I’d like to use this blog partly for feedback on our ideas, but posts don’t seem to get a lot of comments. If anyone is out there, can you comment on why that is? :). What changes would make you comment more? Is it the subject matter, the interface, or something else?
NEW BLOG POST
I posted in the “TSI feedback” forum almost 3 weeks ago and no answer to my questions:
Couple general feedback points:
Perhaps the subject material seen on this site is of the variety which attracts those of a character lurkers like myself. While my interest is piqued by the ideas I see here, I don’t have tremendous confidence in this venture, given the past performance of similar endeavors.
Additionally, I think that individuals with a strong sense of independence (and a healthy paranoia) might think twice about posting to forums which do not allow anonymous content.
I think that if there was an option for people to post a comment without registering a full account (f.ex. just a Name/Email/URL + captcha, as on most blogs) you would get a significant increase in number of comments. It takes only a very small barrier to entry to discourage most people.
We can’t make it easy for spam and still have a usable forum.
It has been my experience that most comments are generated out of emotional triggers. Although your ideas may be controversial to the majority, they aren’t controversial to those who would follow the blog. Also, your plans still seem very theorectical, further contributing to a sense of detachment. Those of us who know anything about the history of attempts similar to yours are more likely to adopt a wait and see attitude anyway.
it’s like that joke about kid who didn’t speak until they were eight. first words were “please pass the salt”
Has spam yet been a significant problem for you on this blog? If not, turn off the filtering and allow unrestricted comments. Wait until *after* you actually have a demonstrable significant spam problem to go heavier on the restrictions. You might not even need them.
I turned off anonymous commenting because I was tired of sorting through lots of spam comments every day to find the non-spam anonymous comments. Since this is a drupal site, and drupal is very common, it is a common feature for spam bots to know how to spam it.
Spam is the problem. When we allowed anonymous posting, there was lots of spam, and I had to sort through and approve anonymous posts by hand. It was a pain.
Most of us value our time. Reading anonymous comments is usually a waste of time, as they tend to stroke the ego of the person posting more often than they make a contribution to the discussion.
I’ll always choose quality over quantity. Prefer you to spend your time advancing seasteading rather than sorting thru spam and administering the web site.
Most of it is just information delivery, so I don’t see a need to comment. Don’t misplace our quietness for a lack of enthusiasm though :).
Allow anonymous contributions. Obviously spam needs to be stopped but there should be measures that takes care of this right? Or can spam bots fill in captcha codes?
There are probably tens of millions of blogs, some of them way more popular than here, that allow commenting without requiring registration (and those that do usually have short registration forms than yours). I’m sure you could find a system that works.
Add a CAPTCHA and allow anonymous comments. Registration is a pain.
I had some issues with the sight and a link from here took me somewhere that crashed my browser. Everything seems to be working fine now. I’ll keep checking in.
It’s part of my daily routine to drop by and see if Patri has added anything else. I used to read the forums everyday, too, but now there are just too many topics of which to keep track, that I “let” Patri summarize and post the links he sees appropriate. True, I’m probably not the ideal person for which you’ve been looking, but I’m grateful that there is a group like this out there, and I see myself more and more everyday participating more actively in such an endeavor on the future.
CAPTCHA seems to be working worse and worse. I found that something else works much better: “Please write twohundredandeighteen with numbers” and only accept the comment if 218 is written.
Would it be possible to have a shortcut so that one could click on a day and see a short view of all comments posted for that day on the different threads? One could then click on the comment and be taken to the full comment and/or thread. This would be much more useful to me than scrolling down through something like the defense thread just to find the new comment(s).
One I like is to show three pictures, 2 of dogs 1 of a cat for example, or stuff like that, and ask the commenter to select the one (with a radio button) that is of the cat. Or of the duck. Etc.
I can’t speak for everyone on here by any means. But I feel discouraged, to say the least, regarding my ability as an individual to affect any kind of change with this world. I have recently been getting involved in farming and local town government to try and change that, but i think it’s a very rough and long road until I really feel anything I say matters at all. What I really want to say is that maybe people aren’t commenting for a couple of reasons. Among them, is people being discouraged by our complete lack of control over a government that tells us it’s a democracy. But equally important: I don’t have much time, to even do something as cool as this. Maybe I don’t realize how cool this is, or maybe I just don’t believe this is actually going to happen…It’s kind of out there sounding from the Wired article that i found this in. The multi million dollar design, that is. (i understand that this is a great way of grabbing people’s attention) but i chanced upon your post on how you will be using old boats and barges at first, and i think something like that on the home page would be much more down to earth, and people might say, oh, this could actually be possible, and say: “maybe some day in the future we can make that oil rig posts idea work, and maybe we could come up with some revolutionary power generation methods, etc, etc” OR “hey, i know a guy who has a barge” or “hey, i have an old boat of decent size” etc etc. But until we bring this down to the level it’s really at. Maybe people don’t see this as something that will happen. I dunno, just something to think about i guess.
I understand how you feel, as I’ve felt the same. You mention that you set what seem to be impossible goals, but then work to achieve them. Keep it up! That’s what’s needed here. We’re not going to change the world overnight, but we WILL have a positive impact.
If people saw that there was an actual plan … “Build it and they will come”.
I’ll have track down that post about the old boats and barges. That’s kind of how I envisioned starting out. Was thinking along the lines of joining a few old freighters together and building a deck on top of them. That way the floating city/state would be “mobile” using one or more of the ship’s engines. Anyway, I’d better read the original post before I ramble on further.