Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Themed Recital Woes

I agree there are a few too many. Most are not often read. However, moving the current themed recital to a sticky temporarily seems reasonable - for say 2-4 weeks after it goes live? Just my suggestion.

I see the issue, but in this case, the cure may be worse than the disease. Take a look at just the view statistics for the last set of regular recitals vs themed recitals:

5/14/2018
Recital 50 - 5786
Recital 50 Discussion - 21418 views

6/14/2018
Debussy Themed Recital - 607 views
Debussy Themed Recital Discussion - 1572 views

8/18/18
Recital 51 - 2298 views
Recital 51 Discussion - 8180 views

10/15/2018
Slavic Themed Recital - 686 views
Slavic Themed Recital Discussions - 993 views

11/15/2018
Recital 52 - 2840 views
Recital 52 Discussion - 7050 views

2/15/2019
Recital 53 - 1730 views
Recital 53 Discussion - 5438 views

3/16/2019
Bach Themed Recital - 407 views
Bach Themed Recital Discussion - 937 views

As you can see, all the regular recital threads get from 4 - 14 times the number of views as regular recitals. People just forget that the themed subform even exists. People who would otherwise look at a recital thread (and of course, not everyone would), look at the ones easily accessible many multiples of times more than the themed recital threads, which are "off the beaten path."

I think a happy medium might be to use the main forum for themed recitals and only sticky the recital itself and then only for 2-3 weeks, and then it can be unstickied. There aren't that many themed recitals to make this stickie/unstickie process cumbersome. For example, it seems 2019 will only have 3 themed recitals.

The top three stickied (is that a word?) threads are:

UPDATES - 2020 Music & Piano Tour - Europe
Piano World IS NOT FREE!
Multiple Accounts on the Forums - Not Allowed!

Do those even belong in this forum? There is a separate forum for parties and tours. Nobody reads the "Piano World IS NOT FREE" thread - it would get more attention if it were posted every now and then and allowed to rise and fall like the other threads. Having it constantly up there means no one notices it. The one about Multiple Accounts applies to the Piano Forum, not in the ABF - I don't think multiple accounts have ever been a problem here.

Eliminate those three and now you have room for recital threads.

Sam

No arguing with the view stats but there are other plausible explanations aside from the fact that they're "relegated":

• Since the themed recitals have a single composer, people may not be as interested in listening to them.
• The quarterly recitals generally draw a broad cross section of forum members playing a variety of music so people view the threads to see who participated and what they played.
• There is generally more content in the quarterly recitals (more submissions) so return trips/viewings might happen as people go back to listen to other performances.
• etc

I'm not convinced (yet) that having them in the main ABF forum would significantly increase the number of views.

Well, for whatever reason Frank decided to post them as stickies on all forums. It's his house so he gets to decide what the curtains look like ;-) As I said, I'm going to check with him about removing them (from all forums).

The ABF is more or less on par with the Piano Forum (and Digital Forum, and Pianist Corner) with the number of multiple accounts created.

BB - please notice that three people on the first page of this thread alone admitted to missing the Bach recital because they didn’t see it posted.

I vote for putting the themed recitals back on the main ABF page, that is if we’re taking a head count.

I did indeed notice that out of the 35K+ views the ABF has had since the Bach recital was announced that 3 people missed the announcement.

I see two of the stickied threads have disappeared, so that's progress.

Sam

Yes, I just removed them.

That 35k+ views stat is meaningless. We don't have thousands of people participating in this forum. It's the tens of people that actually participate in the recitals, or would be likely to join them if they knew about them, that are important.

Sam

So let's look at view stats for two Quarterly Recitals from long before the creation of the Themed Recitals forum and two Themed Recitals from that same period:

2/14/2015
Recital 37 - 20839 views
Recital 37 Discussion - 138201 views

3/14/2015
Schumann Themed Recital - 18836 views
Schumann Themed Recital Discussion - 53015 views

8/13/2015
Recital 39 - 12354 views
Recital 39 Discussion - 86818 views

9/14/2015
Great American Songbook Recital - 13552 views
Great American Songbook Recital Discussion - 18941


For the two themed recitals above, people seemed just as interested in listening to them as to the quarterly recitals.


