The filePro Group - A second attempt

[Fairlight]

When asked his whereabouts on Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 12:14:25PM -0700,
fp at casabellagallery.com took the fifth, drank it, and then slurred:
> A while back (couple of years) I mentioned the idea of
> creating The filePro Groups as other users base do.  Back
> then there were a couple of replies but nothing ever
> came of it.

That happens a lot in this community.

> A week or so ago Mark posted something in the area of
> 
> "Wouldn't it be nice to have a place where one can post
> known solutions to known problems and be able to retrieve
> them?"

I remember that.  And not for the first time did I wish that.

> The primary idea is to allow user base to build a relation
> with others in their immediate communities and to provide
> a free for all repository of knowledge ...

Which is a good idea.

> In addition, we will all learn more about one another and
> give ourselves the opportunity to establish business relation
> that may otherwise not be possible.
> 
> Some of the features available are:
> - Articles              No explanation needed
> - Knowledge Base        No explanation needed
> - Who' Who              A directory of filePro developers and
>                         users alike.  A great marketing tool.
> - Market Place          Buy & Sell anything you want ...
> - Code Snippets         A library of routines designed to address
>                         a number of real life problems
> - Live Chat             A chat room (working on it!)

All of which sounds good.  In theory.

> I would very much like your opinion on this.  If this is something
> the community in general is not interested in, then I will use
> my spare time on something else (putt putt perhaps).

Well, I'm honestly not sure how much interest you'll have.  I think a
knowledge base is a great idea.  I even like the idea of an article base
and the other stuff you have planned.

That said, it's YANTKUW - Yet Another Site To Keep Up With.  I'm registered
on the fP-Tech forum on their site and I think I check it once every couple
months.  Seriously.  I play World of Warcraft, and as an MMO that's
arguably a "community" thing, and I still don't read the forums unless I'm
bored or looking for help.

Let's look at this objectively:

Articles - No present resource available.
Knowledge Base - No present resource available.
Who's Who - fP Tech maintains a sort of directory of developers, resellers,
            etc., but I don't think it's hugely thorough.
Market Place - fP Tech kinda has this sort of covered in their Products
               section of their forum.
Code Snippets - No present resource available to my knowledge.
Live Chat - John has the fP Room for voice chat with limited use of the
            text area.  All suggestions regarding forming an IRC channel
            or using IM groups have failed in the past.

You've also got to look at the audience.  Articles and Knowledge Base I can
see people getting into.  Who's Who, less so.  Market Place, well...this
community is a hard sell on anything, and given the existence of a barely
used area on fP-Tech's official forum, I'm thinking it won't get used much.
Code Snippets is a good idea, but the people most likely to do that aren't
keen on web forums.  Live Chat I just cannot see taking off at this point,
as the fP Room has communications mostly covered for realtime, and this
list is a close second.

Of what you have, if I were to focus on an area, it would be a knowledge
base, and potentially articles.  And the knowledge base really depends on
how good a search engine you're putting on it.  I took a look at the site
and that area not being ready for even skeleton use doesn't give me much of
an idea how useful it will be.

Overall, I think the "social" aspects of such a site will fail miserably
due to apathy combined with redundant functionality.  The technical areas
may or may not succeed depending on how well implemented they are.

Speaking of which, I note you're rolling your own from the looks of it.
(Your articles section is using a user number rather than name on article
display, btw.)  I have to ask why you'd spend all that time rolling your
own instead of going with existing software like a Wiki of some sort.

> Take a moment to review the site and let me know what you think.
> I do not expect you to be gentle, so your true feelings and
> criticism will be appreciated.

Well, I don't think it's -bad-.  It's brutal on the eyes though, at that
font size.  I have to crank it up at least one notch in Firefox to get it
readable on a 17" 1024x768 96dpi here.  Same in IE6.  The logo could use an
overhaul, but hey, not everyone's a graphic artist and that's relatively
unimportant.

Other than that, again...this goes back to an incomplete user interface,
whereby I can't personally tell how effective something would be
technically.  I do again have to raise the question of why you're doing it
by hand.  Even I wouldn't do that in this day and age, unless I was truly
bored, looking to learn how to do something and could use it as a test
project, or had absolutely nothing better to do.  There's too much
adaptable stuff out there already to be bothered.

And barring the social aspect, one element of the knowledge base and
article sections is going to be content.  Namely, you have a catch-22 of
starting with nothing, therefore nobody views it.  Nobody views it, so
nobody visits, therefore nobody adds anything.  So unless there's a social
dynamic involved that fires up a site like that, it's going to stagnate
from the first second unless someone goes through the mailing list archives
and starts harvesting tips, tricks, etc., and populating the area with the
relevant information.

Keep in mind, I still think a knowledge base would be handy, and wish one
existed.  It just should have been done about 13 years ago when the web was
starting.  The inertia of a void is amazingly high, though. :(  And now
at this point, all that data would either have to trickle in very slowly as
people re-ask questions, or would have to be mined manually.

I think it's a good idea in principle, the site as a whole.  However, this
community is largely slow to adopt to new ideas/forums/technologies and
whatnot, and I think that if fP-Tech's official forum is anything to go
by, a web site is doomed to failure before it's even born.  The only way
I could see one taking off is if Ken or John started it, and it's not a
personal indictment against you, it's citing a catalysing factor where
they're trusted names with high knowledge and have been highly visible in
the community since before HTTP existed (I know John has, anyway), and
people might follow where they go.  Someone like you or me coming in and
trying to start it up without a kind of...following, per se--well that's
just not going to fly well.  I wish that weren't the case, but so far it's
proven very true in several communities.

Unfortunately, "If you build it, they will come," doesn't hold up in
reality--even when it should.

Just as a point to note...I think it's a good idea on the whole, but still
wouldn't visit it myself except as-needed, or as a marketing tool.  So my
personal usage alone would be minimal even though when the need is strong,
I'd want it to be there.  It's a case of those acute strong needs not being
able to float a continuing endeavour that is the real killer for a project
of this type.

Personally, I think you'd be better served doing whatever you enjoy in your
free time than working on this.  I think you'll end up doing it for nothing
unless you put in way more effort than any one person should have to.  But
that doesn't make me right, nor does it mean you shouldn't do it.  Good
luck if you decide to go with it!

mark->
-- 
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