CPod Staff Contributions

I'm interested in the transition of total monthly number of comments posted here. Do you have that?

Hi go_manly,

Thanks for bringing this subject up again. All counselors have been notified and will start posting and contributing more onto the site. Just to let you know, Helen Shen was the community advocate last year, however has now become a teacher for guided and executive students, therefore is unable to post as many comments on the boards as she used to.

I thought you had a magical method for counting them, hehe. Anyway, that's a great job, for which I thank you! Incidentally, there is a long vacation，国庆节，in China in October. Probably the decrease in this month should be partly attributed to that.

changye

I forgot about that holiday. So I counted over the last 14 days - a total of 80 staff posts. That is slightly LESS than the rate for the first 17 days of the month. So I'm afraid my whine still stands.

Pure speculation on my part, but I believe that Praxis has a policy (which users probably aren't supposed to know about) of sharply reducing contributions on the boards from staff and any undue friendliness between staff and users on the boards.

As regulars here know pete greatly enjoyed interacting with us on the boards. He really saw many of us as friends and loved the community life. And look what happened to him.

As for questions going unanswered and so on, I rather think they (meaning the powers that be) would like to move away from a system of staff spending their time answering questions posed on comment threads. I'm sure they think it's unnecessary, and/or that such answers can come from other users, or just more thorough study of the material provided.

Hi go_manly

Maybe they are still struggling in "aftermath" of 国庆节 holidays or have been very busy preparing for/enjoying Halloween, hehe.

go_manly:

Your whine still stands indeed.

We've had a busy period at the office recently, but community has actually been very much on our minds (see John's latest blog post).

As one result, a week or so ago ousijia joined us as full-time Community Advocate intern. She'll be getting more and more involved in the community during the next few weeks and months, which should serve as a remedy in part.

Ousijia/Scarlett's Chinese is excellent, so she'll be able to help in the way Amber did. We'll be introducing her formally very soon. Here's my very brief introduction from last week: http://chinesepod.com/lessons/kaixin-wang-farm-thieves#comment-136397

This is not intended as a full response to your post, but just an initial reply before we get back to work on Monday. I hope it's adequate for the moment?

suxiaoya

Thanks for your reply. I will certainly be looking forward to getting ousijia's help, especially if she can provide Amber-style replies. I believe Amber's detailed response to questions was the most useful part of these discussions. Hopefully Cpod's reply rate will be up again by the end of November - I'll do another count then.

Aside from the dip in October, I still think something needs to be done to prevent staff from simply missing questions. Perhaps you are already considering this issue.

(And a friendly tip:  If ousijia's Chinese is as good as you say, perhaps her profile should not refer to her as a Newbie!)

Sorry changye

Counting posts from 9 Cpod staff took me about an hour. I wouldn't want to contemplate the task of counting every post over the same time period. Unless you can think of a quick way of doing that?

@tal

What in the world are you talking about? Why is it that everytime a CPod staff member moves on to other things, conspiracy theorists come out of the woodwork? People went insane when Amber left. Sometimes people just change jobs. Chill.

@matt_c

I just wanted to thank you guys for your candor. As a user, I've always felt like you guys do a superb job of keeping us up to date on the inner workings at CPod and listening to our input.

jckeith, I think because one can only say "I do miss Pete" so many times, when you do miss him so it just expresses itself in other words.

I'm with Tal on his complaint that our questions so often have gone answered and am glad staff presence will be increasing immediately (Someone please come answer questions people had on the "Even if ..." QW. It's already over a week old but nobody from CPod has been to leave word there. Doesn't look good!).

Yes I know, the purer the speculation the bigger the mess.

I believe that the August/September guided plan promotion had an effect as well.  I got into that, and and now, if I have a question on the lesson content, I just post it in the counselor tab.  Every question is answered in 12 hours.  Second, I work mostly with older lessons now that are related to my interests (business and culture).  Since activity tends to cluster around new releases, I don't participate as much as I used to.  (Not that I've ever been one of the top-ten posters.)

I guess my point is that my language-related questions are now out of the comments section.  I am getting much-improved service, but I am the only beneficiary of that service.  Staff is actively supporting me; but it doesn't appear using the any metric developed solely from the community section.

I wonder if having user's questions from the guided plan appear in the comments thread would help?  Certainly, someone might benefit from my questions.  At the same time, there's the business aspect; I benefit from the counselor's guidance because I paid for it.  Also, other poddies might have an unfair expectation of having follow-up questions asked when, in fact, they never paid for that service.

As an aside, I have gotten great help from the guided plan.  I was a bit skeptical when it came out and would never have signed up.  Now, I will probably renew it.  (Damn you marketing gurus!  I know what you're doing, I just can't help myself!)

@tvan -

I'm really pleased to learn that the Guided Plan is working for you!

While I'm sure we would never post up the private questions of Teacher Services customers without their prior permission, perhaps an anonymous "question round-up" of sorts could be prepared in an edited format? After all, I'd guess the chances are that many of the questions asked relate to specific ChinesePod lessons.

Sticking on the subject of Teacher Services, yajin/Helen, who's usually very active in the community, has been doing over-time during the past month to work with many of our newest Guided students privately over Skype/online.

She's still around on the community boards, but we should have better communicated this recent shift in her role.

@go_manly, I forgot to mention that davidxuzhou's posts could be counted amongst the staff members' going forward, since he started hosting some of the more advanced lessons in October.

With new "ChinesePod Team" page, the roles of each staff member, past and present, will soon become a lot easier to determine. You can read the details in his blog post, but here's the paragraph that refers to this particular development:

"... each ChinesePod employee’s comments all over the site will be clearly labeled, and also linked to a “ChinesePod Team” page where you can see a list of the ChinesePod hosts, teachers, and support staff, both current and past."

So, hopefully, with support from new and existing team members, plus better communication of these team developments, the community experience for everyone should improve markedly.

PS. I'm feeling a little delicate this morning after last night's Halloween celebrations; I hope this all makes sense!

Just to add a positive here, the number of posts in the last month by Cpod staff is 511. So we are back to the June figures.

It looks like my previous post here was premature. The number of posts by CPod in the last 2 weeks is only 143.

All the counselors who, we were promised, were going to start taking up the slack, have almost vanished from the forums - 13 posts from 12 counselors in the last 2 weeks. The surprise is Helen Shen:  She posted 590 times in her first 4 months, 110 times in her next 3 months, 35 times in her next 2 months, and only twice in the last 2 weeks. Eight counselors have not made a single post in the last 2 weeks.

@go_manly Since the introduction of the Activity Stream, people's Chinese Level in their profile is less indicative of their 'real' Chinese Level. If you wish to participate in different levels in the Activity Stream there is an option to switch levels - this actually changes the level in your profile as well. So it's my guess that Ousijia has recently participated in the Newbie Activity Stream hence her Newbie level status.

There is absolutely no policy dictating the reduction amount of staff comments, if anything staff are encouraged to comment as much as possible. As Sarah mentioned, this recent decline is being addressed and will increasing our presence immediately.