About Forum Changes


Big Picture View of Changes at Guitar Tricks

Over the last few years there has been a wholesale shift in the demographics of the Guitar Tricks site. While we once primarily attracted a young, rock and metal inspired membership, we know have a much wider range of people.

If you have been a member for more than 3 years, then you have seen the membership change from "you and your friends" to "you and your friends and your friend's mom, and your other friend's dad, and your doctor."

Another big change is we are attracting people who are not in the habit of joining guitar sites. This is the single biggest factor that influences our recent decision-making:

Our new members are not so web-savvy as our old members.



Think about your own experience: how many websites have you signed up for? I personally have signed up for at least 100.

These new members are not in the habit of signing up for web sites. Everything is new to them.

Here are some things they do that are different from those of us with more experience:



- some will ask us to delete their account once they are done with it.

- some don't understand that a forum "signature" is not a part of your post.

- some don't know the difference between a forum and a chat.

- some need telephone support to get logged in.

- some use their real name or email address as their username.




These differences have affected our decisions over the past six months. From a long-time member's perspective, these decisions might seem strange. Let me try to explain why they were made:



Specific Topics of Change


Member List

We removed the member list last year, because it caused an undue load on the server. Search bots would spider the whole list, thousands and thousands of pages, every day.

We have since moved to a new server with more capacity. However, we did not reinstate the member list.

The primary reason for this is that many new members don't understand that their username is going to end up on a publicly-searchable memberlist.

Remember, they are new to this and they are very concerned about their privacy. They are also often using their email address or real name as their username.

So, for their privacy we decided not to reinstate the member list.



Chat Room

We monitored the chat occassionally throughout the last year, and daily for its last few weeks. Usually the chat log looked like this:

10:00 am username_A logs in
10:00 am username_A logs out
2:00 pm username_B logs in
2:00 pm username_B logs out

Basically, anyone who went to the chat room found an empty chat.

Many of the usernames who we saw in the logs are not regular users. So, they come to our chat, check it out, find it is empty, and never come back and never post in the forum.

We think we are doing these people a disservice by showing them a chat that isn't there.

Remember these are new people, who maybe don't know the difference between

- broken chat
- my browser doesn't work right
- nobody there


We thought it might make sense to "up the ante" and put in an audio chat. I have run audio chats before, it takes a lot of moderation, so it probably isn't appropriate for a public forum. However, in Full Access it might be fun.

So, I went to the Full Access forum and put in a thread with a test audio chat to see what the response would be. Exactly 1 person went there.

At this point I concluded that nobody was really interested in chat, and that it does more harm than good as an empty chat, and I removed it.

It took 7-10 days for anyone to notice.

That would have been another 7-10 days of dead chat.

It doesn't seem like a wrong decision, if you look at it from the newbie perspective.


So hopefully now you have a better understanding what we are trying to do. I am sorry if it looked like we were just removing things for no reason.


Jon