How to Improve CE, A Case Study

@rupam-das-wW5CvN • Oct 21, 2024

Oct 21, 2024

1.1K

look at the site
#-Link-Snipped-##-Link-Snipped-#heir whois reveals:
Creation Date: 2006-01-02 ( Incidently three months later than CE was formed)

This is the board statistics when I am Creating the Thread
[TABLE="class: ipbtable, width: 1237"]
[TR]
[TD="class: formsubtitle, bgcolor: #D1DCEB, colspan: 2"]4500 user(s) active in the past 60 minutes[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: row1"][/TD]
[TD="class: row2, bgcolor: #FFFFFF"]4271 guests, 229 members, 0 anonymous members

This is the broad statistics[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
Our members have made a total of 118,081 posts
We have 516,776 registered members

So what makes it better visited, than say CE. and why there is a registration of 8,000 members in 24 hours. (They have members from all possible countries possible in the earth).

1) What we can do to really get in and leave them ahead?
2) Why the forums have more member there?
3) Why is repeat visitor and contributors is lower in CE than that board.

Lets make a case study.

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Ankita Katdare

@abrakadabra • Sep 14, 2011

I just visited it and felt that they have total focus on 'Jobs, Jobs and Jobs'. That's what people are looking for day-in and day-out, that's why they have repeated visitors.
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narayana murthy

@narayana-z4W16q • Sep 14, 2011

job oppertunities
high level concentration on subjects
far different than CE
this is my study of 1 min on the site
if i made any mistake or hurt any one i am so sorry please excuse me
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Anoop Mathew

@anoop-FRTf1L • Sep 14, 2011

Good Idea Rupam. I wanted to point this out. I had in fact done a similar thread #-Link-Snipped-#

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Anoop Mathew

@anoop-FRTf1L • Sep 15, 2011

This is interesting. #-Link-Snipped-#

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ISHAN TOPRE

@ishan-nohePN • Sep 15, 2011

Ce has jobs section, Ce has entrepreneurship section, Ce has everything.

What CE doesn't have is proper people who would try to take that section forward. There are very few people.

Let us keep on contributing to sections as and when we get information. We should keep on updating CE.
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Saandeep Sreerambatla

@saandeep-sreerambatla-hWHU1M • Sep 17, 2011

Chetanas forum is very popular as it has more concentration on jobs, placement papers etc... Its good though.
But CE's concentration is on Engineering as a whole , so if I join Chetanas I would leave it when I get a job, or I would revisit it whenever I plan to change a job.
But CE if I will be visiting it all the time.

SO, CE may be slow but will be strong 😀
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narayana murthy

@narayana-z4W16q • Sep 19, 2011

here i got an another feedback from my friend about CE
its nothing new interesting in CE
i don't know about what is wrong
he said that what is new in CE every thing is old in CSE section as he is from that background
try to get feedback friends so we can know what is wrong
i think all are about old topic and simple in all sections
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Mr.Don

@mrdon-92OwlG • Sep 19, 2011

I don't know about chetanasforum till now. People search for Jobs the most in net and that's the reason why they will get used to the online forums and coming to CE. CE is entirely a different site and this site cannot be compared to other sites. It is growing but steadily. At present CE has more Indian Engineering Students where the online education is not yet developed as only some(still) will study(discuss,share) online and the persons who will be having the facility is spending more time in Facebook and other things.

To me CE has everything but the problem CE has is the information it has is bulk and in one place. You can see thousands of discussions in each section and there is no topic indexing and sometimes some threads go down with zero replies because of that and that will create lack of interest on the new member who want to share information or trying to get doubt solved.
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Anoop Mathew

@anoop-FRTf1L • Sep 19, 2011

narayana murthy
here i got an another feedback from my friend about CE
its nothing new interesting in CE
i don't know about what is wrong
he said that what is new in CE every thing is old in CSE section as he is from that background
try to get feedback friends so we can know what is wrong
i think all are about old topic and simple in all sections
Yes, I got the same response from some people to whom i mentioned about CE. They don't seem to like the idea of using a forum. All of them want ready information. The information on CE is vast and takes times to be found out (in terms of a newbie).

Anyways, i feel that CE is more concentrated on the Engineering Students rather than on the real Engineers. The fact that more Engineering Students have time to browse for ideas, while Engineers who have to face real challenges have no time looking into a forum, while they can get the quicker answers from GOOGLE. It's hard for people to get involved with CE. That's the main problem for CE.

