We want your opinion - Improving Codeguru

What would you suggest we (Codeguru/Jupitermedia) should do to get you (or others) to submit [good] articles to the site on a more regular basis? What needs to change? What should we do?

I have some ideas, plus the moderators and article reviewers have made some great suggestions; however, we want to know your opinion. I'm open to any suggestions you believe might help.

Is it changing from blues and grays to greens and yellows on the site? Is it letting people use the letter 'a' in place of 'e'? I'm open to any ideas you might suggest.

Brad!

The solution seems simple to me.

1.) Apply page access counters to the articles. Make them visible to all.

2.) Use some of the income coming from the right 1/4 of the CodeGuru page (your advertisers... IBM and Microsoft mostly) and pay your article authors for their work. Most any article published at CodeGuru ultimately benefits Microsoft, so maybe they would be interested in any special or addition funding to make this happen. The author's "fair share" could be computed from the counters in item #1.

3.) Possibly change the submission agreement to enable the authors to retain more rights to published code so that personal use of submitted code might be okay, but using it in commercial software might require licensing from the author. I've personally written several controls that I would consider letting everyone use for their personal use or freeware applications, but have always held them back because of the "terms". It's just not right for someone to be able to make money off of some else's hard work. Of course, if the article states that the supplied code is for free unconditional use, then that's okay too.

4.) Review and clean what you already have. Organize and categorize. I've looked for code to use before and almost used it before I read the 100's of comments about the code having resource leaks or any of hundreds of other bugs or errors. Many articles state that they're for Win32 and in the first sentence or two state that this or that is derived from CWnd.

My 2 cents.

I hate the ads at right.
Sometimes they take 100% CPU resources. Whole browser slows down (almost hangs).

Suggestion is to open PayPal account or something.
Every member that has paid some money for CG, wont have the nags at right.


I would pay instantly, if such feature would be available coz i hate ads (not only on CG site). But here is such thread created..
.. so its my opinion.

Better search capabilities for finding the articles, and better facilities for leaving feedback on them.

With respect to the search capabilities, they are terrible. Word searching is antiquated, and doesn't allow boolean searching. In addition, the search results are too numerous, sorted in a relevance order that rarely reflects true relevance, and include sites outside of Codeguru.

With respect to feedback, it's too cumbersome to see all feedback at once, and it's almost impossible to navigate through the comments quickly.

In candor, even though the articles database here might be larger than at Codeproject, I rarely use any of the articles here since they are so hard to find, and to evaluate (by reading the comments). I primarily use Codeproject for articles, and Codeguru for forums (the forums here are better than at Codeproject).

Mike

I bump both improved search facilities and a thread/posts cleanup (a lot of work!)

Minor things:
The edit window is in my opinion way to small! At least add an option where ppl with large screens can increase edit window size.

A C forum, ppl posting standard C questions sometimes get quite harsh feedback.

1. no smilies when using the quick-reply box, or at least make that an option, even outside of code-tags.

2. locale-related date-formatting instead of forcing US on everyone

3. when modifying a post, let us still see other posts in the topic.

Brad's question seems directed to the articles, not the forums.

Mike

Correct - my question focuses on the main site and the articles there.

A couple comments (and feel free to attack these. The purpose of this thread is to discuss and understand how to make the main site better and to get more people back to contributing articles regularly to share wiht others.)

- Have you tried the main site search in the last month or so? We actually dumped our old search and are now licensing the Google search engine on the main site. The forum still uses the forum software's search, but you should find it easier to locate articles using the search now. If you still think the search isn't good enough, then I'd like to hear more specifics on what we should be fixing or changing.

- Paypal and members paying instead of ads. We've actually tried this on some sites. The answer is... it doesn't work. Most people (nearly all) would rather have the ads and not pay, even when it is a small amount. Having said this, I do agree that some of theads are relatlively large and annoying. That is something I've brought up internally.

- Ads taking bandwidth -- We don't create most of the ads. Rather ad agencies provide them for the companies advertising. When we find one that takes up the CPU or does something odd, I push to get it removed quickly or fixed quickly. If an ad truly takes up 100% of the CPU, we've gotten them removed until they were fixed. I think our internal people are getting better at taking our complaints about broken ads more seriously, quicker.

