Evening everyone.
In recent months we've seen participation on the forum vastly decrease - once upon a time probably the most popular discussion forum for enthusiasts in our region, most of our users now just post on groups and pages on social media instead. That said we do still have a significant amount of viewers, a lot of whom just do not post. Of our 646 registered users, just 62 are actually active, so we've lost a lot of members along the way, but we still have a lot of long-term users (those who have contributed since the website's early inception back in summer 2012!) and we want to do more to try and retain those users, as well as welcome new users to contribute and bring back the 'spark' that NEB once had.
As I mentioned yesterday, we're really hoping to use the current pandemic as a time to give NEB a bit of love and attention. We're going to regularly promote our news articles and Bygone Era submissions on social media to help drive more traffic onto our website, and we hope that by doing this it will encourage more new users to join.
We're going to make more of a conscious effort to keep the fleet lists and fleet news up to date. Both Go North East and Stagecoach's latest news is now up to date. The news is one of our best resources, and the archive of this news is really what sets us apart from most other enthusiast groups. We're still trying to find a reliable source for Arriva North East fleet news for us to be able to backdate our records (can anyone point us in the right direction for this?)
The biggest change that we're going to implement is a new-look forum. With improved mobile optimisation and user-specific colour/layout customisation, the new forum will include a number of new features:
- new index page, which is brighter and depicts sub-forums more clearly by use of imagery, and makes it easier to see which threads the latest posts have been made in
- new forum 'feed' page, which will allow users to preview the first post in newly created threads, so if it is of interest, they can read further.
- 'like' system re-implemented
- new notification system, which informs users when they receive a private message or when another user has quoted their post.
- new calendar system, which we can upload details of bus rallies and events to (once things go back to normal!) or even key dates for service changes etc.
We've tried to fix some of the various bugs reported over the past few weeks too.
Our approach with the new theme is to give the forum more of a social media 'feel'. We appreciate it's a big step from the board we've been used to, but a growing number of enthusiasts in our community are younger, and have not grown up with discussion boards and forums. By implementing some features commonly found on social media, we hope that this will encourage more younger enthusiasts to join our community and contribute to our discussion forum.
We'd encourage everyone to add an avatar/profile picture - our only request is that you try and ensure it's equal in height x width dimensions otherwise certain areas of the forum go slightly odd.
The biggest step-change for the forum is by moving away from our traditional 'monthly' operator threads. Discussion should now be shared in individual threads unique to that topic. This, like social media, means that if there is a particular topic that users would like to join in on the discussion, they can. Rare and odd allocations can be split into unique threads by day rather than monthly, should users still wish to report these (the inception of popular website "bustimes" has rendered these threads largely useless, as most enthusiasts use this to check rare allocations now rather than post them on our forum, but we appreciate there may still be users who'd like to discuss these allocations or share their photos). We have unfortunately lost in excess of 30,000 'rare & odd working' posts from Go North East, as I clicked the wrong button and we didn't have a backup of the database from today.
We hope everyone likes these changes. Feel free to leave us any feedback below, or to comment with any bugs you stumble across.
Dan.
