagging feature, and are very proud of its functionality. |
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Member
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Location: Poland / Switzerland | Icowrich,
I've just noticed your avatar image. I wonder - am I not the only person who played Fallout 1 & 2 while reading Canticle at the same time?
Cheers,
Luke |
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Regular
Posts: 92
Location: Boston, MA | .. ,but why so few members and participation?! website is well-designed and quite equipped i wonder why it isn't very populated |
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Admin
Posts: 4006
Location: Dallas, Texas | hihik - 2010-04-18 10:00 PM .. ,but why so few members and participation?! website is well-designed and quite equipped i wonder why it isn't very populated That's a good question and I'm afraid I don't have an answer. My guess is that people come to the site and don't take the time to look around and see all the cool stuff. There are a lot of SF/F sites out there so we have lots of competition for eyes and most folks are clicking away before they get very deep into our site.
We get a lot of traffic but it's been a very slow build up in members. Our conversion rate is pretty low despite our efforts. Of course, most of our efforts go into improving the site not in advertising for which we have no budget. We're concentrating on building the best site we can and we hope that the word will get around eventually. If anyone got any ideas on how we can attract more members we'd love to hear them!
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Regular
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Location: Boston, MA | this site seriously beats a crap out of most other sf-boards with 5th-grader's-dreamweaver-homework like designs. i'll definitely buzz and tweet it.
Edited by hihik 2010-04-18 11:12 PM
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Veteran
Posts: 207
| I've wondered this myself, awesome site but not a lot of forum activity. In general though more traffic will get you more forum members and more signs of life over time. The best way to get more traffic is to look at how the current traffic gets here and do more of whatever that is, ie get a positive feedback loop going. I suspect adding more links in wikipedia pages would be a good start as I suspect google search and wikipedia will be the biggest sources at the moment. |
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Admin
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Location: Dallas, Texas | Well, thanks to you both for the great comments. Always good to hear you guys like what we're doing. I think as far as the forum goes there is some stiff competiton out there from a couple really big forums that have been established for years. Heck, I'm a member of two other forums myself. Very hard to break into when the conversations here tend to be a bit start-stop. I try to stay on top of the activity but sometimes it's just me responding so folks go elsewhere where they'll get more and better conversations. We've not had hit that elusive critical mass yet for the big growth we need to sustain the forum properly. Bit of a catch-22. We need more people participating in order to get more people to participate. It's getting better all the time but we're still relying on word of mouth for now. We get a lot of traffic from Wikipedia and Google etc. but most of the people that click through are just window shopping or looking for something specific. They generally don't stay longer than a few seconds cuase there are other links to click. For instance, we recently got a big spike in traffic from the SyFy channel broadcast of Riverworld via Wikipedia. I suspect they read the synopsis or excerpts for the books and moved on. At any rate, it didn't result in any increase of signups but perhaps they'll come back and use the resources in future. Converting them from visitors/lurkers to members is the hardest part. I suspect people are getting saturated with "online communities" everywhere they go and getting more reluctant to signup to yet another one. I know I feel that way sometimes. Any thoughts? |
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Regular
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Location: Boston, MA | nicely summarized, Admin, you're absolutely right, so is htaccess - the website needs more traffic which can subsequently be turned into members. one way to increase traffic would be to make a one-time visitor come back again. i hate to be a critique with fewer than 10 posts under the belt but i mean good - this website lacks a "catch", a retainer which would make people come back again. true, you guys have an extensive database of books and links to other sf&f websites, but that's very static. i'm here for 3-4 days now, i'm very excited about the website, i added the books i've read to my profile, skimmed through your thin forum .. and now what? i don't really have a reason to come back.
one reason to come back would be something that changes daily that i'd come to read and discuss in the forum. so what is interesting and changes often - news! i'm guessing none of the creators are industry insiders and breaking the news is improbable. well, that leaves second hand news from other resources. value add to the user would be a collection of these news in one place with opportunity to discuss them with other likely minded people. what i'm bidding is why not do a daily (other -ly) round-up of everything sf&f from around the internet - from items on sale to upcoming movie releases. doing this, however, would require someone to be on this full-time which seems like none of you can afford (am i right to assume that this site is a side project to your jobs?). so this is a problem i see and one solution i could come up with. please, don't banish me for calling the site static
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Admin
Posts: 4006
Location: Dallas, Texas | hihik, you've hit the nail on the head.