On entry forms - Were these forum comments or aimed the article submission pages?

As to comments being cumbersome. I agree. Good suggestion. I'd also like to hear any additional comments that people believe would make those better.

DHillard -

Page access counters can be tricky. If you automate them, then you have to watch out for bots and spiders. If we only count logged in users' actions, then the numbers will be lower and people could get discouraged. One thing we've tried to do on this site is be more real on our numbers. As an example, if a person forgets their ID and thus creates a new ID, is that one member or two? More specific to articles - do you count a bot hitting an article as a view?

Paying for articles - This opens up a number of issues and would change the overall attitude of the site from community-driven to editorial. Like Code Project, we want to let the content be primarily community driven. If we were to pay for content, then we would start getting extremely selective on the content we were paying for. The other option is to start awarding people for the 'best' articles or for some other 'achievements'. This is something suggested and being considered. (Note that Code Project and many other sites don't pay for articles, but that doesn't seem to be an issue.)

Side note: Codeguru covers generic C++, Java, VB, .NET, and lots of non-Microsoft topics. A lot is Microsoft-centric, but there is also a lot that isn't.

licensing - We can let licensing get extremely complicated if we aren't careful. Good comments though. If others have comments on the site licensing policy (which is more open than the Jupitermedia licensing), that would be interesting to hear. Note that all rights to the code and article remain with the author. You simply give the right (license) to others to use what you post.

Review and clean up what we have - I agree that we need to revamp the categories and do some organizing. Many articles were posted before we added the ability to associate mulitple sections. As such, a lot of stuff isn't in the best of spots. (But our search is better now!)

whew! Long post. If I befumbled something, let me know. Again, this thread is to help me in proposing the next wave of improvements to the main section of this site and to do what I can to help make you more willing to submit articles to share with fellow developers/coders!

Brad!

I've been asked about blogs. Should Codeguru have blogs?

Blogs, nah I'm sceptic, blogs are for other use. Fot that part I feel the CG should stay as it is, focusing on helping others with code & holding articles on specific code items even though I don't feel I have enough substance to contribute with one.

Tough issue this articel stuff though, have had one respondent that urged me to write an articel for somthing that I felt was pretty basic (and not had substance enough). Maybe we all should reconsider what's worhty beeing an article? Where to draw the line?

Thanks to all for the feedback so far!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by S_M_A

Maybe we all should reconsider what's worhty beeing an article? Where to draw the line?

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S_M_A - my opinion, while I'd prefer every article to be intermediate/advanced and hardcore topics, in truth, if anarticle is related to programming and at least a couple other people will get value from it, then it is likely worthy of an article.

Brad!

Blogs :sick: I know its an upcoming release of vBulltin but CG is a more professional site and do you really want to turn it into a myspace type site?

I don't have a suggestion on how to promote more article submissions but one thing I would mention. Cross-linking of articles based on subject. It could be a tough work but it is very nice and helpful. For example, the types cross links that wikipedia has - within articles picking keywords and external as well as internal links.

I usually don't post an article because I know quite less about things. I do post on my blog though. I don't submit those here because I feel articles should be high quality and that might need more time being devoted than I might have. Take a visit of my blog and if you think you would like to borrow some articles that might be worth it, I would not have a problem. Some of them are more casual though, the language and mostly derived out of the topics I come across on codeguru.

I think Yahoo Answers is very good obviously its different to Codeguru but I like the way it rewards responses also I like the fact that it brings questions to you! You can spend hours on their and not realize it! I come to Codeguru when I need help generally with PHP. I would like to see more PHP activity on Codeguru.

:thumbd: to blogs!

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Originally Posted by PeejAvery

:thumbd: to blogs!

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blogs on codeguru, right? Not in general. Blogs are better in the sense that it doesn't need to worry about many things that an article needs to cater to. Blogs can be short. They may be simple tips or discuss small issues, bugs, best practices. They are short (but surely can be longer). They usually don't fit into the style of an article. However, too many blogs really becomes unmanageable and trackable for readers.

