Dear Nairaland User, I am concerned about Nairaland.

Of recent we have been growing very strongly with 100 or more new members and almost 2000 posts daily, and on our way to recognition as a web phenomenom. We have more traffic than perhaps every other Nigerian forum, but not as much traffic as Nigerian news and newspaper websites like NigeriaWorld and SunNewsOnline.

I am convinced that he system that has been used to manage this site to this level of growth seems to have reached its limit. It cannot take us to the next level. Moderation of the forum is very annoying, as we have new members and even the oldies making the same mistakes and violating the same rules over and over again. We can't handle the current inflow of members properly, and yet we want more traffic.

I would like us to discuss how we can take Nairaland to the next level: 50,000 members, and maybe 1000 logged in users per day. I would like us to raise various issues involved in this quest such as the forum interface and features, moderation policies, marketing, public relations, et cetera. This is not a thread for personal attacks or the airing of grievances, but a place to give constructive and progrssive suggestions.

In particular let us first of all explore the concepts of democracy and separation of powers and see if we can apply it to this forum, because I know that if we can create a democratic forum then we would be unstoppable. What do you think? Dictatorship is lonely.

I just read the web phenomenom thing.. This is my fav part.

Some outstanding hot jocks include hot-angel, a 16 year old femme fatale who lives in the US. She spends practically all her life on Nairaland, and that explains her 15,000 posts! Then theres nike4luv and Queenzy - the peacemakers, layi and snazzydawn - the cynosures of all eyes on the land, WesleyanA  teenager with a 30 year old feminist mind, K2DaC  the Photoshop lady and wife of Ramsey Noah, and alheri  a woman whose true life stories are very hard to believe.

Anyways... to contribute to this thread.. i'll be right back. I'm reading the phenomenom thing.

Okay back.

I Think it'd be cool if we get like more signature space. For words, not pictures or whatever. Just words.

Hi Seun,

It's great that you want to discuss this openly in the Nairaland community. I would encourage you to split this thread up in a few threads that discuss the different topics at hand.

- maintenance (technical & possible staff requirements)
- moderation and rules (how to create a self-organising system)
- interface improvements (technically you're very close to the optimum, but needs serious usability enhancements)
- features (do you want to create a portal? Do you need editorial content? Do you want to offer services such as webmail, etc?)

What do you think?

*

The first time i saw this forum, i was actually worried
because of the 4 sections and 30 subsections to discuss on.

I think the load is too much and you shouldn't try to
cover all aspects of life.

Personally, I am only interested in the Technology section
and adverts subsection and that is where you will find
most of my posts.

I once sent a PM to Seun requesting information on how he set up
the forum but he never replied me. I would have set up an
Internet Marketing Forum that will take care of interested
parties all over Nigeria and beyond.

My candid opinion is that we reduce the subsections.

Olu

This is an interesting topic am not too good in but I will be back when I have something nice to contribute.

Once again, I think am very proud to be a nairalander

I think this shouldn't be rushed or turned into a fire brigade approach. there should be a road map. just like the way google has been taking on the world.

top on my list are news, chat, and dating engine. also, nairaland needs a brand new design. this one SUCKS!

Nairaland is no doubt the biggest online forum in Nigeria now, so there is need to move the forum forward. It is good that seun is involving the stakeholders in the forum to brainstorm of the appropriate plan and action for doing this.
The first plan is to get moderators for differenet sections in the forum, this can be volunteers, and the appointment should not be done based on the quantity but quality of the contributions of the applicant. I will send in more information and ideas later.

Seun:

In particular let us first of all explore the concepts of democracy and separation of powers and see if we can apply it to this forum, because I know that if we can create a democratic forum then we would be unstoppable. What do you think? Dictatorship is lonely.

Like i said in a previous PM to you, Allow members of the site to become moderators, the site is gradually getting to a point where it needs more than one moderator.

Its also important to learn from the mistakes of other popular sites like Nigeriaworld. At the moment the user experience there is horrible. It has so many 'pop ups' and 'pop unders' its begining to look like a porn site.

Moving it to the next level does that mean that the exechange rate will increase very soon. this is a question? is there anybody who can anwser that question 4 me.

This is a good idea and to achieve this you can't do it alone.This is how Tianshi Product moved from one man to multi-national business. Pick people that are in I.T thing,discuss with them.Then you will know how many departments/sections this forum requires and how many people that will be involve.

IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT
Any attempt to improve on a system that already works is pointless and may even be detrimental.

Seun

I am launching a commercial website this summer after almost one year of research in the travel industry in the unites states. The ventures are J.P north america who will spend not less than half a millon dollar to develop the website.

