User Groups

Bodawei's photos are always interesting, especially for those of us who don't live in China. Don't miss out y'all!

(Bodawei, if despite my best intentions this post doesn't get you enough good PR you could I suppose always make your posts under General Discussion ...)

If you rock up here as a little French looking Asian boy with a mo I will gladly hand over a hongbao

lol...imHo

The bad news for you is that I am already considered old in China. One little kid in the 小区 is instructed to call me 爷爷 - puzzling because I look at least 10 years younger than I am. IMHO. :)

What, next year? ;-)

You realise that if I do, you will have to look after me in my old age? ;-)

Hopefully that means you will give me money in a red packet next new year! :-)

Feel free to contribute. The more users put photos up, the better a thread it will be. I'm still holding out the vain hope some CPod people might contribute :)

what a great thread - don't know how I missed it. so interesting seeing another side of people. you will always be a little Chinese boy with a big moustache in my mind. (And your photo is taking a long time to download so I haven't seen your other side.)

This is my photo thread!

http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/8720

I do see the benefits of "like" and "useful" buttons. I'd be rather hesitant though, to ask for additions that if introduced might again prove to be very distracting until the system is working right with them!

See, that's just what I mean!

'instead of just one overall rating,you could rate different aspects of the podcast...eg....audio quality,entertainment value,grammar value,vocab,deng deng'

Excellent idea. At least once a year - at the ChinesePod Logies. :) Sorry non-Australians, another Australian reference. The biggest event in the Antipodean calendar is when people buy up their TV Weeks and vote for their favourite TV star (no limit on how many votes you put in so it rewards those with enthusiastic mothers and fans with nothing else to do.) It is a kind of up-market Oscar night.

gotcha.Yeah,well chanelle's original suggestion was about posts as well as lessons and groups..everything,so that's why I misinterpreted.

The reason I never vote on the lessons is that they're all top notch. However I might be inclined to vote if ,instead of just one overall rating,you could rate different aspects of the podcast...eg....audio quality,entertainment value,grammar value,vocab,deng deng

btw for non Aussies.....Margaret and David are a couple of movie reviewers on telly here in Australia..they discuss flicks then rate them

I was actually referring to the 'underused' star rating on lessons, but it could be extended to threads, couldn't it.

The star rating for lessons actually works better now than it did - originally it just gave the average vote without saying how many people have voted. Kind of meaningless. I suggested that it also show the number of votes. Now we can see HOW meaningless the system is, for example if only two people vote out of 400 users it is not what you would call a reliable sample, even if, or especially if, they both give it a 5. I think it is the only idea that I've made to be picked up by ChinesePod. :) I would much prefer a system of user reviews, or the above 'famous poddy rating' - I am thinking of Margaret and David.

xiao_liang's xuanze...hehe,very good mate. So you mean for example that changye's choice would be changye creating a thread and picking out posts that he likes of other poddies from anywhere on the CPod boards...is that the idea?

Star rating like this (and Internet surveys) never 'work' because they have no credibility. Other options:

- a rating by an independent reviewer (eg. a regulator rates the energy use of a household appliance) - not really appropriate here

- ratings by people with some credibility (like famous film reviewers rate films)

I don't want to promote stardom, but we could have famous poddy ratings - like Changye's Choice, Tal's Tip, Xiao_liang's Xuanze etc. :)

PS. What's your 'photo thread'?

I rate you 5 out of 5!

Ok, 4 out of 5, because you won't post a photo in my photo thread :p

Now that probably would be a most effective way to get me to cut down drastically on my commenting. I don't want to be rated!

I suppose they could just extend the "star rating" that's woefully underused on the lessons...