If by luck an Engineer passes through CE (through the famous GOOGLE), he'll be perplexed to see an ocean to drink from when he's just desperate for a glass of water. So i say that those who are really committed to CE like it because they've experienced what it's really like to be here. The others are just here for the free food (as some AKD once told me)
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Rupam Das

@rupam-das-wW5CvN • Sep 19, 2011

Guys, Thanks for your response. We all are concerned and committed for the growth of the Forum. One of the major issues that I see here is that there are too many unnecessary threads front end in all the forums. but there are some super threads being wasted at the bottom of the database.( find data structure in CE 2008 )

See boss forums are hardly Indexed. They are like Blogs. Will you be interested to read what I wrote back in 2004 September? Never. All we need is chalking out agenda and bumping the best threads, rather than indexing them. A month later, that index will also be old. Google will never crawl a thread with all Links. those links are already indexed(You can refer that index occasionally but hardly solve the purpose with current Vbscript). So define:
1) What we are expecting out of CE
2) What others are expecting from CE
3) What is our agenda of spending time over here?
4) How many regular members we have on an average?
5) You can not make people to come back to forums forcefully. It should be a blend of "Information"-> Ready, Clarification-> Through Discussion.
But for Now if you observe: Information by asking-> Clarification-> try searching the threads to find it yourself.

Look we know it is a great place for sharing Ideas, but if we dont have wide audience , with whom we share? and if we do have wide audience, can we really share?

If we could really sort out these issues, we can work on.
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Rupam Das

@rupam-das-wW5CvN • Sep 19, 2011

And what I mean by bumping is an Example of My Thread: Creative Crazy Ideas. See, I keep posting on it, Idea or demand for Idea, Just keep posting. So it remains upfront. And slowly it reaches forum hot thread. Now if I put a little effort, that will reach 100 replies. and it basically stays there for months. @simplycoder has done a great job writing a C-tutorial. Can you find that through google? ( without mentioning CE or simplycoder?) Now can you immediately locate that thread? So what happens? A very good effort is just wasted. A thread which could have got 10,000 page views, is stuck at 1000 odd views.

Dear K has taken all the responsibility thus far to bring CE to what it is Now. But a forum of 1,00,000 members is not an one man Show. It needs to be well run by us , the members. And that requires experts and professionals. A student joins here, asks a question and is replied to use search facility. So why join the forum.

You come my home, and I welcome you with "look around my home. its great. be comfortable. Prepare food. have it yourself. you might get some stuff in refrigerator."
Will you ever comeback? Leave that, will you stay long enough?
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Anoop Mathew

@anoop-FRTf1L • Sep 19, 2011

@Rupam: You're right. But do we have any example forums to which we can point out as example to what CE is doing?

Well I must say that CE is the most cleanest forum I've seen. Pardon me if it's my ignorance, but the whole concept of CE is totally different. It does not mean that people should like CE for what it's not, but it's because of CE consistent growth that people who like it, like it!

The only thing that I find that CE lacks is a proper INDEX. And as an expert, do you suggest an effective method to set up a categorization system for the CE website so that all our users may be benefited? I believe that there may be a program or application that we could add to CE so that all the threads get indexed automatically.

And as for the audience, they'll follow suite once the site is properly indexed and Google can 'sense' it's contents easily.

Just look at Facebook itself, what's the use of all those posts if you don't bother to keep the memories intact. All is lost as archives. We have a similar situation in CE.
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narayana murthy

@narayana-z4W16q • Sep 20, 2011

i think CE became as a another wiki because we have no other new topics except the topics in texts and some links
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Saandeep Sreerambatla

@saandeep-sreerambatla-hWHU1M • Sep 20, 2011

@Rupam: Good points, but I personally dont say that CE is my home, CE is like library everyone has to explore what he wants!

If a student asks how to solve a + b which infact is his homework , we are not ready to give him the solution, instead if he does something on that front then we would help him in solving.

We seriously donot want people who will ask questions without any homework..
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Saandeep Sreerambatla

@saandeep-sreerambatla-hWHU1M • Sep 20, 2011

And regarding searching, please start a thread in chit-chat section where the answer is given as "Search Forum", I would personally request all mod's here to search and put the links in the thread where the question is being asked. Atleast we are providing some information for the question.
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Anoop Mathew

@anoop-FRTf1L • Sep 20, 2011

English-Scared
And regarding searching, please start a thread in chit-chat section where the answer is given as "Search Forum", I would personally request all mod's here to search and put the links in the thread where the question is being asked. Atleast we are providing some information for the question.
This is impractical from my point of view. Most of the Mods are not online on all times of the day. And it's hardly possible for a Mod to find links to so many questions pouring in each day. What is possible is the Categorization (solves the problem upto an extend). What we can do for starters is:

1. Create more sub-forums on each forum.
2. Move the existing threads onto the relevant sub-forums.
3. The names of the sub-forums can be discussed here on a thread, and we can all suggest "Category Names" to be given to the sub-forum.
For eg: Check my work on #-Link-Snipped-#
Even though it's not much, still it can solve the problem of finding the right answers or right questions upto a certain extend.
4. You can later add a drop-down category list a.k.a "Forum Display" like the one shown on the Forum tab here:<a href="https://forums.digitalpoint.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Online Internet Marketing & Search Engine Optimization Forum</a>(site suggested by Rupam)

If a student asks how to solve a + b which infact is his homework , we are not ready to give him the solution, instead if he does something on that front then we would help him in solving.

