Biggest DaniWeb pain points

Well.. here's my 2¢

1: Old threads (like.. some are 3+ years old!) being commented on. They need to be locked. A lot of the comments are outdated, spam, or often times not even on point with the rest of the thread. (Granted, this hasn't happened super recently, but there seems to be spurts of it throughout the year).

2: A majority of my time here is spent trying to help others. People just aren't posting things I can help with :-/ (not anyone's fault in particular, just my skill set doesn't cover some things). If there is nothing new for me to address on the first page, I tend to go back to work and that's my break... so.. I guess get more traffic so my breaks can last longer than 20 seconds please? :-D

3: DW doesn't have the name recognition or priority as Stack Overflow, and Im sure that drives a ton of potential traffic away. In general, though, if it's within the first couple spots people will visit just to see what's there. On top of that, SO was designed as a skim-to-find process. Some of the answers here require you to read. I don't mind it. Others who are in a hurry might.

4: The people here are what I find as a huge value over other places. There are 2 things that piss off mods here: Asking for someone to do your homework (which may actually push people away, sadly...) and spam / hate speech. Other than that, the "community" at large tends to deal with trolls pretty well. There is a huge wealth of knowledge, and I always felt that even if I ask "stupid" questions, someone would give an answer that would at least nudge me in the right direction and get me started so I can ask more intelligent questions later. There is a general collective intent to improve. On SO or Reddit, you ask the stupid and the stupid crawls out of the wood work to write back. It's just not a pleasant experience for the most part.

5: When I search for help with the ole google-finder, DW just doesn't provide hits. SO and Quora pop up far more often than anything DW shows, followed by Reddit as a last resort. I don't know why it is, but it is.

6: No "new" content, or "news" to pay attention to. The draw to come here is A) I have a problem. B) I am looking for a solution. Maybe if there were topical RSS feeds or.. I dunno.. something... It might be a reason to just hit refresh and use it as a launch pad. However, seeing that Yahoo! had tried this forever and a day, it may not be that great of an idea... I think the bigger issue is just no "new" content.

7: there is comfort here once you get here... I really wish I could help you express this better, and to help extend that feeling to draw new people... but I don't know any other way of saying this, or why it is the case.

8: Habit. As I have told you before - this was where I started programming. It's just built into my day to come visit and see what I can do.

Thank you very much for your feedback. I'm trying to read between the lines for anything that I have not already done or tried to revive DaniWeb.

I've said all along that I created Dazah to fix DaniWeb. If it's not able to do that, then I have to go back to the drawing board (which could perhaps mean ditching or repurposing Dazah's functionality) and try another way.

I think the idea of the separate login created more problems than it helped. As of right now, I'm thinking of going back to DaniWeb's own login system (no longer have a separate Dazah account), but take Dazah's features and functionality and revenue stream and somehow integrate that into DaniWeb. However, it would need to be done in a way that both benefits DaniWeb members and brings an additional revenue stream outside of banner ads.

What pain points would you say sites like Stack Overflow, Reddit, and Quora have? They're not friendly to newbies? Would you say that's the main thing? What else?

SO requires a certain amount of "points" to allow replies. It's a community filter. It's annoying. However, as was pointed out with how hostile the internet is in general to everyone, it seems to work for them. It prevents people from tanking their own accounts because it makes it harder to get help when you really need it.

Reddit... it's just noise. If it's not on the front page (or like.. front 3 pages) I don't bother. They have so much churn and reposts that it all gets lost in the noise. It's also not a great place for "help" since it's just a public free for all forum.

I don't use Quora much, most because they have a registration wall to access data in some cases. Honestly, I don't use it enough to know what qualifies as a "public" post vs what you have to be registered for. If I find a Quora response, I tend to overlook it unless I don't have a choice.

DW is a community - SO and Quora are research filters. Reddit is a collection of communities. That's not to say StackExchange doesn't have its own community driving many of the sub Exchanges - but it's not quite as connected and open as say DW is. Within a few months of posting here I knew right away who was likely going to reply to a message, and what quality of an answer I could expect (and that was before I started looking at profiles and seeing quality scores, etc...). On Reddit, I don't know anyone by their handle or name. On SO, same. It's just a mess of noise.

Im not sure if that's the feedback you were looking for, but that's what I got :-/

What are the biggest pain points you have with DaniWeb?

1. spammers
2. people who copy/paste homework
3. people who revive multi-year old threads by posting nonsense
4. people posting in the wrong area (e.g. programming questions in the Community area)

If you don't visit DaniWeb as much as you used to, what changed?