Having said this, I will like to give you some tips:

The traffic you are getting on this website is just enough to track your progress.
Do you have a graph that shows trancendent increase in the number of subscribers?
With that graph you can do probability calculations and see what you are getting at in the next couple of months..

Few Sugestions for u.

Try contacting TV stations in nigeria, schedule a meeting with the top managers and discuss your website with them, Try and be persuasive when you speak to help in conviction and provide figurative examples like the traffic you get from the site. Ask them if they will be intrested in a trade by barter if you dont have money for advertising with them at this time. This is a very important step concidering that most nigerians watch Television and dont have computer at their homes...also nigerians with computer at their homes are likley to have television.

The trade by bater can come in the form of featuring your site to the public and have the news company conduct "Yes or No" questionarie about a situation in nigeria (CNN and other popular website do this). In return for their surport, you can feature their websites on nairaland home page and also give them few stake from the money you make in advertising. Sit down and relax and watch propulsion in the number of traffic you get per day and dont be surprise OBJ might join

Move am to next next level need any help on doing so contact me

seun, can u do a competition. let all the smartarse web designers on NL provide an alternative design for this forum. the winner's design is going to be implemented. timmy, oasis and others r u there? (i hope oasis doesnt win jare...)

coz the forum's design sucks.

Posted by: dejiolowe
Insert Quote
seun, can u do a competition. let all the smartarse web designers on NL provide an alternative design for this forum. the winner's design is going to be implemented. timmy, oasis and others r u there? (i hope oasis doesnt win jare...)

coz the forum's design sucks.

Commpetition do you how many i have won?

b4 now i was thinking something like nairaland email account, i wish if that can be available in the nairaland next level

ababoy1:

IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT
Any attempt to improve on a system that already works is pointless and may even be detrimental.

Well said Ababoy.

My own contribution here. When talking of publicising this forum, you need to go to TV stations or any media. Most of us that run Internet Marketing websites know that there are CHEAPER means of getting publicity, even FREE and BETTER means are available. I list some of them below:

a) Writing articles: The articles can be submitted to newspapers and also to several Nigerian sites. What of getting a column in a popular newspaper/magazine? That will work better. So many newspapers are awash with columns that are so irrelevant. Just pick a niche and sell the idea to an editor and see the result.

b) Recommendation from NL users. If I love NL, then I should be able to recommend it to my friends. I joined this month and I have told 2 people about it already. If we can have a recommendation page where users can fill a form to recommend their friends, won't that cause an increase in traffic?

c) Organising Seminars/Workshops and Trainings can also make people know NL as well.

There are several other means of achieving the chief aim. Another question Seun need to ask himself is if the required growth comes, will he be able to handle it in terms of the financing and administration? He should be able to answer that.

I hope this helps.

MIKEBUDDY@nairaland.com well that one i think it's the same thing as your PM inbox.

i agree with ijebu man. this site definitely needs more than one moderator. what i am not sure about is if any member should take up a position like that. also, i would advice that you  have sections that require age categories so that under age people can give you their own ideas about there section and grown ups can do so in their section as well. i would suggest that you have some requirements to join the forum ( of course i can not tell you what requirements are necessary). hope i have helped in my little way. this site needs some support.

If am made moderator dangers will occur on this site like...

Good things thinking of moving nirialand to the next level.
i do think it really has to be further developed

Hi Seun,

I think this is a great idea and every good webmaster should know the forum will grow to the next level but the truth of the matter is, having so many topics to handle and so many headings to read through, the capacity of the NL wont be able to meet up as time goes on. What I will suggest is:

- maintenance (removiing unnecceasary threads and syncronizing some)
- quota (space) and bandwith increase
- interface improvements (more user friendly)
- extra features like email, news, and groups

With all these, I think NL would be moving alongside sites like BBC, CNN and host of others.

No doubt, this site has been nice and growing by the day.
Though i am not really an I.T person, but i think the site could still be given a kind of facelift in order to make it more and more attractive.
Then, we can add mail addy e.g micklplus@nairaland.com which will automatically attract more people to this our site.
I am indeed very cool being a member of nairaland and the sky will only be the very beginning of greater things to come.
Gbam !

My quick comments:
[list]
[li]Thanks a million for your suggestions. I really appreciate your willingness to help. [/li]
[li] This is a surprising request, but I can set up the server so username@nairaland.com redirects to your registered email address. http://username.nairaland.com can also redirect to your web page.[/li]
[li]No, I do not think Nairaland should become a "portal". Portals are so 1997, Google.com is in.[/li]
[li]Yes, this site needs multiple moderators but this can only happen if the rules are unambigous[/li]
[li]If the moderators are the armed forces, can we have legislators and judges too?[/li]
[li]Articles: Are www.naijarita.com articles publishable in Nigerian papers?[/li]
[/list]

How about adding links to world news but mostly Nigerian and African news.
How about getting PR firms to pay you to link their press releases.
How about getting paid by African countries to promote them. ( Tourist Boards,
countries seeking investors)

Since in the West we only get news of disasters in Africa. We don't ever see
any good news about Africa. We only see stories of Aids, AIDS orphans, famine,
war and other catastrophes in regard to Africa. Nigeria also gets a lot of bad press.
All of these negative stories rob all Black people. People absorb these stories and believe
we are hopless Godforsakenlosers.

jclord: thanks for your suggestions. I think that by browsing the forum you will agree with me that there is much more going on in Nigeria than the bad things reported by the foreign press.