Most people who become WWEnd members do just what you describe. They take a few days to tag all their books and look around then they find something new to read and off they go for a week or 2 to read it. Then they come back to find another book and off they go again. Which is fine, of course, that's what the site was built for: to help SF/F fans find the best books in the genre. I'm glad for them to get use out of us at whatever level they want to be involved. If we can get them to stick around and participate in the forum and blog etc. it will make it that much better for everyone.
There are lots of reasons to visit when you're looking for something specific like who won the Hugo in 1985 or if you want to find a convention or a new magazine etc. but not much to keep you checking in daily if you're not into the forum. That's been an issue for us from the beginning really. We've started to address that with the blog but we've not managed daily posts yet - but we're getting better.
I like the idea of getting more news into the blog but I don't want to just regurgitate from other blogs and it is a big time commitment as well. One of our goals is to try and keep a narrow focus on the books. They are our primary mission but we'll go outside that with stuff like Thies' Pieces etc. but we want to tie back into the written stuff when we can. We've managed to get a couple author interviews and that's something we want to expand on as well along with some more book reviews to round things out. The biggest problem is of course that we are most definitely a part time operation. I really envy the people that have time to post 3 or 4 times a day on their blogs. I wonder where they find the time? I'd be happy to have a regular 1-a-day posting at this point. We're not too far away from that now.
Another thing we want to do that will hopefully get people more involved is allowing member submitted content for novels and authors etc. I'm hoping that people will like the opportunity to help build the site and influence the books and authors we cover. After all, it's your site too. We just don't have the coding in place to do that yet but it's coming.
Thanks for your honest feedback and the great ideas! We need all of that that we can get and we try hard to act on the ideas you guys submit. The Book Lists was a user submitted idea and I love how that has enhanced the site while allowing us to maintain the kind of quality content we strive for. I'm just glad you guys care enough to bust our chops Now we just need a few hundred more of you.... |
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Veteran
Posts: 207
| Perhaps an official wwend twitter account for announcements, twitter can be a great way to remind people of new content and keep them coming back and can also be a source of new people if you have interesting tweets. Perhaps also facebook, but I'm not a fan myself. I guess it depends on how much time you guys who run the site have to engage in social media.
What keeps me coming back are a number of things ...
1. New blog posts
2. New forum content.
3. New books via a new list or award
4. Having finished a book I com back to record and rate it.
I think number 4 is the stickiest, if you make people enthusiastic about finishing books and coming back to record them you are going to have them come back every time they finish a book. Perhaps you could add a goals interface where people can add a goal like for example my current goal which is to finish the SF Master works series. If you could see a special gaol interface that shows you how many books you have finished and how many you have to go and what percentage you are through, that type of thing. That would then give users an incentive to come back and record their new reads.
Another way to get people coming back and adding books is to make it semi competitive so that you highlight readers that have read the most books or have a star system something like on the forum. Then readers who have added a lot of books get their name in lights and they get to feel special and new users get to aspire to having their names in lights so they are incentivised to add more books.
So yea thats a couple of thoughts off the top of my head, I'm sure theres other options too, oh actually you could make some bits of the site accept user content more like a wiki so for example adding links, you could let users (perhaps only "trusted" ones) add content, if you have users who actually create content you will find them much more invested in the site and more likely to stick around.
Finished Count Zero last night, I liked it better than Neuromancer. |
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Regular
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Location: Boston, MA | user ranking! great idea. easy to cheat though and probably needs lots of new code. i believe that right now you should concentrate on better blogging. and as mentioned why not accept content from users after admins approve of course. i bet tons of people would love to see their text on the homepage insted of just on forum. |
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Member
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| Some years ago, before the Internet, I wanted to know how I could acquire some limited editions of Stephen King's. Well, I wrote to him and got an answer. Unfortunately not from him directly but from the editor of Castle Rock, his fan-based bimonthly newspaper. If I recall correctly, every second issue of Castle Rock contained a short by Stehen King which was always fun to expect and to read. I did get my hands on a few limited editions from King, as well as some beautiful signed editions from Dean Koontz. Dave, do you think it is doable to gather some SF/F writers to provide a short story unique for WWE? |
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Admin
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Location: Dallas, Texas | Some great ideas in there htaccess.
Being able to show off your reading list is kinda fun and an incentive to keep it updated. I like the "goals" idea. That would make a nice addition to the My World page. We've got lots of ideas for that section that are gathering dust on our list right now. That would tie into the eventual Buddy List we want to build so you can friend other members and be alerted to their posts and book reviews etc. via email. If you were my buddy I'd get alerted when you tagged a book as read. You can bet I'd be trying to match you book for book! That's a feature that I'm really looking forward to.