You might have something here, however it appears that of the 4 recitals above, one might theorize that people are just as willing to view/listen to the recitals, but might be less willing to discuss composers or music they might not be familiar with. However, the greater number of discussion views might also be related to your next point of there being more participants, which leads to more comments in the the discussion threads for quarterly recitals, than for themed recitals. Of course there could be other explanations. And there are only a pair of data points above.


I think that the pair of recitals from before "the split" provide evidence that there were more views of themed recitals (compared to regular quarterly recitals) when the themed recitals were in the main ABF forum than now when they are not.

The sticky thread “Important Topics on the ABF” can probably go elsewhere too. Written in 2007, it has very little relevance today. It contains links to study groups that are almost 20 years old.

I agree that the themed recitals are buried in the subforum and need to be moved to the main menu. Even if it for only a few weeks.

I see this quoted a lot here - it's Franks Forum, so he decides. Well, I donate every month. And it's the content that the users create that bring people to the site. And the recitals are a large part of the quality content that gets created. Shoving us off to a subforum doesn't seem to be responding to the people that are contributing.

I don't remember any open discussion about creating the subforum, and I am here every day. Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that someone complained privately and it happened without any public discussion.

Sam

I also want to add the a couple more statistics because I think the segregated subforum even reduces the number of signups and submissions - so less participation in submitting. At least one person commented for the most recent Bach recital that they hadn't know about it or they would have submitted something.

Here are views for the sign up threads for the first two themed recitals that were fully in the themed recitals subforum:

Slavic Themed Recital Sign Up Thread - 3788 views - 22 sign ups
Slavic Themed Recital - 18 submissions

Debussy Themed Recital Sign Up Thread - 4185 views - 30 sign ups
Debussy Themed Recital - 22 submissions

Here are views for the sign up threads for the last two themed recitals that were fully in the main ABF forum:

French Themed Recital Sign Up Thread - 26223 views - 60 sign ups
French Themed Recital - 42 submissions

Russian Themed Recital Sign Up Thread - 20427 views - 50 sign ups
Russian Themed Recital - 44 submissions

These numbers suggest that there are half as many signing up for recitals and submitting pieces to the themed recitals since the themed recitals subforum was recreated and all of the threads were moved there. There are significantly fewer views on the signup threads also, which might explain where there were fewer people signing up and submitting pieces to these themed recitals, and fewer people looked at the signup threads resulting in fewer signups which in turn resulted in few submissions, and its possible fewer submissions resulted in these recitals being marginalized from the perspective of people listening to them and discussing. Possibly this is a cascading issue.

“Shoving us off to a sub-forum” seems a bit harsh. My admittedly fuzzy recollection of how it all came down is:

• There were two themed recitals plus the quarterly recitals ongoing and one (or possibly) two more in the planning/call for participation stages.
• The threads associated with these activities plus the regular sticky threads and announcements basically dominated the ABF and some users (roughly the same number as are agitating to get the themed recitals moved back to the main ABF forum) complained that they were having to scroll through half a page or more to see new forum posts.
• These complaints were buried in other threads, received via “report posts” and via private messages to the moderators (primarily Cheryl). To my knowledge, there was never a “should we do this” thread in the ABF but the volume was pretty loud at the time that people were unhappy about the large number of threads stuck to the top of the forum.
• A “Grieg recital” sub-forum had already been created (I don’t remember why) and Cheryl proposed in the moderator forum to simply rename it “Themed recitals” and move everything but the quarterly recital there.
• This seemed like a good idea given the volume of complaints so that’s what we did.

As I said, other than the work it’ll take me to undo it all and stick/unstick recitals and calls for participation (as well as respond to the inevitable complaints about too many of these and the future proposal to create a sub-forum) I don’t really have a strong feeling about it. I will say though that the number of people who are against the sub-forum seems to be a small but vocal few, this is fairly typical of proposed forum changes but it’s not clear to me that it necessarily represents a general consensus.

