topic Re: Community site dumbing down? in Community Site Feedback

Community site dumbing down?

Vip3r — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:57:22 GMT

Looking at the Service Status pages a few days ago (I only tend to check it if I have a problem, so very infrequently ;)) I was surprised to see announcements about an Increase in Capacity both 20CN and 21CN, I was surprised because, I haven't seen any such announcements on the front page of the community site so is this the community site dumbing down and replacing interesting plusnet service information, with "Website of the Week"?
And why has there only been 1 EOW (End Of Week) in the last 5 weeks, have plusnet staff all been on holiday so there is nothing to write about? It started as a EOD, then moved to an EOW, are we now seeing a move to EOM?
Cheers
Vip3r.

Re: Community site dumbing down?

bobpullen — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:29:25 GMT

Hi Vip3r,
A recent decision was made to abandon the EoW posts I'm afraid. The reasoning was that it has a tendency to take people away from their work, and very few people actually read the posts according to web analytics.
One of our Marketing folk has been looking to get more focus on the blogs though, with more frequent articles compared to what you may be used to.
I normally post the capacity announcements but wasn't in the office for the best part of last week, time allowing I'll see if I can get something published today.

Re: Community site dumbing down?

dvorak — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:31:04 GMT

Not surprised, but very disapointed by the decision not to carry on with EOW.

Re: Community site dumbing down?

Vip3r — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:50:50 GMT

Thanks for the reply Bob.
I have to admit, I don't always read the EoW's myself, but it can be quite interesting to hear what is happening behind the doors of plusnet towers.
With regards to the capacity announcements, I can see that it wouldn't be at the top of my list to do if I was coming back after a few days off with lots of other things to catch-up with, just wanted to check that this wasn't being dropped.

Re: Community site dumbing down?

Be3G — Tue, 04 May 2010 11:30:16 GMT

Part of me suspects that PN have taken the wrong approach with the EOD/W. The EOD from years ago used to be extremely succinct, yet when PN revived it a few years ago they turned each post in to a verbose novella – the length of which probably put a number of people off; I was someone who always read each EOD/W yet even I occasionally found the longer entries a hard slog. Plus of course, there was a significant amount of repetition.
So why not go back to something short and sweet that people can digest in about 30 seconds? They could potentially sit in their own box on the Community home page (perhaps à la the headline box currently talking about cakes), each day's taking over the previous day's one, and the EOD would be so short that there would be no need to click a ‘read more’ link. Thus, a lot more people would actually end up reading it, because visitors would absorb it while generally looking at the Community home page.
It seems to me that a lot of the things that made Plusnet seem like a more interesting and open company than average are disappearing – open days, ‘Plans for the year’ posts, other detailed insights in to things like traffic management (Dave's posted a few graphs but there's not been much written discussion about anything), and now the EOWs. Combine that with the fairly sorry current rate of blog posts on the Community site and I guess I get the feeling that Plusnet's Community-focussed ‘energy’ is starting to run low.*
* (Of course, there's still plenty of Plusnet participation on the forums, I don't dispute that – but that's in more of a support capacity so it doesn't really come in to what I'm discussing here. Although actually, I do think that some aspects of staff participation on the forums have reduced during the past year or two too.)

Re: Community site dumbing down?

Bud — Tue, 04 May 2010 11:47:23 GMT

The old EODR were excellent and nothing like the new plusnet version. Short, to the point and gave an excellent insight into how plusnet was doing and I must admit I never liked the new style EODR and laterly the EOWR.
The classic EODR was just 3 paragraphs, 1 about how well (or not) support was performing with an indication of the average wait time for the phones, 1 about what network issues had been seen and or fixed and then 1 with some future to do's.
Wouldn't it be possible to do an EOWR with the last weeks support stats (ie average support response time over the week or how many tickets closed within the timescale given on the site) and any service announcements regarding the increase in capacity or why people may have seen slower than expected speeds due to major events?

Re: Community site dumbing down?

bobpullen — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:26:57 GMT

Quote from: Bob
I normally post the capacity announcements but wasn't in the office for the best part of last week, time allowing I'll see if I can get something published today.

Linky!

Re: Community site dumbing down?

jelv — Wed, 12 May 2010 08:38:32 GMT

How about a statement on IPv6?

Re: Community site dumbing down?

Alex — Tue, 18 May 2010 22:30:54 GMT

Sounds like a senior manager has decided that staff time would be better spent elsewhere.
But it's not been totally axed, of course, they might do something else in the future
Jam tomorrow, and all that.

Re: Community site dumbing down?

bobpullen — Thu, 20 May 2010 19:53:37 GMT

Quote from: jelv
How about a statement on IPv6?

There's talk of getting it on the development roadmap at the moment. As soon as we know more we'll be in a position to publish something.

Re: Community site dumbing down?

avatastic — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:23:49 GMT

@Bob If this goes to trial rather than general roll out, can I please be on the list! Running through a broker is all well and good, but native support would be nice!

Re: Community site dumbing down?

matt_2k34 — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:23:08 GMT

i agree with Be3G (theres a first :D)
EOD/W should be short n sweet, 2/3 short paras at most.
Bud's suggestion...

Quote
The classic EODR was just 3 paragraphs, 1 about how well (or not) support was performing with an indication of the average wait time for the phones, 1 about what network issues had been seen and or fixed and then 1 with some future to do's.

sounds perfect to me...