We've toyed with the idea of having "badges" to go with the avatars. Different little icons that would indicate levels of contibution for different factors on the site. A little rocket for you guys that have read all the Hugo winners, a little book to show that you've submitted some reviews maybe a key to indicate you're an Uber User etc.
Uber Users are what we call our trusted members. We've not done much with them so far but Paul Thies is a good example - he blogs for us every week about movies. When we open for member submissions they'll play a big role in quality control etc. We'll be looking for volunteers later. But you're right about the extra code, hihik. That's whey we don't have these features already.
We do have a twitter account: http://twitter.com/wwend We're just getting that going so don't expect too much. Do sign up tho, it'll get better! I need to put up a link for it soon so folks can start finding us. We've also got an RSS feed you can follow us with too. It's in the main menu on the far right. |
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Regular
Posts: 92
Location: Boston, MA | people, there's a small triangle on top of the site, between member entry and search - it changes the color scheme of the website, essentially skins. you can have different looks if the one you currently have gets stale with you. didn't notice this feature before - love your attention to details, guys! |
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Veteran
Posts: 207
| http://twitter.com/wwend ... cool, following. |
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Admin
Posts: 4006
Location: Dallas, Texas | hihik, you found the Easter Egg! I've been meaning to make some more of those.
htaccess, great! We're all kind of old school around here so the technology is not quite second nature to us yet but we'll do our best with the tweeting and the twittering. |
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Admin
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Location: Dallas, Texas | Pierre - 2010-04-21 9:24 PM Some years ago, before the Internet, I wanted to know how I could acquire some limited editions of Stephen King's. Well, I wrote to him and got an answer. Unfortunately not from him directly but from the editor of Castle Rock, his fan-based bimonthly newspaper. If I recall correctly, every second issue of Castle Rock contained a short by Stehen King which was always fun to expect and to read. I did get my hands on a few limited editions from King, as well as some beautiful signed editions from Dean Koontz. Dave, do you think it is doable to gather some SF/F writers to provide a short story unique for WWE? Missed this one. Not sure how to go about getting short stories that I wouldn't have to pay for that would be good quality. We had a section called New Voices for member submitted short fiction years ago but it fell by the wayside for a number of reasons. I've been noodling on the newsletter idea too but we just can't fit it in right now. We will be sending out an email blast to all our members with some updates and news about the site. Hopefully bring some folks back for a second look. We've made a ton of improvements that most people are not aware of. I often wonder how the blogs I follow get all the free books from the publishers? I'd like to get my hands on a few and do some giveaways. Maybe in exchange for reviews that we can add to the blog? Free stuff always brings folks around.
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Member
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| For the shorts, it could be with your authors contacts or perhaps a contest. I guess it does not have to be a regular event at the beginning but with time it might attract attention. Authors may have oodles of shorts unsuitable for publishing and would be happy to provide to a reader base.
I do not know about the free books, but I got the limited editions from small publishers' advertising in the newspaper. Castle Rock had hardly a few thousand members then, and that is one author - WWE refers/caters to all. It would be a win-win situation: free books to incite membership and free advertising for the publisher and author. Just some thoughts.
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Veteran
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| I really like the Easter egg, never noticed it before, love the fractal backgrounds. Have you guys seen the awesome Mars photos available at http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/nea.php ? They are public domain ... I wonder what some of them would look like as WWEnd backgrounds ... |
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Admin
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Location: Dallas, Texas | Those are some great images. If I can find some time this weekend I'll experiment and see how that would look. I'm going to try and finish up the Pringle list though so no promises. |
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Veteran
Posts: 207
| 1000's more here: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/images/wallpaper/ |
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Regular
Posts: 92
Location: Boston, MA | some nice pics over here - http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html
(some are copyrighted though) |
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Veteran
Posts: 207
| Another idea for getting a more forum posts would be to check out the userlisting page and identify the users who have posted in the past but have not been to the site in a long while (eg luke.lewandowski from this thread). You could then send them an email inviting them to stop by as there seems to be more activity on the forums that they may find interesting (as well as other cool stuff like book lists and more blog posts etc.). |
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Admin
Posts: 4006
Location: Dallas, Texas | We're planning on sending out an email to all members with some news and updates about the site. Hopefully we can lure some of them back. A lot of our members haven't been back in some time so they've not see all the new stuff. I'll try to send it out this week. |
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New User
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| I was looking for this feature.
I think a regular newsletter with just some bits of the front page news would do wonders to remind us to visit regularly!
Just my two cents!
J. |
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WWE Rocks