Jeff, please do an interview of some sort

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've often wondered if dcum has a core of inflammatory posters that drive the snark and the mommy war threads. Or is the snark and inflammation commonly distributed among all the posters?

Like if all the "anonymous" suddenly turned to usernames, would we see the same tired posters time and time again when threads turned ugly?

We have a group of what I would describe as "regular users" that come to the site very frequently. That number is somewhere in the range of 75,000 I believe. There is a much smaller group, probably less than 100 though I don't really know, who are total obsessives. They will post 50-60 messages a day. I have not been able to identify any member of this group who constantly posts inflammatory messages. If I did, I would have engaged in behavioral modification activities. But, many of them post snarky messages from time to time. Because they post so frequently, they are often the first to post in a thread. The first post often sets the tone for a thread. So, if these posters are in their "snarky period", they can be troublesome.

However, the obsessive group still only accounts for a small portion of the snark. What I've found is that perfectly level-headed, helpful, generally nice posters can have a bad day or be particularly touchy about some topic. There are so many of them, they even though few of there posts are problematic, it still amounts to a lot of posts.

When someone is a constant troublemaker, I make them unwelcome pretty quickly.

How do you make them unwelcome? What are these "behavior modification activities"?

[Anonymous]

Jeff please email me I will make you so happy!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Jeff please email me I will make you so happy!

Him or unkempt man? Choose!

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Have you thought about opening up DCUM like forums in other areas? We are thinking about relocating to Atlanta and the closest thing we can find is city-data which is much different than DCUM.

Offshoot of this question, how much time does it take to run/mod something like DCUM? I assume thats a major factor in opening up forums for other cities.

We constantly think about opening DCUM's elsewhere. However, my concept is not to open an entirely new site, but to branch off from this one. I am working on another way of organizing forums so that we can have more of them. Then, I will probably create regional forums so, for instance, people from the West coast can have their own forum. Then, if sufficient traffic builds up, we can create, for instance, Los Angeles and San Francisco forums. Then, sub-categorize them as demands calls for it.

It's a lot of time but adding new forums doesn't necessarily mean more time.

What you are describing sounds very similar to how the website Dave's Garden is organized. Central theme with "communities" that are regional.mnbut I thnk from a marketing view this formate Is better.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've often wondered if dcum has a core of inflammatory posters that drive the snark and the mommy war threads. Or is the snark and inflammation commonly distributed among all the posters?

Like if all the "anonymous" suddenly turned to usernames, would we see the same tired posters time and time again when threads turned ugly?

We have a group of what I would describe as "regular users" that come to the site very frequently. That number is somewhere in the range of 75,000 I believe. There is a much smaller group, probably less than 100 though I don't really know, who are total obsessives. They will post 50-60 messages a day. I have not been able to identify any member of this group who constantly posts inflammatory messages. If I did, I would have engaged in behavioral modification activities. But, many of them post snarky messages from time to time. Because they post so frequently, they are often the first to post in a thread. The first post often sets the tone for a thread. So, if these posters are in their "snarky period", they can be troublesome.

However, the obsessive group still only accounts for a small portion of the snark. What I've found is that perfectly level-headed, helpful, generally nice posters can have a bad day or be particularly touchy about some topic. There are so many of them, they even though few of there posts are problematic, it still amounts to a lot of posts.

When someone is a constant troublemaker, I make them unwelcome pretty quickly.

How do you make them unwelcome? What are these "behavior modification activities"?

Frequently just replying to a poster and pointing out that his/her posts have been inappropriate will be sufficient. When it's not, I'll start removing the posts. Finally, I'll try to block them. Most of the time, posters either get with the program or get frustrated and leave.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

You can see stats here:

https://www.quantcast.com/dcurbanmom.com#!cities

Initially, I think most of the traffic came from transplants. Now I believe it is more organic. We have great Google rankings and come up in searches frequently, but we've also received quit a bit of press.

Amazing that Singapore is responsible for more hits than many US states. The SG population in DC is not that large so I wonder how that happened.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

You can see stats here:

https://www.quantcast.com/dcurbanmom.com#!cities

Initially, I think most of the traffic came from transplants. Now I believe it is more organic. We have great Google rankings and come up in searches frequently, but we've also received quit a bit of press.

Amazing that Singapore is responsible for more hits than many US states. The SG population in DC is not that large so I wonder how that happened.

My guess is that a lot of those are spammers. The spambots normally don't load Javascript and, hence, don't get counted. But, we have had a lot of spammers from Singapore, so maybe they act differently.

[Anonymous]

Fascinating how low Baltimore ranks compared to cities further away.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've often wondered if dcum has a core of inflammatory posters that drive the snark and the mommy war threads. Or is the snark and inflammation commonly distributed among all the posters?

Like if all the "anonymous" suddenly turned to usernames, would we see the same tired posters time and time again when threads turned ugly?

We have a group of what I would describe as "regular users" that come to the site very frequently. That number is somewhere in the range of 75,000 I believe. There is a much smaller group, probably less than 100 though I don't really know, who are total obsessives. They will post 50-60 messages a day. I have not been able to identify any member of this group who constantly posts inflammatory messages. If I did, I would have engaged in behavioral modification activities. But, many of them post snarky messages from time to time. Because they post so frequently, they are often the first to post in a thread. The first post often sets the tone for a thread. So, if these posters are in their "snarky period", they can be troublesome.

However, the obsessive group still only accounts for a small portion of the snark. What I've found is that perfectly level-headed, helpful, generally nice posters can have a bad day or be particularly touchy about some topic. There are so many of them, they even though few of there posts are problematic, it still amounts to a lot of posts.

When someone is a constant troublemaker, I make them unwelcome pretty quickly.

I think this is consistent with a study one of the online gaming sites did (per Wired)-- IIRC they found that if you banned everyone who engaged in bad behavior at some point few would be left.