I like Chanelle's idea because sometimes I have nothing useful to contribute to the conversation... not that that always stops me... but I would like to show my appreciation for the thought and work that was put into a helpful comment. I know it is a bit much, but I would like both a "like" and a "useful" button. Because there are many comments I like that are incredibly useless and I would like to lend my support to those as well! 哈哈

Hi Chanelle, is that like on Facebook (I'm not at all familiar with Facebook)? What I like about having to comment is that we're forced to be more thoughtful before we speak at all (it was even more so before, when there was no "delete" button and 15-minute window to retract our own comments). But maybe you have the right idea. Maybe the majority of users want something like your suggestion, a way to voice their approval or disagreement more easily, without having to spend the time and make the effort to choose words and articulate well and stay clear of flame wars.

Do feel free to start a thread to plug your East Brain, West Brain group here. You already have nearly 40 members and that's great, but maybe you'd like to let newcomers know about it? There are interesting questions that get asked and discussed there.

I heard the same thing mate,but that was before my time. Perhaps only just before my time and no coincidence...maybe they realised they'd created a monster and didn't wanna feed it,hehe ;)

Zhen, yes I'm referring to the activity email which Cpod has just started sending out yesterday. I found it useful, especially for the East/West Brain group I started. I would imagine such an email will also be useful for people who have started groups... they don't have to log in to see if there are new comments in the groups that they have started. Of couse, for one who is a member of many groups, these daily activity emails can just present as another chore requiring attention.

Hmm... seems to me this could be Cpod's main intention for implementing the Dashboard - to market daily what's up at Cpod. But for me, as a member of only a handful of groups, the daily activity email is helpful and would enhance my progress in learning Chinese.

That's my recollection of what a long-time poddie (can't remember who)informed me last year when we were discussing "top ten posters" that Cpod in the past used these stats to reward certain members who were not only frequent posters but also helpers. Maybe people like Baba or RJ can confirm or not that these stats were once used by Cpod to reward helpful people.

I wonder Paul if that's the same kind of email I got yesterday or the day before, then promptly unsubscribed from--because it was showing me a lot of "latest activity" but it was all stuff I'd seen already here at least a day or two before. I got the impression this group activity email might be useful for people who only come to the site like once a week.

Hm. Not sure about that. I don't feel as though I deserve a free subscription just because I choose to post frequently.

I think the group activity email which Cpod implemented today may lead to participation by more people. I agree that Cpod should scrap the top 10 users listing which was used in the past to motivate people to participate and to reward the top posters with free subscriptions.

Repeating myself, but I think Xiaophil's made a very good point up there about the Top 10 Users list.

xiao_liang, haha no one needs to go to a list to ”find" users as active as go_manly and Baba (btw where is Baba ... ?)! And to follow their posts we only have to click on their avatar or username link. (^_^)/

I get your point though. Obviously there are people who see value in the user Rankings and enjoy them.

Thanks Zhen, and I agree with you. There does seem to be a frustrating lack of intuitive sense at cpod.

Xiaophil you're sounding almost like you support me more than I support me haha. I'm not only all for cleaning out the User Groups including removing and deleting, I actually thought that point was so obvious we shouldn't have to be articulating it.

I'm cool RJ. I could have made my point in much better words myself--and "puzzled" like Phil said is actually closer than "surprised". Thanks for sharing your view on user groups. As most of us probably do, I completely agree with the need to set aside and remove those groups that just are not "alive"--instead of just leaving them all up there for users to go through--and I'm sure the CPod guys are also thinking the same thing.

I wasn't going to complain here in this post, only wanted to do something positive "in the meantime", as we wait for CPod to set things right here--but just have to say this again. It is really incredible that the option we've been given if we want to be sure we won't miss any interesting community activity is to go through and manually join "every active user group" out there! You can't be serious. I'm surprised that CPod could not foresee how annoying and stressful this would be for us. This is no technical problem, it's a case of the CPod people having little intuitive sense of user community experience ... it's disappointing. OK I'm done now.

