You have to post.

hello.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: UberDog,

hello.

Calling people n00b is meaner then ignoring them till they introduce themselves (as it would be right).

hello.

N00b used to be derisive but I do not think it is anymore.

At any rate, people often get slammed after their first posts. At least if we have a damn intro thread they have half a chance of posting a salutation in the right place.

I changed it to make you happy.

Uberdog is Love.

What's bad about being a noob?
It's kinda nice, even if a bit pointless, to have a thread to check into. I doubt the thread's going to last, though.

I feel this could be a good idea.
You see the membership numbers go up weekly. All those people setting up an account, finding a (sometimes quite) cool screen name, and then... poof. They never post, they never comment.
Why bother, then?
At least a bit of expansion on the 'why did you join...'. Anything.
Prove you're not a bot.

We had many threads. Just a few longish ones. All started by the new kid in the block, which is only to be expected, as we already know who we are.

We used to have a thread everyone chimed in after joining: How did you find this forum?. Now we just don't care much about new blood, at least till they hang out for a few months.

Dunbar's number in action, and most of us are already close to the limit...

Well, you know, instead of jumping on them for posting in the wrong thread it might be nice for them to have a place to post where they don't get jumped on immediately.

I feel there is the suggestion here that there aren't enough new posters for this to be worth it but I would have to contend that the treatment of new members is one of the reasons we don't get a lot.

quote:

Originally posted by Babylon the Bride:
What's bad about being a noob?
It's kinda nice, even if a bit pointless, to have a thread to check into. I doubt the thread's going to last, though.

It would be nice if threads could be made "Sticky", you know? This board's functionality is somewhat limited compared to the "Other Board."

Actually what I am suggesting is that new people in a forum either have a mission or have a non-filled Dunbar's number (how many people you can keep a relationship with). However most established posters, after all these years, have a full or almost full Dunbar's number of relationships (that I think varies from one person to another, of course), so they have no interest (nor free cognitive ability) to interact with the new person. Mainly because they probably will have to drop someone else.

Which is why there are parts of the forum which are a limited group of people interacting with each other and nobody else, and how most posters will only respond to a post of a subset within the whole poster population. Those he/she actively tracks.

All that gibberish to agree that yes, ideally there should be threads that enable these people looking for virtual relationships to link up, but the squatters that live in the forum prefer that they do somewhere else, rather than distract us from our current relationships. Signal and noise depend on your emotional linkage.

So the established posters do not care if there are no new people. They have what they want already... And anyway, people will keep bringing other people in their own social circle into the forum, so there will still be some new people trickling in.

I have to disagree. I have never seen the internet forum world conform to that theory. people are always trickling in and dropping out. The faces change, the forums change, the beat goes on.

Nor have I seen a lot of unwillingness on the part of forums to accept new members.

To say nothing of the benefit new members have to WG and his sales.

At the end of the day this place exits and is maintained as part of his publicity arm for his public face.

Penguin (or whomever) pays for the site in order to promote Gibson, perhaps nt aggressively, but still. Having an official website for an author in which new people are less than welcome is counter productive to why this place exists.

It may feel a bit like a fansite in personal relationships and the like, but it isn't. It's an official website from his people.

I'd theorize that such a benefit would be vanishingly small compared to the benefit of favorable reviews and good advertising. How many new members are we thinking here? The WGB currently has 4642 members at the time of this post. The NGB, 9155 members (and, at this precise moment, 10 members and 12 guests using it).

Both of those numbers are but a percentage of self-selecting purchasers and non-purchasers of either Gaiman's or Gibson's novels, considering that Spook Country alone sold over 100,000 copies in hardcover. Therefore, my theorizing fails to take into account overall sales for all novels by Gibson or Gaiman.

The point isn't to generate new readers as such, but to have a presence on the web where new readers come to look him up. having said destination be lukewarm to their presence at best is a negative reinforcement of a budding fan's desire to talk about the new author.

It isn't advertising in the sense that reviews and the like are but it is nevertheless integral to the mechanics of selling books. If it was not, do you think a publicist would be purposed to looking after it?

This is business, internet business, nascent perhaps, but still business.

And your Gaiman numbers, there are 12 guests on there checking it out. that's 12 people who might want to post and might want a Hello thread to post in. and likely would be at least turned off when their first post is shot down for failing to conform to insular nettiquette.

Which isn't to say I'm not guilty of it, but recent events have reminded me that there is always room to be nicer especially in what amounts to another person's place of business (sort of).

Anyway, there's no harm in having a thread. I wonder how many new members will find it and use it?

quote:

Originally posted by colin:
Anyway, there's no harm in having a thread. I wonder how many new members will find it and use it?

Eleventy Billion.

quote:

Originally posted by Psychophant:

We used to have a thread everyone chimed in after joining: How did you find this forum?. Now we just don't care much about new blood, at least till they hang out for a few months.

Dunbar's number in action, and most of us are already close to the limit...

It's funny. I found it so "long" ago (in intarwebz time) that I can't remember how I found it now. I just know it's here and I like to come back and visit.

Like one of those tawdry cross-time pan-dimensional saloons.

Always the same, always different, always "here".

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:

quote:

Originally posted by colin:
Anyway, there's no harm in having a thread. I wonder how many new members will find it and use it?

Eleventy Billion.

I would suspect, then, that a few of them are hydras.

To check if my impression was right I classified all the posts dated 11th August 2008, and I got the following numbers.

Total posts: 256

Posts in Random Thoughts (therefore having little relationship to WG or his work, except through common interests): 219

Posts in the Spook Country area: 1

Posts in News (which is a subset of Random): 19

Posts in the other areas: 17

Now considering posts by posters time on the board:

Less than 1 month: 4 (all by the same person).

Less than 1 year: 9 (and over half are by MrsK, married to a long term poster and who has been here 11 months and 11 days...).

More than one year: 243.

As for number of posts:

Less than 100 posts: 5.

Less than 1000 posts: 13.

More than 1000 posts: 238.

One year ago when I checked in a similar way, results were different, mostly because the new book had just appeared and we had quite a few new posters, though they did not stay in most cases.

In this we are now very similar to the NGB, though I stopped counting around 400 posts, as their daily post total is much higher than ours. Ratios however between old and new are similar.

I think Uberdog misunderstands me. I do not necessarily like how things are, I just describe how they are. I estimate Gibson sells 300 thousand to 400 thousand copies of his books, counting translations. The website is a small part of the marketing, but the forum is not really part of marketing. Instead it is an easy way to have a tame sampling of the readership, and a service for readers, somewhere they can ask questions and get answers. But in between the board is not frozen but develops its own social dymanics.

99% of the browsers that visit WGB will never open the forums, as I do not visit 99% of the fora associated to any of the pages I visit.

However when I search for an specific answer to a complex question in the internet, almost always the answer is in a forum post, a forum I will never visit afterwards, and which I certainly would never join, whether it is Olympus macro fetishists or console emulators, Napoleonic reenactors or comparative linguists.

We are not part of the marketing campaign (unlike the other parts of the site), we are a service.

You in the camp that the Olympus Zuiko OM 50mm f2.8 macro's one of the sharpest lenses around?