There's just not much of interest going on. There are few questions in my skill set that I feel capable of answering and most of the ones that are in my area are so simple that it is obvious that the OP just couldn't be bothered to even try to do it his/herself.

There used to be interesting discussions in the geek lounge but that area is just stagnating now.

Where do you go now instead of DaniWeb?

Nowhere. I haven't found anything comparable.

What makes other resources better?

Don't know. Haven't been there. My interest at the moment is in GPU programming (CUDA, OpenCL) and APL and I tend to get answers when needed directly from the vendors.

There are three things wrong with DaniWeb: no traffic, no traffic and no traffic. Pain points were never an issue before Google sunk DaniWeb search results.

I am at a loss as to how to solve this issue, I'm sad to say. We have a superb core of experienced members happy to help those actually looking for help. We have a great community feel that stretches across everything that DaniWeb does. What we don't have is the exposure on search engines, well Google, and without that nobody gets to discover the good things about DaniWeb. I'm no SEO expert, but there must be some traction in looking at what Google doesn't like about DaniWeb and changing that (even if only at the cosmetic/surface level) to be more Google friendly?

Technically, I am retired. Before I retired I spent 30 years of my working life, marketing IT projects.

The first question to ask is what need or requirement exists that DaniWeb is well placed to satisfy and by doing so, converts resources to benefits (financial and otherwise).

The second question is does DaniWeb meet the objective?

Clearly your question suggests that you consider it does not!

If this is a serious question, then I would be prepared to respond with a marketing plan. Would you want to share that marketing plan with all your competitors?

Ryantroop's response above was interesting and factually correct, so I upvoted it. However it was primarily critical and not constructive. But your question was posited in a negative way, so he replied accordingly.

My immediate recommendation is that you create a restricted forum and invite your contributors/responders to join it. You will know who to accept and who to reject from the quality of their contributions to date. In that closed forum I, for one, could prepare and publish my proposals.

what need or requirement exists that DaniWeb is well placed to satisfy

I see DW as a resource primarily for learners. Unlike S.O. we are beginner friendly, and will spend time discussing options and providing guidance. This is surely a huge need that we have met well in the past and can do again.

There are three things wrong with DaniWeb: no traffic, no traffic and no traffic

I agree 100%. If we don't get DW in front of potential members then nothing else matters. Questions like "how can I best use <some particular technology>?" or "what problems do existing comitted members have?" are irrelevant. There are three things that need to be fixed: SEO, SEO and SEO.

There are comments in the Question on who would build a Dazah App that should be aggregated into this discussion.

Obviously I am waiting for the input from Dani Horowitz into the discussion now.

In a comment from happygeek above, Davey mentions that Google "sunk" DaniWeb search results. Do you mean that there was/is a specific action by Google to down rank DaniWeb content or just that the content does not attract sufficient attention in the Google search algorithm?

How do DaniWeb results on Google compare with other search engines such as Bing and Yandex?

I for one would find it entertaining and informative to read just exactly what those who think that DaniWeb should be doing with respect to "SEO, SEO and more SEO" than it is already doing.

Various algo tweaks hit DaniWeb, and other forum-based sites, more than the likes of SO for example.

However, what I meant was the simple fact that DaniWeb used to be top three, first page, for many of the programming/dev queries that drove people to the site. Now DaniWeb is lucky to be in the top three pages at all.

As for what should be done other than is already being done, as I have already said - I'm no SEO expert so cannot answer. I would, however, suggest that looking at what those sites that are ranking highly for the kind of queries we would like to get traffic from is a good move, and seeing if DaniWeb can change anything that might make it more attractive from the Google <insert other search engine here> perspective might help.

I suspect Dani has already taken much of this on board long before now, of course, but just throwing it out there regardless :-)

@Dani:
I started visiting less often around the time that all of the separate programming language topic forums were munged together. But this wasn't the cause of my decrease in activity.

I'm more of an answers person. I come here to try and help others, rather than to ask questions.

When I was most active on the site, I used to log-in and lurk - waiting for new posts to answer. But over time, I'd noticed that there were a lot less new questions being posted in the areas that I'm interested in (primarily C, C++, Python and Linux). So I'd lurk less and only log in occasionally.

And a lot of the time, by the time I got around to reading any new questions - they had already been satisfactorily answered by other other regulars here. So there was no point adding anything!