RJ

I was puzzled a bit by your opening sentence but not offended. I prefer Zhen's method over yours by a small margin (although I think they would work excellent together). However, what really appeals to me about your method, i.e. archiving or deleting old groups, is that as far as I can tell would not require massive technology changes. It seems to me that CPod staff could find all the seldom used groups, send the monitor an email, if no reply within a week --blamo-- delete the group the old fashioned way, manually. Oh yeah, as you can see, I prefer just deleting them.

Sorry Zhen (Phil actually), I actually do support groups and your right to use and advertise them. I could have worded it better. I didnt really mean to aim directly at Phil like that.

Cheers

RJ

Also, I'd like to say the "most active users" list I find quite useful. There are certain people like go_manly and bababardwan who are really active, and by looking at posts they have made, I can follow their study strategies (or their funny posts), and find active groups etc. It's part of being in a community.

I totally agree with most of what you've said here RJ. Of course Groups need to be cleaned up. And it's my fault for giving it so much space, but actually the point of my post was not a campaign to get the current Rankings (top 10 users) replaced or abolished. The point, the purpose of this post, actually was this:

Some of us have founded, or have been actively involved in some really interesting User Groups, and might like to give those a little PR--let people know they exist. Please feel free to start a thread here and do that!

Regarding the Most Popular list, of course we need to be shown which groups are the "most popular"--if that means those Groups most supported by activity by most users. As I've said before, currently the "Most Popular" list seems only to show us which groups have the most members, regardless of whether there is any recent activity. And am I right in guessing that unless a member who has joined a group has actually gone to the trouble of leaving it, then whether or not that person is still a CPod user now they remain counted among the group members? So yes--this needs cleaning up like you say. If the current "Most Popular" list (of just 6, including the General Discussion group!) were actually useful I would never have come up with the suggestion that CPod give us rankings of the Most Active User Groups at all.

And ... I see no need to cut Phil down for showing me support just because you beg to differ. Sorry if I'm misunderstanding and you haven't done that--it just looked to me though, like you were taking some impatience with someone (me?) or something out on him and I was surprised, to be honest. But I hope actually I'm totally wrong here, and look forward to offering a proper apology once you set me straight.

Exactly! Additionally, I think it would be helpful if in addition to the User Groups category, there was a Location Based Groups and a Language Exchange Groups category. I think it is great those groups are there, but sorting them into different pots would help everyone find what they are looking for.

Yep RJ, you nailed it! Good to see you back in your old style!

I think I agree with about everything you said here.

The attention it deseves? Look at user group participation. Im all in favor of user groups but it needs cleaning up. There are over 200 user groups and most have a couple users, a couple posts, and they have no activity for sometimes years. There are few with merit. The most popular and newest lists should be kept up, and groups with no activity for a year should go into an archived group list somewhere or dare I say it - be deleted. . People inadvertently create groups just to make a post. Others are basically one post wonders that quickly fizzle, and predictably so. Then there are gems like transcripts with Tal, Goulniki's group (now stopped) and even your 中文把。 Some groups were dead long before they were transferred here from the old "88 groups" system. See "character insanity". John B's firestorm that lasted one week or so. Long dead it still sits, and occasionally someone wants to join it, having no way to know that its defunct, unless they look at posting dates. Id say clean it up first, then maybe there should be some minimum criteria for creating one, at least a suggested criteria. I couldnt care less about the frequent users list but I fail to see what one has to do with the other. Both could be counted. It doesnt have to be a trade off.

Hey Xiaophil cheers for 顶ing this. And that's a very good point, re "top 10" users rankings:

it is too short. The top 10 doesn't change much. Perhaps this creates the impression of a clique? I think if it was the top 20, the list would be a lot more fluid, and hopefully that would give people more of a feeling of being a part of things. We might also notice more CPod staff activity. As it stands, there are rarely more than one or two staff members that crack the top ten at any given time.

Good. I hope you saw my :-)

Yes CPod is reading this.

Yes and "Most Popular" as of now is not the info users want is it, esp with the General Discussion Group at the top (this is the "most popular user group"--?) when we're only given the Top 6.