Board activity?

I'm a long time lurker but recently more active because i'm not feeling well. That certainly has something to do with it. The forum seems nice so I think things will pick up from time to time.

It has slowed down somewhat across the board. This is pretty much normal to get a lull, then things pick up. The new design is great for those that use their phones which many people do. I am old school, I stick with an Ipad or laptop. I can read the posts on my phone but that's about it. Change can be hard for some of us.

I also think a lot of people leave when they are feeling better too. It would be nice if they would come back & give an update. It would help newly dx'd members to see they can have a life even with the disease.

Compared to when I joined years ago it's at a snails pace now.

Agreed that it's become so much quieter than it's used to be. And that's a shame, as this has been an amazing resource for me over the years. Where else other than forums can you get years of accumulated experience and knowledge? But the rates of Crohn's haven't fallen and I seriously doubt that many people have gone into remission.

No, something else has changed and that's the internet itself. Social media, particularly the data-harvesting monster that is Facebook, has taken over everything. If Facebook could take a massive fall, I wonder if forums would become more popular? Fingers crossed... >.>

As for the layout, I preferred the old one but I've seen a lot worse. It's just become more bland, but that's usually the case with forum redesigns - the original quirkiness gets removed.

The redesign was to appease Google that heavily penalized websites that were not mobile accessible (penalized for a series of years). Some traffic pickup sense, but a full recovery in traffic will take time. Google does not make big swings in rankings, so it will be slow slog back up.

Yeah there's a lot of activity by newly diagnosed asking tons of questions, you get a number of newbies who post tons in their first few months then trickle down as they get their answers. Those of us lucky enough to be in a remission tend to drift away (off living and loving life with less thoughts of IBD) but return during flares to visit, commiserate, and see what to try next. There's some of us that hang around even in a remission to helpout but not a lot those types.

Forums are kinda old-school, so I am sure folks are chatting via discord, reddit, facebook groups, and other more social mediums. Hoping over time, healingwell adopts some of those more social expectations of folks (like upvoting/downvoting posts, share post, follow poster's activity, etc etc). Having forums for non-chronic-illness subjects could keep folks around who are in a remission, if there was more sense of community and talking with friends about other topics they enjoy: like pets, gardening, and other hobbies.

mirowpl - Good on your two sons. I have a Facebook account but I never post there anymore and rarely visit. To be honest, I wouldn't use Facebook out of principle. It's not just that it's a data-harvesting monster, it's a monster which has got out of control. Hopefully this next bit won't be too political for this forum, but Facebook data is used for a lot more sinister purposes than personalised ads. It was used to help illegally gerrymander the Brexit referendum for example. Facebook looked the other way whilst 50 million users' data was stolen by data-mining companies (of course FB knew about it; it even enabled it). This data was then used to target susceptible swing voters with specific interests on Facebook.

Even if that highly secretive social media campaign had no effect (and there was good evidence it did), there is no way I could support a company who allows its users' data to be abused in this way.

iPoop - If I google Crohn's forum, Healing Well doesn't even come up on the first page and crohnsforum.com is way down at the very bottom. It wasn't that long ago that both sites were in the top 2 or 3 on the first page if you googled Crohn's forum. HW isn't to be found on the 2nd or 3rd page either. Dang. No wonder its traffic is down.

I'm hoping that HW doesn't adopt any of the things you mentioned! Particularly up/down votes. All that tends to happen on small forums is that the most popular users get lots of likes, whilst less popular or less well known users get far fewer likes. It's just pointless. I left one forum largely because of that - it didn't just have 'likes', it had 'favourites', 'inspirings', 'rainbows', 'hugs', etc. The posts were generally quite high quality (as they are on Reddit actually), but all the huggy wugginess did my head in.

You may be onto something with a "general chat" forum or forums for other subjects besides illness though.

I agree, it's been really slow lately. I think it's probably mostly what iPoop mentioned, it's an older format, and a lot of people are going to communities that are more "social".

I don't use social media personally, but when I did, I know there were a lot of health groups on FB that were quite active. I think FB has pretty much run its course at this point, but I don't think things will go back to old fashioned forums. Things generally keep moving forward.

in order to grow, we need to compete with what's happening elsewhere. I've done searches and I've noticed we've dropped in the results. We haven't been properly indexed in years because of the lack of responsive design. Now we are responsive but we are trying to play catch up with everyone who was always responsive, and those other sites have additional functionality, and they are more community driven. It's a bit of an uphill battle, but we will keep fighting!! The interesting part is that a few of our forums are quite active, but some of the ones that were the most active in the past are very slow. I would imagine people are participating in communities that are more specific to these topics.

When people started using their phones here at HW so many complained the site was not cell phone friendly. The print was super tiny & most found it too difficult to use. This hurt the traffic brought in by way of Google & HW was penalized as a result. He said not long ago that it will take some time with Google to get things back on track. Hopefully in the next few months things will pick up again.

Well after moaning about board activity, there were actually a few new posts today >_>

iPoop - There just aren't that many really long threads though. (And none at all on boards where mods lock the threads after a few pages, e.g. Crohn's, Depression.) I do see what people are getting at and I do the same myself on certain sites - there is something strangely compelling about seeing what the top rated comments are.

Oops, posted send by accident. My finger slipped.

Anyway, was just going to add that top rated posts are usually self-reinforcing: the number of likes propels a post to the top, whereupon it receives even more likes because it's the most visible. I prefer reading threads in chronological order than in order of number of likes, because they just make more sense that way.

Regarding reddit, do you guys know a better alternative for general purposes?

Thanks, I meant a better (than reddit) platform for discussion about gut problems, illnesses, diet, environment etc. - everything that is related to health. People in reddit oftentimes can act immaturely when answering questions, or discussing a topic.

A more active, calm, open-minded, knowledge and research based place would be good.

Post Edited (xy123) : 11/28/2018 12:51:52 PM (GMT-7)

NCOT, those people stopped posting altogether, that forum is very inactive compared to the old days. This leads me to think again about what OP is saying; there are a lot of people who have Crohn's or UC worldwide, we all know these diseases are very problematic for the majority of the patients, yet the health forums related to these diseases are very inactive for the last few years. I find it very interesting.

Maybe the concept of "internet forum" is the thing of the past?

Post Edited (xy123) : 11/28/2018 1:32:39 PM (GMT-7)