With regards to the “it’s Frank’s house” comment. Yes, users drive content and should have some say in what’s on the forum. Having said that, if Frank decides for whatever reason that a particular subject merits a general announcement that’s his call to make. If you don’t like it, by all means “report” the post and he’ll see it. Whether or not he’ll decide to do anything about it is ultimately his decision. I suspect though in some cases he does what every user of the forum does: scrolls right past all the stickies and doesn’t even look at them so they gradually pass into obsolescence without being removed.

Those tens of people are only important with respect to the recitals, the 35K views stat is not meaningless since after all page views drives revenue for the forum and if those 35K viewers or a large subset of them get tired of scrolling past content they’re not interested in and go elsewhere it matters.

Look, I like the recitals. I’ve participated in them in the past and enjoy listening to them when they appear. Having said that, people come to the ABF for lots of reasons and listening to or participating in the recitals is just one of many reasons. The forum attempts to strike a balance across a broad range of interests. There have been complaints in the past about too many study groups, too many recitals, too many stickies, too many threads dedicated to a single composer, too many sight reading threads, etc. These complaints are often done via reported posts or PM to a moderator/admin so you wouldn’t necessarily see them but they do occur and we (forum mods/admins) try to decide what, if anything, to do about them at the time. As I said previously, for most forum changes it’s a small but vocal group agitating for the change. That doesn’t render their concerns moot but it does not necessarily represent a general consensus.

If page views are important to the site, then put the recitals out where they can be seen and generate page views.

Sam

Actually, this could have been managed. For example, the themed recitals are far enough apart that there should only be one going at one time. Others might be in planning or call for participation stage, but those don't need to be stickied. Only the single recital that is live needs to be stickied. Traffic on threads will keep them near the top without being stickied. For example, the discussion thread for a given themed recital will stay near the top until people have nothing more to say and then it will fade away as any other thread. Especially now that you've cleared away some of the older stickied threads, adding only one at any given time for the themed recitals should be no big deal.


It would be relatively easy to check on a general consensus. We could do a quick free SurveyMonkey or Servio survey and put this to the question in under 30 mins. If proceeding this way, it might make sense to ask some other questions to users of ABF.


The numbers above show that even the old themed recitals from a few years ago generate page views on an ongoing basis... except much less once hidden away in the subforum.

The data proves that placing recitals in a subforum is detrimental to views and participation. Why does it matter how many people are advocating for the change? It's not a meaningful number. I dropped out of the discussion since I saw that two others were leading the charge, so to speak. You can't conclude that thus I don't care. # of people reporting is not at all representative of the problem or validity of different solutions.

The data clearly shows that recitals in that subforum receive a lot less attention and participation. Why wring hands over the undoubtable fact that if you change something a few people won't like it?

If cluttering this particular forum is a problem, why not a main level "recital and recordings" forum (essentially a rename of the Member Recordings forum, and remapping of the subforums to it)? Put all recording related stuff in that forum (which would then also make an obvious place to ask question like "zoom or tascam" type questions, sticky recital announcements (so you'd have maybe 2 stickies at a time), and there you go. If you want to listen or participate in recording there is one obvious place to go, and if you don't you can avoid it entirely. I'd also bump it up to the "most popular" list at the top, since it is very active already - far more active than the Events forum which is oddly in the "most popular list". (in one page of events, the oldest post is from 2017, whereas the oldest post on the first page of Member recordings is 2019).

Actually, it is worse than that. Pianist Corner has a members recordings subforum, which I didn't know existed, then there is the main level "Member's recording forum". Then there is the nonclassical member recordings sub forum. Then Adult beginners has themed recitals (why under Adult - they are not at all limited to adults, or beginners, or adult beginners). None of this makes any sense to me. I just don't go clicking around subforums every day, and I miss tons of stuff that interests me.

Some of the forums here just seem odd. 9/11, Calendar postings, Legal Postings, Who's Who - these are just dead. The latter has the last post in 2014.

The data on usage is indisputable; the only question is do we care that recitals are not receiving the attention they received when not stuffed in a subforum?