Latest Comment...

I think when the boards return you all should make nice and be happy. You can start by just wishing everyone well. No back peddling and if you don't like the other person if you have nothing nice to say then keep to yourself about it. Clean slate is a welcoming thought. Cheers! Annie

Original Post: General Discussion Board Update

We understand that many members are singing the 'general discussion board blues' right now. We know that it was a place for many members to kick back and read the thoughts and feelings of other artists. The question is, how many members have been effected by the loss of the GD boards?

To answer this question, we ran some reports from our message board statistics. Fortunately, we have very detailed statistics on the message boards. We know the names of every single member that has ever posted to the boards, when and what they posted and can tell anyone which threads they have read and what day, hour, minute and second that they read that thread. With this data, it's easy for us to run the numbers and this is what we found...

Each month, at least one topic on the GD board was read by around 200 members. Over the last year, an average of 105 members per month posted at least 5 responses or new topics on the GD boards. It's pretty much the same members that post and respond to topics each month. If you do the math, that means less than .5% of our total membership was active on the GD boards and less than 1% of our total artist membership even went to the GD boards to read anything. With 500+ new members joining ArtWanted.com every month, the percent of those that want the GD board gets smaller and smaller every day.

To answer the initial question above of how many are effected by the loss of the GD board, the answer is less than 1% of our total artist membership. The other 99% of our members could care less about the GD board and many of them have e-mailed us thanking us for removing it, because of the negative vibe that it had on the site.

Now that everyone knows the facts, let us talk to the 1% of our members that still want the GD board. As we mentioned, we understand that you have the need to discuss non-art related topics and enjoyed the General Discussion board for this outlet. We created the General Discussion board years ago for this reason and we liked having this area of our site at first, however this board was abused by our members. People would knowingly break the rules and would sometimes even say 'this will probably be removed but I will post it anyway'. We had to remove/delete posts on that board almost daily, because of all those that ignored the rules. Those same members that repeatedly broke the rules are now asking for the GD boards to come back. Lets state the facts here...the GD boards were removed, because too many people knowingly broke the rules with their posts and didn't care.

We are still undecided at this point if the GD boards will be back. We are in the process of creating a member survey and plan to ask several questions about the GD boards on this survey to get the feedback from our members. We will review the feedback from the members as a whole, but also view the results from just those that participate on the boards. We will have this survey posted before the end of June and we will make our final decision about the GD board after we gather some feedback from our members. Until this is made, we will be removing any new topics about the GD board that are posted.

For those members that are considering leaving AW over the GD board issue, we ask that you stick around at least until a final decision is made about the GD boards.

On a positive note, today we added a new 'Member Spotlight' forum. This new area has many purposes. It should be used to post positive feedback towards other members of our site, it's a place for new members to announce themselves and can be used as a 'prayer' board for those members that need our thoughts. We hope this new area will be a place to bring positive thoughts and feedback to the members of ArtWanted.com.