We seriously donot want people who will ask questions without any homework..
You're right. But look at what's actually happening. We DO NOT have many big guns here. So we've got to try and help everyone. Well, answering a question from a student is one thing, categorization is another thing.

In the end, I hope that through categorization, the number of questions asked will be reduced on this forum.

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Anoop Mathew

@anoop-FRTf1L • Nov 11, 2012

My latest suggestion can be found #-Link-Snipped-#.

P.S: Don't want this thread to be left out.

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Jeffrey Arulraj

@jeffrey-xA7lUP • Nov 11, 2012

anoopthefriend
This is interesting. #-Link-Snipped-#
Todays result are most painful the key words which rate us in this link show the following stats
2 Job related
1 Civil and structural link
2 Electronic and electrical related key words
1 news
1 Chuck of trades happy works here in CE
and finally
1 project request

What in the world is google asking us to do?
This clearly tells why we are not standing in the fore front with so many users

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Kaustubh Katdare

@thebigk • Nov 11, 2012

That report isn't very authentic and clearly not an indicator of what drives people here. Being a user generated content driven community; optimising for keywords isn't really what we can do. Plus, we follow the regular best practises which are within the set boundaries from Google.

Google will take their own sweet time to recognise the changes we've implemented on the site and then more time to restore our rankings. So it's a long ride which we can't control in any way.

It's true that most of the people come to CE searching for ready made projects and project ideas. But that's how most of the students in India are looking for. We've absolutely no control over what people want.

So far we've played on the 'content' front and we are proud to have created a community with amazing content by our amazing CEans. Coming weeks should reveal our strategy for growth and I personally feel very excited about it. The possibilities are unlimited and we're taking step in the right direction - something we've never done in the past. Just a few days more and our announcements section will make a bang!
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Jeffrey Arulraj

@jeffrey-xA7lUP • Nov 11, 2012

Some thing tells me we are to have a wild ride this Crazy Engineers day DO let the bunny out of the bag Biggie
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Anoop Mathew

@anoop-FRTf1L • Nov 12, 2012

jeffrey samuel
Some thing tells me we are to have a wild ride this Crazy Engineers day DO let the bunny out of the bag Biggie
Try searching for the Grand Quiz on CE which took place last year during our celebrations. It was simply brilliant.
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Jeffrey Arulraj

@jeffrey-xA7lUP • Nov 12, 2012

anoopthefriend
Try searching for the Grand Quiz on CE which took place last year during our celebrations. It was simply brilliant.
I checked it out one night analysis of the CE announcements segment revealed many strange but hidden truths of CE day

Am waiting for this year which is the 7th Birth day

7= Complete: This is the year CE completes some thing really special and starts a new phase from the next
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Jeffrey Arulraj

@jeffrey-xA7lUP • Feb 18, 2013

PS: Any ideas or hints of how the suggestions here and in many like minded threads are going into the new CE forum We need a quickie which will make us jump out #-Link-Snipped-#

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Kaustubh Katdare

@thebigk • Mar 19, 2013

So far, we've been growing on the basis of 'content'. Chetna's forum has done a fantastic job - but one must keep in mind that the number of posts being far lesser than the number of members is not a good sign. There are other websites also, where the number of registered members is far bigger than the number of posts or content being contributed.

What I've seen is that we can boost the number of registrations by simply blocking our content and making people 'register' before they can use the site. That'd make this website flooded with the number of registrations. But I'm not sure if that really does any good. I might be completely wrong.

So far, we've exposed our content to everyone and only those who wanted to join have join. So there's a big difference.

What I see lacking is that we do not generate enough number of new discussions every day. This has been discussed a ton of times but without a solution. There has to be an incentive for the members to create new discussions.

What do you all think about this?

Tagging: #-Link-Snipped-#, #-Link-Snipped-#, #-Link-Snipped-#, #-Link-Snipped-#, #-Link-Snipped-# .

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Jeffrey Arulraj

@jeffrey-xA7lUP • Mar 19, 2013
Answer these Questions
1. Are you planning to implement the points system again?
2. If so what way is it going to be manipulated ?
I think a special credit be given to the person who starts a thread and the number of posts in it crosses more than 5.

