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WZZM Partnership


GRDadof3

How do you feel about UP-GR partnering with WZZM?  

97 members have voted

  1. 1. How do you feel about UP-GR partnering with WZZM?

    • For it
      11
    • For it on a trial basis
      38
    • Against it
      43
    • Need more info
      5
    • Other
      0


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I'm for it for the following reasons...

1)It will increase interest and traffic to the forum and could really help to put UP on the map

2)It will provide a diverse opinion that will cater to interesting and energetic discussions

3)It will allow us to have a say in what gets reported and how it gets reported (less negatives, more positives)

4)It will serve as an educational tool and create awareness/increase interest

5)It will help GR look that much more innovative

6)It will prevent UP GR from becoming a 'members only' type of atmosphere...what good is all of our talking, thinking ifwe are the only ones who know/care about it?

I have full confidence in not only the local Mods but the general UP Mods. Given the fact that traffic here is pretty brisk anything obscene will not last long and most of us know better than to feed the trolls. Since registration will be required, the negative randomness should be less frequent.

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What WZZM is proposing is that they would take an excerpt from an UrbanPlanet discussion (custom written and not just a random post IMO), post it on their website, with a logo link back to the UP discussion. Similar to the front page of UP:
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What does UP stand to gain from this (besides increased page-views)? In all honesty, are there that many people out there who are passionate about design/public transit/construction/etc that aren't already here? I totally agree with what xkcd stated (emphasis mine):

When social communities grow past a certain point (
?) they start to suck. Be they sororities or IRC channels, there
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"Innovate or Die" would be my answer to that.

Chris Knape is discussing another partnership in his blog, between the DDA and RapidGrowth.

http://blog.mlive.com/knapescorner/2008/04...news_media.html

I guess you stay away from partnerships where there might be a chance someone will say something bad about you? Chris does raise some good points.

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"Innovate or Die" would be my answer to that.

Chris Knape is discussing another partnership in his blog, between the DDA and RapidGrowth.

http://blog.mlive.com/knapescorner/2008/04...news_media.html

I guess you stay away from partnerships where there might be a chance someone will say something bad about you? Chris does raise some good points.

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Kind of brings up another point, with an influx of viewers and members to the site by a possible partnership, will UP LLC's equipment be able to handle the load? I know a year or 2 ago there were some upgrades because of increased loads. This is just a curiosity point.

We lease our equipment rather than doing it all ourselves as it is much cheaper for the way we do business. We also get a 100Mbit connection to the Internet, something that really wouldn't be doable if we had our own server and line to the Internet locally. In the past we have been knocked down due to huge traffic numbers from an article in a major newspaper for instance, but I've taken great measure to make sure it doesn't happen the way it has in the past. Some of it has been design changes (such as the latest design unveiled last Friday for our forums) that reduce the page size and load times for everyone and some of it has been in better hardware or a faster connection to the Internet (we moved from a 10Mbit connection to a 100Mbit connection last year).

We do have room to grow on existing infrastructure so I don't see the additional traffic as being a problem at the moment. I'm continually evaluating the need to expand however, unfortunately expanding takes money. Luckily we have been able to operate and expand by way of advertisements on the site and by way of Plus/Premium memberships (for which I am very grateful for).

Having said all of that, this partnership may be something we should take on as a trial basis though. Exposure in magazines, newspapers, etc. have given UP spurts along the way that has fueled our growth and I see this partnership as being no different. The entire site has a certain aura about it that encourages professionalism IMO, something that doesn't work very well for other forums/communities on the web. Yes it is possible that at any point our sense of community could be threatened but it could also be that we continue to grow as we have in the past with even more users who have a desire to better the communities represented here on UP.

No one can say for sure what the outcome will be unless we at least try something new however. I can assure you that UP wouldn't be where we are today had we not tried new things along the way. I wonder where Apple would be had it not tried something new with the iPod. We are obviously going to make mistakes as we go. This is a learning experience for us all as there really isn't a precedent to follow for what we're attempting to do with our particular community here. For all of the mistakes we will make along the way I can say with certainty that what knowledge we gain from them will drive us to greater goals.

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I don't see this forum "dying" any time soon without the partnership :rolleyes: ...

As for the RapidGrowth numbers.. I don't find them absurd at all. You have to buy equipment to store all this information/pictures/renderings etc.. Then you have to pay someone to design the layout and then to manage the content and keep it up to date. Add on top of that badwidth cost and you aren't far off...

Typical webserver if you buy your own (as opposed to hosting it someplace) is going to run you probably around 4-5k for any of the big 3 manufacturers depending on the storage requirements, this should have a 3-5 year replacement cycle. Add on to that any OS licensing/Content Management software licensing. Then you need a web designer/developer is going to run you probably 45-70k+ a year depending on experience (which yes is spread amongst multiple responsibilites, not just this Project Profile), or probably $50-$150/hr if it's contracted. Plus internet bandwidth which will increase due to the exposure. Numbers don't seem that far off base.

Kind of brings up another point, with an influx of viewers and members to the site by a possible partnership, will UP LLC's equipment be able to handle the load? I know a year or 2 ago there were some upgrades because of increased loads. This is just a curiosity point.

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How long would a trial period run for? And, how would it be deemed a success or failure?

One more question, would it be possible to use this or another partnership to direct traffic/discussion to the other West Michigan communities? We seem to have Grand Rapids covered fairly well, but I'd enjoy seeing Kalamazoo, Muskegon, Holland, etc. covered more extensively.

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After looking this over for a bit I tend to think this would be fine as a temp situation. The key thing is that although it may look bad or good in some peoples eyes you have to understand how some forums work. I am a mod on two other boards and have run my own board for a few months before I became too much of an autocrat. In any case the thing is that on Mlive and similar boards signing up and posting #### is easy. On other boards its a lot harder. Most require the ever present link in the email to be able to confirm. As a result that tends to put off a lot of people. One of mine has moved to that style of system and it has allowed some spammers but considering the topic we are talking about, PG2 ( a game that is going on at least 10 years now ), has stayed fairly busy. We have in the past talked about combining other forums of the game together but most of those talks have been rather long and nothing comes to them. What this means to WZZM is this. We can attempt to bring in some discussion in the next few months and hopefully it brings in the right mixture. If it doesn't fit what we thought but we still have a fairly decent enviroment maybe thats what we needed. The bottom line is that it could cause issues but the likely hood of having problems with that enviroment is lessened by the means of registering.

One great aspect with a lot of these communities is the aspect of sock puppets. For those that dont know the term its when somebody registers two names and uses them to cause trouble. Most of these forums allow checking of the IP addys. When a person does a sock puppet they tend to have the same IP addy. As a result its easy to ban them once they cause a problem. Mlive and the such seldom if ever check the IP addys.

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