What do altdotlife members care about? Talk about? Obsess over? I'm glad you asked-- I've spent a good part of today analyzing the posting habits here at altdotlife, getting ready for another round of forum usability enhancements.
Here's a rough breakdown of how our current participation looks by board:
If you're anything like me, you're breaking out into a cold sweat looking at all those tiny slivers of color. Each of them represents a separate board on the site, and holy cow, it's out of control! This was a rookie mistake we made when we first set up the altdotlife community-- we looked at the taxonomy of all possible conversations, and ended up splintering the community. It's now fairly challenging to navigate the different areas of the site, because you end up clicking multiple times to drill down to the conversation you're looking for. So most people end up navigating via Unread Replies or Updated Topics, and threads get longer and longer, because people would rather not start new topics (and have to resubscribe).
Now imagine, what if it looked like this instead? You can easily see that our participation is still heavily mama-focused, but the number of boards is a bit more manageable. In fact, if we recategorized the Monthly Chat boards into Shared Interests and Support, you'd see that altdotlife is heavily cohort-based (and many of those cohorts happen to be parenting-related). It opens up the possibility that we can successfully grow cohorts that aren't quite so mom-focused. That's one of the goals of the restructuring that we've done over the last 6 months or so.
If we remap the boards to match this new, more streamlined organization, it might look something like the image below.
Of note:
- We've changed the Category and Board mappings to try to keep to fewer than 7 categories and 7 or fewer boards per category. This should make it much easier and less overwhelming to process the navigation.
- Most of the sub-boards will be collapsed into a single parent board, so you can more easily browse threads in a major forum rather than having to drill down multiple times. For example, you can see all Gear topics in one list, rather than having to drill down to fairly empty child boards.
- You'll still be able to drill down by clicking on tags in a given board. We'll prepopulate the boards with tags matching the current child boards. So clicking on Gear gives you all gear topics, but clicking on the link "Fashion Forward" will filter out those topics just like the sub-boards do right now.
- Each new board should become more active, and less like a ghost town. Hopefully they will have more topics with fewer posts per topic. This will make it easier for new members to jump in and join us- it can be intimidating to join a conversation on page 83 of a thread.
- This is a first draft organization attempt. It's almost certain that things will change around before we're done. So: don't get freaked out about specific organizational minutia. On the other hand, feedback is welcome. We're going to do this a little less by committee than we did the last time around (you know what they say about too many cooks, right?), but we do want feedback. We just don't guarantee we'll take all of it.
If you've got a quick comment, log in and add it in the Comments section below. If it gets complicated, join the discussion here: Organizational Analysis and Usability Ehancements.
Once, I dug a hole halfway to China. It made a great swimming pool. Or mud pit. Or battleground for GI Joe. Either way, it was awesome.
Most of business owners have the same dilemma at the beginning
of the year. Because we're entrepreneurs, most of us have an
optimistic/visionary side that sees possibilities everywhere. When a
new year rolls around, we tend to think “Fresh! New! Clean slate!” and
hurry toward the brightest shiniest object (plan, goal, etc.). It's
really quite fun and exciting.
Question: Does anyone have any
favorite seed catalogs? I'm mainly into food gardening, but we've got
some space for flowers this year so I'm ready to branch out. My
favorite part of winter is curling up on the couch with a hot cup of
tea and all the seed catalogs that come in the mail and planning out
everything that we're going to grow once the snow melts.
...
Question: Which aid organizations do you feel are of the most help and why? It
seems that the biggest, well known ones have (with reason) large
operating budgets, and thus the monies that trickle down may be much
less than the original donation, while the smaller independent ones
have a lot of potential for fraud and abuse. 