And ever since then - I still check the site - albeit much more infrequently than I used to. And I will log in and put in my 2 cents when appropriate. Nowadays, I spend more of my time on Linux.org answering Linux related questions and helping to solve coding related questions there.

I'm not a huge fan of the bigger sites like SO and Reddit - sometimes they feel more like a dick-swinging contest for geeks than a community. I prefer to participate in smaller communities.

Daniweb is a great community, I really like it here. I like spending time here. The only thing that is letting it down is the lack of traffic. And the main reason for the lack of traffic seems to be the lack of visibility in search engines.

Back when I used to log-in every day, if I had a C++ related problem and did a search - very often I'd see several results from daniweb in the first page of results. Most often Daniweb were at the top. But nowadays, you usually have to view several pages of results before you see any hits from Daniweb. And we all know that many people only look at the first page of search results.

Linux.org is a fairly small community. Like Daniweb, there are a lot of registered members, but only a handful of active regulars - far less regulars than DW. But they still get a lot of people visiting the site and viewing the content - even if they don't post anything. And I have noticed that results from their site often appear much higher than Daniweb too. Sometimes they even appear in the first page. Why? I have no idea!

So I think the primary thing to fix is visibility. Until DW start showing up in the search results, less people will find the site. As for how to fix that - I really don't know. SEO is completely outside my area of expertise!

Also, I suppose the other factor is "mind-share". Stack Overflow is a site that all developers know the name of. It's the de-facto site for developers who are looking for help. And their content usually always shows up in the first page of results in searches.

Finally, one minor thing I have just noticed - which is not actually relevant to this thread. It doesn't have anything to with why I visit less often or anything. But I've literally just noticed that at some point the endorsements on my profile have gone a little screwy. It probably happened years ago.... :/

The 10 endorsements I have that are currently listed under "Cloud based applications" were originally for awarded for C++ - I've never done anything with cloud-based applications, or posted in the cloud section of the site! And the 2 "software development" endorsements were originally for python.

So surely both of those sets of endorsements should count as "software development"? - and because Vegaseat endorsed me for C++ and Python, I guess that would mean one of those votes would have to be removed or something... IDK!

I'm not sure whether my commentary is valid as per sample size. I didn't really get off the ground in the first place, so you are instantly forgiven if you take me with a grain of salt. I do believe that DaniWeb should exist though: Even if I don't fit into the "user pocket" or demographic pouch, there are plenty of others who do. I might even fit as enough time passes, that is, if DaniWeb isn't prematurely offed. That may constitute a criticism in itself. Why didn't I get rolling? While much of it is my fault, some of it isn't. I can recall emotional reaction, but I can't point my finger at discrete actions in the community. It didn't feel welcoming: I didn't feel exactly abused as much as I felt trivialized. Many people in the forums have a way with bitter, biting irony. Maybe I'm just too sensitive. I probably wouldn't make it in law school. Maybe I should have been better at markdown. I've never been much for appearances.

Now, as to the more concrete points, I wasn't able to find my niche. No matter where I went, I didn't seem to be in the right place. I know @Dani tried to help me, or would have helped me even more, but I didn't want to be selfish or picayune. I think I may have a non-traditional set of interests; maybe the site doesn't do the best job of steering people towards their niche in terms of those interests.

I love code snippets, but I never seemed to run into any that were targeted at what I was doing.

Much of the code seemed oriented toward a student base with classical metrics, but I couldn't seem to find "arms-dirty-to-the-elbows" code. Not everybody wants the fastest sort algorithm.

I think the chief killing point for me was finding exactly what I was seeking at the moment. Stack Overflow is a brisk clip to work; DaniWeb was more a leisurely stroll -- I'm sorry that I couldn't find the time to come home for the weekend. That could be driven by search engine results, or maybe the competition is to be congratulated for serving a certain part of the community well. I'm just not sure that's the DaniWeb base: Lumping them into buckets that fit Google, for instance, doesn't serve them well. I don't know whether Daniweb forced me to Stack overflow or whether Google is guilty. Maybe if that wrinkle hadn't changed the world, I would have come to fit. The Dahza debacle didn't help much, but @Dani deserves a lot of credit for piloting me through that awkwardness.

People may ask how I could get an emotional tone if I didn't participate: Easily, because I listen. I read the forums, and saw people raising issues that occurred to me who were poo-pooed without the chance to explain further; I often sympathized with the unexpressed. I think we were well-moderated, but it's a big job that can never be done completely correctly.