This will obviously build healthy discussions as well as pull some good contents in the time passing by
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Kaustubh Katdare

@thebigk • Mar 19, 2013
Conqueror
Answer these Questions
1. Are you planning to implement the points system again?
2. If so what way is it going to be manipulated ?
I think a special credit be given to the person who starts a thread and the number of posts in it crosses more than 5.

This will obviously build healthy discussions as well as pull some good contents in the time passing by
1. The points system can be restored and I'm going to do so in the next few days, hopefully by weekend.

2. The plan is not to rely on the rating system based on 'likes' or ratings given by other users. I hope to announce something on the similar lines in the next few days.
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Jeffrey Arulraj

@jeffrey-xA7lUP • Mar 19, 2013

Kaustubh Katdare
1. The points system can be restored and I'm going to do so in the next few days, hopefully by weekend.

2. The plan is not to rely on the rating system based on 'likes' or ratings given by other users. I hope to announce something on the similar lines in the next few days.
Good then I will wait for announcement to be made and then post my views here or the thread which is created
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Rupam Das

@rupam-das-wW5CvN • Mar 20, 2013

Kaustav, you are doing a great job. keep doing it. Points or no points, it does not really matter to someone like Mr. Bioramani or me. Probably new guys would love it. You do not really want to have numerous bytes wasted on storing accounts that are never used!

Voice is doing well. I personally want to see more value being added to the forum. Contest!

Organize coding contests, technical talk contests, Robotic contests, spread the words. Not quiz. You need to get the bests from the crowd and explore their talent to grow CE.

Ask people to make Apps, post about making apps, post video tutorials and offer cash prizes! What we need is New technologies and solutions and not just "give me source code+ppt+report+explanation" threads.

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Kaustubh Katdare

@thebigk • Mar 20, 2013

Alright, consider it done. In fact we've been wanting to do this for a long time now; but I guess now is the time. I'm going to need volunteers to make this happen. If anyone's interested, get in touch via conversation.
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Abhishek Rawal

@abhishek-fg9tRh • Mar 20, 2013

Rupam Das
Organize coding contests, technical talk contests, Robotic contests, spread the words. Not quiz. You need to get the bests from the crowd and explore their talent to grow CE.

Ask people to make Apps, post about making apps, post video tutorials and offer cash prizes! What we need is New technologies and solutions and not just "give me source code+ppt+report+explanation" threads.
So fucking true ... If I can hit 100 times "like" I would've done for this post !

I am afraid that if only "News" will be covered,CE might end up being something like Technology News-hub.

News are good,no shit.But we have do something like what #-Link-Snipped-# is saying because we have dope Engineers,only place in which we're behind is innovative projects.

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Kaustubh Katdare

@thebigk • Mar 20, 2013

Okay, a word about VoiCE -

Front Page: Will display both VoiCE Posts & Regular Posts that we 'promote'. It basically keeps the front page busy and user always has something new to read when they visit.

VoiCE: Is our special section that gets crawled by Google News (hint: Not all websites can enter Google News). So that will only contain news items.

We aren't behind. If I could, I'd show you what we are doing behind the scenes. It's just that things are taking painfully longer to get done. 😔

But it's high time we have organised a contest. Any immediate ideas come to your minds, folks?
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Abhishek Rawal

@abhishek-fg9tRh • Mar 20, 2013

Well,I didn't meant to criticise VoiCE.
I am happy that CE has entered in Google News.

My concern is : We're very good in frontend section (VoiCE section) of CE,but within CE i.e Community,Things ain't moving.
We're still on same page & nothing is getting interesting.
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Kaustubh Katdare

@thebigk • Mar 20, 2013

Front page and VoiCE are totally different. Yes, I agree that things aren't moving a fast pace as it should
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Jeffrey Arulraj

@jeffrey-xA7lUP • Mar 20, 2013

The importance given to Voice has to be partly diverted into the community atleast for a month to build it up

One problem we faced in any technical contest stuff we had earlier was that there was no proper participation except a few regulars.
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Kaustubh Katdare

@thebigk • Mar 20, 2013

Conqueror
The importance given to Voice has to be partly diverted into the community atleast for a month to build it up

One problem we faced in any technical contest stuff we had earlier was that there was no proper participation except a few regulars.
It's no one man's duty you see. CE offers a platform to everyone to create new discussions and benefit from them. Not many members create new threads on daily basis. That needs to be fixed.
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Jeffrey Arulraj

@jeffrey-xA7lUP • Mar 20, 2013

Kaustubh Katdare
It's no one man's duty you see. CE offers a platform to everyone to create new discussions and benefit from them. Not many members create new threads on daily basis. That needs to be fixed.
Hey i meant organising quizes and stuff not thread starting. In the first month you get involved so that a basic layout is laid for other regulars to take up and continue from there. Got my point mate
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