Members Purged, New Members welcome, and other changes

While you are encouraging people to sign up and be more engaged, you might consider emphasizing that this is a partner dance forum if that is who you are targeting for the long run. Perhaps a descriptive line underneath the dance forums logo on the sign up ads, or something like that. "Dance forums, where partner dancers gather online" or something. (I'm sure someone else can come up with better wording.

We have a long history here of getting a person or two per year periodically posting with a ballet, hip hop, etc question. Those of us with any background in those areas attempt to answer if we can, and some of the other members will speak up too (helpfully or not, LOL, if they have zero experience). But then we never hear from those people again.

Just an idea.
 
raindance said:
While you are encouraging people to sign up and be more engaged, you might consider emphasizing that this is a partner dance forum if that is who you are targeting for the long run. Perhaps a descriptive line underneath the dance forums logo on the sign up ads, or something like that. "Dance forums, where partner dancers gather online" or something. (I'm sure someone else can come up with better wording.

We have a long history here of getting a person or two per year periodically posting with a ballet, hip hop, etc question. Those of us with any background in those areas attempt to answer if we can, and some of the other members will speak up too (helpfully or not, LOL, if they have zero experience). But then we never hear from those people again.

Just an idea.
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OK noted. I like to be inclusive. I can imagine if we had a lot of those types of people we could have a form lower down on the page that's not the highlight of what we do for these discussions and I can't imagine it would ever get to the point where it's taking over or anything. But we could sort of move threads over there. Just an idea also. What do you think?

That being said I have done a lot in the last week or two. I probably should take a break haha
 
I think if we open it up to all forms of dance, and it ever takes off, could be over run with nowhere to discuss partner dance. There are bazillions of ballet and hip hop dancers for every partner dancer in the USA. Do we want this forum to become where dance moms come to talk about what's going on in their kids' ballet and hip hop studios and whatnot? I have no objection to them having a place to talk, but this forum isn't it, IMHO. That sort of traffic might drive the partner dancers away, and we don't have that many that participate here as it is.

We'd also need admins who know those forms of dance to manage (or at least be willing to read and police) those discussions.

And I think if the search engines knew from our title (subtitle) that we were a partner dance search forum, more partner dancers might find us.

Just my opinion. You need to do what is best for the site, just offering food for thought while you're doing a revamp.
 
raindance said:
I think if we open it up to all forms of dance, and it ever takes off, could be over run with nowhere to discuss partner dance. There are bazillions of ballet and hip hop dancers for every partner dancer in the USA. Do we want this forum to become where dance moms come to talk about what's going on in their kids' ballet and hip hop studios and whatnot? I have no objection to them having a place to talk, but this forum isn't it, IMHO. That sort of traffic might drive the partner dancers away, and we don't have that many that participate here as it is.

We'd also need admins who know those forms of dance to manage (or at least be willing to read and police) those discussions.

And I think if the search engines knew from our title (subtitle) that we were a partner dance search forum, more partner dancers might find us.

Just my opinion. You need to do what is best for the site, just offering food for thought while you're doing a revamp.
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I hear you, but I just don’t think discussion forms are that popular anymore. Anyways, it’s not anything imminent that we need to get done or something like that. But like in the last couple of weeks, I think we got two new members.
 
DanceMentor said:
You might notice the number of members has dropped significantly by more than 5000 and that's because I went in there and deleted everybody who had zero posts and has it logged in in a year. Bots that try to spider for content are especially stupid and go spidering member pages with no posts repeatedly. That includes Googlebot.
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Web crawlers tend to be intentionally simple minded to avoid traps overly clever crawlers can fall into.
DanceMentor said:
Either that or I lack the intelligence needed to understand just what they are doing. :)

You'll notice we show the members online at any given point and before that was set to the last 30 minutes but now it's the last 10 minutes.

View attachment 6449
So you'll see just how much traffic we're getting. Some of it can be real people who are actually doing searches and finding us but a large number of them are bots and you can see in this graphic here we have 455 guests.