Let me excuse myself in two senses of the word. I never aimed to waste the community's time.

I read the forums, and saw people raising issues that occurred to me who were poo-pooed without the chance to explain further

I think it would have been appropriate, then, for you to have stepped in to question the response of the poo-pooer. There have been several instances where I have been called on my responses and I have either defended them or, when appropriate, apologized. Staying silent accomplishes nothing. I have found that in the main, people here are reasonable and willing to listen to differing opinions.

I would suggest that looking at what those sites that are ranking highly for the kind of queries we would like to get traffic from is a good move...

TL;DR There is no magic for this one. But I will comment about joining. I haven't tried it again since all the changes but there's a rule about the software I write which is "Don't make me think." The apps I currently work on have me thinking about how to automate as much as possible and the right choice is the top choice or if I can devine the answer, use that and move on.

Which means that if Dazah login/account is required you may lose the less technical folk at the door. And yes, most of us know what you were trying to do.

WHERE DO I GO NOW? I may be a very non-typical user. My background is embedded computing since the 70's and progressively moving to bigger and bigger systems along with apps for the embedded systems then automated testing and more than I will write here.

So when I have a problem I used to talk with my coworkers (Engineers all) and later would pick up new skills with books. The Internet happened and as it filled with content, less books, now a book is a rare thing to buy. so....

Where do I go now? Google it is the answer. I find the problems I can't solve are out there and I do solve more problems than I ask for help on.

WHAT ABOUT AVERAGE JOE/JANE? This could just be me but they don't want to google it. They want it fixed. You see this a lot in many posts. "Just gimme the code." The seasoned folk here try to avoid beating them up but the average user just wants answers (without a google run.)

Posts like this. They should be deleted instantly. To be honest, for new members, the post shouldn't even become visible until an admin has verified it. It's pollution and it damages the site.

It seems like, for the most part, you all are no longer active on DaniWeb because there's nothing to be active about.

Is there anything that could be done to encourage you, when there is no one to immediately reply to, to post tutorials or code snippets instead? Those are always ranked highly by Google and, the more there are, the more the overall domain is ranked. I think we spoke in the other thread about how tutorial sites are ranking above forums, by and large. What incentives could there be to motivate you to do this?

My immediate recommendation is that you create a restricted forum and invite your contributors/responders to join it. You will know who to accept and who to reject from the quality of their contributions to date. In that closed forum I, for one, could prepare and publish my proposals.

We have such a forum. We call it Area 51. Here's a link to it: https://www.daniweb.com/community-center/daniweb-community-feedback/area-51/44

I'm strongly contemplating making some very drastic changes to DaniWeb ... as big as when DaniWeb was onboarded onto Dazah.

Ideas that I'm thinking of are:

• Rebranding Dazah as DaniLogin, a subsidiary of DaniWeb
• Removing DaniWeb from Dazah, and rebranding Dazah for the audience it was initially created for, business professionals in the tech sector (SEOs, entrepreneurs, digital marketers, recent code academy graduates looking to work on projects with others, developers seeking cofounders, etc.)
• Integrating Dazah into DaniWeb, and retooling all Dazah functionality into the DaniWeb website

Ideas that I'm thinking of are:

... and how would each of those improve our Google visibility?

contemplating making some very drastic changes to DaniWeb

You see these things as "very drastic changes" but us users see them as just someone fiddling under the hood. They are only "drastic" if they interfere with our using DaniWeb, like the great Dazah logon fiasco.
For users Dazah doesn't matter in the same way that your choice of database for posts doesn't matter.

Is there anything that could be done to encourage you... to post tutorials or code snippets instead?

Yes, sure.

A while back assertnull and I built and published a Java utility that could be useful to beginners (here)

Within a few days it had shifted off the first page so I tried to sticky it to maintain its visibility. A bit later it was un-stickied by an admin for perfectly sound reasons.

My conclusion is that there's no point publishing tutorials or snippets as long as they will get buried in the normal Q&A traffic. They need to be a top-level entity in DaniWeb, that people see BEFORE they get to post or view ordinary discussions. Eg like consumer product support sites require you to go through the FAQs before you reach the mail/chat links.

If I believed they would be seen I have a ton of tutorial and sample code snippets that I would be happy to contribute over time.