Do you imbed top 10 search engine keyword searches to your site to increase traffic.
How about adding high traffic links?

I am a marketing professional but I am new to e-marketing.

As a marketing person I am always thinking, what can I sell?

Some forum in the US add EBay auction items that are related to their audience.
(See the Peakoil.com . This is a forum many people are addicted to who believe the world oil supply is running out soon.)

-books related to discusion topics
-your logo on teeshirts, cups, pens etc...
-movies related to topics discussed.

By adding these products as EBay auction items you don't have to worry about collecting payment
because of their Paypal system.

Email me if you want more info.

Seun

I went to college with a Nigerian friend I know the press is biased against black people and their countries in general.

Blacks in America pay a very high price for all the bad press about us. All the Africans I have met while living
in NY are some of the hardest working people. Not only do they work hard they strongly value education.
I have been impressed by them!

seun, will definitely give this some serious thought and hit u back sometime. peace

Seun,

Here are things to be prepared for:

1. Increased load on the database.
2. Increased traffic in general.
3. Increased need for moderation.
4. Increased pressure for a redesign of the phorum.

I don't know how tech savvy you are, but as this forum grows, tech-knowhow is inevitable.  Here are my suggestions:


1. Increased load on the database:

The most important thing with databases is the design.  You can run some tests on your queries using the EXPLAIN command to find out where performance needs to be improved.  If your db tables are structured and Normalised properly, it'd still be very fast, no matter how many billions of records it contains.

Make sure your keyword search queries are properly written.  I'm referring to queries such as
WHERE description LIKE '$keyword%'
or
WHERE description REGEXP $keyword

Such queries are server killers if not properly written.

Next, as your load grows, you can create replication in your database server for parallel processing.  http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replication.html

Here's the cheapest method I know:

A. You buy several accounts on cheap but reliable hosting companies like http://www.globat.com/, http://www.powweb.com, etc for around $5 a month each.

B. You then setup the mysql servers on them as slave servers.

C. Setup your own primary database as the master.

Now all Writes will go to master server, and Reads would be load balanced between all the servers.  
The slaves will periodically get updates from the master.
As your traffic grows, you can easily add another account (database server) elsewhere (another $5 a month).

Of course, the whole thing would be easier if you just have your own facility where you can just add more machines as needed. But, that'd create a "single point of failure" problem.

2. Increased traffic in general:

As some point, your web server (let's say apache) would reach it's limit of requests it can handle.  When that happens, the forum will slow down to a crawl, or people would start to get "server busy" error.

A. To deal with this, you need to run several apache servers.  Read up on apache's Reverse Proxy.

B. If you haven't already done so, setup "catching" on your server.  That'd reduce the load on the database significantly.


3. Increased need for moderation:

It's up to you how you handle this.  I'm sure you already have plans to hire somebody.
However, you can study how responsible a member is and propose it to them.   Many won't respond, but don't give up.

4. Increased pressure for redesign:

There is one thing that a redesign means - add graphics/flash.  CSS can only go so far in giving a webpage enough pizzazz.

Adding graphics would significantly increase your traffic/bandwidth requirements.  So why would you want to do that?  Some of the most successful sites on the net are text-based: yahoo, google, craigslist, etc.

I'm happy with the design of the forum.  I come here for information exchange, not pretty graphics.  But that is one man's opinion.

Of course, you could look and see if this forum has other prettier templates that you could apply.  Or you could consider using other forum softwares that sport better interface: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Languages/PHP/Scripts/Forums/

@oasis a redesign doesnt mean more graphics or pizzaz. in fact, a new design should be according to a previously published guidelines which must include lightness. not everything u see graphical are images. css can do plenty magic

@seun, can ppl have web pages like myspace? what about picture capabilities like flickr? what about podcasting and video uploads (pele o!)

can we have text messages too. since this is a community, ppl need to contact each other as easy as possible.

and we can add merchandize to it. that should be a banger! t-shirts, baseball caps, event sponsorship. get ur name beyond the net and establish a brand.

what about the nairaland logo and brand. we have guys here. throw it open and let ppl submit and we vote for the best. u know, democrazy...