Dr Dobbs portal has a combination of both. Articles and blogs. blogs also work as a notification of a good article that has come up. They help pass information quickly. However, I think on Dr Dobbs, the blogs are exclusive to some high quality professionals in the related domain. For C++, there is Andrew Keonig there (previously it was Pete Becker, I think). His blogs are interesting.

By the way, I don't know why Brad is worried about the quality of articles. Is there a decrease in number of articles being submitted or quality? What is the original concern?

Brad, how about a wiki-style section at the end of each article, where any user can modify the content. IOW, no user except the author can modify the content of the article itself, but any user can modify a section at the end.

I recognize that any user can add comments to the end of an article, but I think the comment system is not efficient and difficlut to navigate. The above suggestion would effectively flatten all comments into a single page. Or maybe it could be used in conjuction with comments (improved comments, anyway).

Mike

Hi Brad !
The only thing which could be a bit better is the editor itself when implementing copies of code directly out of VS C# 2005 IF I'm e.g. implementing old VB code in this editor in the VB forum the code lokks as it is in VB. If I do it in C# I have to go over the code as it has one empty line between each line.I need to catch all newline chars and then using 'Enter' for linechange only. I didn't understand why this is. Also if I'm typing code directly into the editor the positioning of where the code will be on the screen is a bit difficult. e.g typing 3 Spaces before the code moves code much more then 3 spaces to the right. I think you know what I'm talking about. So generally I would prefer to have it a bit more WYSIWYG as it s in the moment. But this is all. Colors of the borders and all that isn't what I'm looking for in a forum like codeguru.

Not sure what the scope of blog would be. Would it be open for all, or will there be moderation.

Personally, blog's work well for more personal-opinion kind of thing, and or, announcements to discuss for a site like CG. Personally, if a dialog could be stretched off of an article that would suffice , IMHO. That will serve pretty much the purpose of a blog.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by exterminator

By the way, I don't know why Brad is worried about the quality of articles. Is there a decrease in number of articles being submitted or quality? What is the original concern?

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There has been a decrease in the number of article submitted as well as a decrease in the precentage that are quality articles. We don't post every article that is submitted, but we try to post all the good ones :). I'd like to see us get the number of submissions higher and the precentage of quality articles from those submissions higher. :)

I also feel it is time for me to request developer resources to make some updates to the site. As such, I'm also interested in other suggestions (such as the blogging idea) and the feedback regarding such ideas. This site is driven in large by all of you, so I want to make sure all of you have input into making it better.

But I'm also interested in getting a bump in the number of submissions because good content is worth coming back for! :D ;)

Brad!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MikeAThon

Brad, how about a wiki-style section at the end of each article, where any user can modify the content. IOW, no user except the author can modify the content of the article itself, but any user can modify a section at the end.

I recognize that any user can add comments to the end of an article, but I think the comment system is not efficient and difficlut to navigate. The above suggestion would effectively flatten all comments into a single page. Or maybe it could be used in conjuction with comments (improved comments, anyway).

Mike

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wiki-style section could be a good idea. I've seen something similar to the php documentation site.

http://www.php.net/docs.php

Well, that is not actually a wiki, but a possiblity to post messages on each page. I would rather prefer a wiki, because in a forum-like posting style, people would start asking questions there instead of the forum. That happened to several of my articles. In a wiki, it doesn't make sense editing questions. ;) Though I don't know to what extent such a feature can be integrated with the articles.

I think some 'wiki' additions to this site can make very good sense. Obviously this wouldn't be to the forums, or necessarily to people's custom articles. There are a few great uses of it, though, for this site. The FAQs is one example where a Wiki might make more sense. I've a few others :)

I've added wiki functionality to my list. Good suggestion!

Brad!

I know this is not quite what you were asking for but:

The ads on the left of the forums are the single most annoying ads I've ever seen. It plain and simply makes this forum a bad idea to browse at work. (Which is exactly where most people use the forum)

I don't want to explain to anyone why there is a fat-dork in business attire dancing like a schoolgirl and waving pom-poms around, on my screen.

That ad alone makes ***********, a MUST HAVE...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by crackersixx

That ad alone makes ***********, a MUST HAVE...

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Blocking of ads is a violation of the AUP.