And now if you're not logged in at the top of dance forums you will see this nice banner inviting you to join which hopefully might encourage some new people to sign up! Most likely it will have some positive effect but we'll see just how much,

View attachment 6450
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In the preweb text discussion group days, there was a rule of thumb that for each poster, there were ten lurkers who didn’t post. If that’s still at all true, lurkers should be given some incentive to stick around and sign up, even if they don’t post. Reduced ads could provide one such incentive, though that’s not a reason to artificially multiply ads.
DanceMentor said:
And mentioned previously we have some of the old sections that were kind of broken working better now

  1. Blog
  2. Photo Album
  3. Dance Music
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Nice having the photo section easily available again.
 
1782080091932.png

I was just taking a look now at the members online and pretty much 99% or more of the users visiting the site right now are not people but bots scrawling for AI and search engines.

Added: OK but not as bad as I thought because the tool I had made to block some of this stuff had been shut off when we changed servers. So I'm turning it back on and that should knock it down a lot.
 
fiesta0618 said:
Lol! Ever hear of the Dead Internet Theory?

WHAT IF YOU'VE BEEN THE ONLY HUMAN HERE THE WHOLE TIME???
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It's interesting to allow the imagination to run wild. I could imagine the day where humans are trying to communicate with each other in a place like this and we're always trying to head off the bots and we're never sure who's real and who's not. :oops: (random emoticon)

After that thing that happened with anthropic and the new version of Claude called Fable getting banned it looks like they're now being pushed into requiring people to show a passport or valid ID along with The person having to take a picture of themselves using their phone That is then matched with the ID photo. I kind of imagine that's going to become more commonplace.
 
DanceMentor said:
It's interesting to allow the imagination to run wild. I could imagine the day where humans are trying to communicate with each other in a place like this and we're always trying to head off the bots and we're never sure who's real and who's not. :oops: (random emoticon)
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We are already there on FB. I figure a good portion of the "people" posting on public posts are bots arguing with each other, trying to move politics or culture in various directions. There are real people mixed in as well, of course. But amongst the "people" that aren't already our personal friends or acquaintances, we have no way of knowing how many are people. I think it's likely mostly humans when I look at posts about ballroom dancing or a craft hobby like knitting or something. But if it's even vaguely political, and has gathered a good number of comments, a lot of those comments (and even the posts) are not coming from people.
 
raindance said:
We are already there on FB. I figure a good portion of the "people" posting on public posts are bots arguing with each other, trying to move politics or culture in various directions. There are real people mixed in as well, of course. But amongst the "people" that aren't already our personal friends or acquaintances, we have no way of knowing how many are people. I think it's likely mostly humans when I look at posts about ballroom dancing or a craft hobby like knitting or something. But if it's even vaguely political, and has gathered a good number of comments, a lot of those comments (and even the posts) are not coming from people.
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Yes I did some experimentation with chatGPT on Facebook and I'm able to automatically post to Facebook from my computer. Since my browser is auto-logged in, it can open the browser, and write a new post. It can analyze comments, and reply, etc. I actually have no use for this. I just did a test and looks like things are going to get pretty crazy. So at least on this side here I'm very aware of the bots that are hitting us and getting ready. Most likely we will be using AI to analyze behavior of new users in the near future.
 
DanceMentor said:
View attachment 6466

I was just taking a look now at the members online and pretty much 99% or more of the users visiting the site right now are not people but bots scrawling for AI and search engines.

Added: OK but not as bad as I thought because the tool I had made to block some of this stuff had been shut off when we changed servers. So I'm turning it back on and that should knock it down a lot.
Click to expand...

So now with rules in place it's down below 700. It had gotten up to 2000. You can see these bots are really aggressive without controls on them. If you guys see it above 1000 or especially above 2000 let me know. We have to keep pushing back.
 
Warren J. Dew said:
All long term posters are identifiably more sophisticated than Eliza, which was state of the art when the forum started.

But most are identifiably more sophisticated than current LLMs, too.
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Not necessarily in this situation on dance forums but the problem I get now is often when I'm answering customers the LLM has a better answer that I do in terms of organizing all the thoughts together in a clear manner. There are some situations where it can make a real difference.
 
DanceMentor said:
Not necessarily in this situation on dance forums but the problem I get now is often when I'm answering customers the LLM has a better answer that I do in terms of organizing all the thoughts together in a clear manner. There are some situations where it can make a real difference.
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Makes sense. Customer service isn’t exactly the place for creativity and originality.
 
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