Edit: The more I think about it the more I like the idea of an FAQ page for each language/technology that would be the landing page for any new member. The content could be tutorial, code snippet, or advice on how to ask questions. That could also remove one complete layer of bad posts that get shot down in the first reply.
eg (Java, because thats my bag) here are some questions that I have answered more than a few times:

Give me the codes for my homework.
My program doesn't work
I have a null pointer exception - what should I do?
I read something from a Scanner, but it's blank
I'm trying to read a file but it's not found
I tried to update the screen in an animation but nothing happens until its finished
My ImageIcon is blank
How do I play an mp3 file?

the average user just wants answers

More and more lately, the average user just wants someone else (us) to do their homework for them. Dani wants us to turn these people from lazy, entitled yobs into considerate, thoughtful users. I think we might succeed in one case in a thousand and would rather just delete the "do my work for me" posts. As has been stated, they just pollute the pool.

As for Dani's proposed major changes, I recall 1998 when (still working) the entire System Control Centre moved from the head office (antiquated) control centre into a brand new, state of the art, hurricane proof, 64 million dollar building. Everything was new and sparkly and high-tech. After a week I quietly went into the conference room and wrote in large letters on the white board

People are still people.

I am surprised at this thread. We were here around 4 to 5 years ago. SEO /search results was the issue then and it's the issue now. I remember reformatting 1000s of posts to make it more Google-attractive. Don't think it worked. The forum format may be dead in the eyes of the public in general but it's pretty useful for programming and the discussion that goes with it. Surely it can't be impossible to improve rankings? Unless this happens, I don't think it matters what else you do. Clickfall won't improve. It'll be an old bar for just the long-suffering diehard drinkers.

The resurrecting old threads issue is even worse now that there are almost no new ones. They have to be closed after a certain time surely? Some of us argued for this ten years ago.

Where are the tutorials? If this is so important, why do you hide them away? On mobile, you wouldn't even know there were any unless you clicked the nav's more button. Again this was raised around at least two years ago.

Sorry if this sounds negative, but many of us left due to these and other related issues. Nothing seems to have changed. Good luck with it. Hope things improve.

They have to be closed after a certain time surely?

I agree. I think threads should be automatically closed after a given period (6 months perhaps). Anything added at that point is likely no longer useful to the OP. Yesterday I say a 14 year old thread resurrected. Seriously? Anything added to the thread as a solution is pointless. If the new poster has a related question, or does not understand the solution, he/she could just start a new thread with a link to the closed thread as a reference. It shouldn't be complicated to script up something to go through all the threads and mark stagnant ones as closed.

The topic was pain points we have with DaniWeb. Rebranding, Removing, or Integrating Dazah brings up the question of "Will this bring in users and their discussions?" To that my answer it would be the effort might have marginal effects. The account/login hurdle is pretty much one time and here's my new question: Does all this work with apps like LastPass or Apple's Keychain? Folk are getting lazy and any barrier to entry is going to lose folk today. Yes you can argue if you can't figure that out, you shouldn't be here. (ouch?)

Enough on Logins, Dazah, etc.

Many of you know I moderate elsewhere and I see the number of posts per day have dwindled there as well. But there it's not just programming. The topics are for the most part all things tech. Even autos. With all those forums, there are at present 10 moderators and most are active. It's not up to moderators to supply the answers (natch) but for folk to help one another. Here I'm not seeing that happen.

--->> Small note about joining DaniWeb. I pulled up CodeProject, CNET, DaniWeb and StackOverFlow. All had the Sign Up, Log In pretty much in the same spot far to the right and 2 put a rectangle around the Join Sign In to bring attention to how to join. Entirely your choice but could folk be missing the Join button? I won't get into Dazah here as many have already commented on that. I just tried it out on another browser and it's unlike other join/sign up systems and folk are going to bail out.

-->> Also is it time to consider if "IT" is required any longer? Is that sending the message that this is only about Information Technology? What do folk think IT is? That movie? Those folk that control the network at the school or office? No need to answer. The questions are to provoke thought about what folk come here for. Is it time for IT to go and some other word to be used? If all you want is IT then you may be chasing a much smaller group of people.

PAIN POINT: Joining. Hde this Dazah thing. Let it be as you wish but remove those hurdles and confusers. Rectangle?
PAIN POINT: IT. If you only want IT discussions you might only get IT discussions.

the number of posts per day have dwindled there as well

Maybe people would rather just go to Facebook and nowhere else.

If you go to the Daniweb home page it is surprisingly uninspiring. It doesn't have a "front page" feel. It looks more like I got dropped at some random place in the site. In fact, the only place I see "IT" is in the tab text. There is nothing that says what Daniweb is. The first thing that grabs my eye is the thread summary for the top thread which is

What would that mean to a first-time visitor?

... and how would each of those improve our Google visibility?

It wouldn't improve SEO directly, but the goal would be to make the experience better for members by reducing the confusion between Dazah+DaniWeb, and putting everything back under one roof with one login.

You see these things as "very drastic changes" but us users see them as just someone fiddling under the hood. They are only "drastic" if they interfere with our using DaniWeb, like the great Dazah logon fiasco.
For users Dazah doesn't matter in the same way that your choice of database for posts doesn't matter.

It's drastic because, if all of Dazah's functionality is all under the DaniWeb umbrella, that means that DaniWeb isn't primarily forums anymore. Instead, DaniWeb, itself, is essentially a social network comprised of matchmaking and connecting, with forums just as one subset of the site. Live chat would be more front-and-center. DaniWeb would additionally become home to a fully robust API where other apps could easily be built off of subsets of the DaniWeb audience. Going in this direction is something I'm trying to do some more research on as to whether it would be beneficial to all involved. Essentially, Dazah would be remolded to be built on top of DaniWeb instead of the way it currently is, which is the other way around, with DaniWeb built on top of Dazah. Instead of DaniWeb being one of the many communities of Dazah, DaniWeb would essentially be the superset with smaller communities carved out of DaniWeb.

My conclusion is that there's no point publishing tutorials or snippets as long as they will get buried in the normal Q&A traffic. They need to be a top-level entity in DaniWeb, that people see BEFORE they get to post or view ordinary discussions. Eg like consumer product support sites require you to go through the FAQs before you reach the mail/chat links.

Tutorials currently receive the most amount of traffic of any content on DaniWeb. However, that traffic comes from Google, not from people browsing the site and just stumbling upon a tutorial that just so happens to be exactly what they're currently looking to do. I think what needs to happen is we need to go back to the editorial stats page that existed about a decade ago, where staff writers were able to see detailed live reporting as to how much traffic they receive. I know Davey appreciated it, before it was lost when we migrated off of vBulletin. Would detailed reporting and stats that show how your tutorials are being seen by so many people from Google and commented on be motivation to create them?

I am surprised at this thread. We were here around 4 to 5 years ago. SEO /search results was the issue then and it's the issue now.

About 5 years ago, SEO was our only problem. Times have changed. The Internet industry has changed. The advertising industry has massively changed. Banner advertising is not as good a revenue stream as it once was. Websites now make pennies on the dollar compared to how much they made 5 short years ago, with the same amount of traffic. Fixing SEO is only half the puzzle. We still need a revenue stream outside of ads.

The topic was pain points we have with DaniWeb. Rebranding, Removing, or Integrating Dazah brings up the question of "Will this bring in users and their discussions?" To that my answer it would be the effort might have marginal effects.

My goal for integrating Dazah into DaniWeb would not be to increase the amount of forum discussions. It would be to bring the other features and functionality of Dazah (currently only accessible via dazah.com or by writing a third-party app from scratch) to the DaniWeb audience, front and center.

To that my answer it would be the effort might have marginal effects. The account/login hurdle is pretty much one time

That's the problem. DaniWeb members are only looking at Dazah as its login platform. They are dismissing all the other features and functionality I created on Dazah that was designed to make the site sticky, and keep people coming back, even when there's not someone immediately they can help. By integrating all those features directly into the DaniWeb experience, I'm hoping to be able to make the site more sticky for DaniWeb members.

Also is it time to consider if "IT" is required any longer? Is that sending the message that this is only about Information Technology?

For many, many, many years, our tagline was "IT Discussion Community" and we haven't been using that for at least the past 8 years or so. I even let the trademark expire! We migrated about 8 years ago to the tagline "Technology Publication meets Social Media".

If you go to the Daniweb home page it is surprisingly uninspiring. It doesn't have a "front page" feel. It looks more like I got dropped at some random place in the site.

Completely agree with you there. I think the homepage could definitely stand to be improved upon. I was going for a Stack Overflow-like look, but it looks like we need to up our game.

In fact, the only place I see "IT" is in the tab text. There is nothing that says what Daniweb is.

As mentioned, we haven't used the word IT for many years to describe our community. That being said, do you really thing it's not clear between the top navigation menu and the right sidebar on the homepage that we are tech forums?

Basically, what's going through my head are:

• What are my current assets?
• What do I already have that I can take advantage of or leverage?
• What are my biggest pain points?
• What does DaniWeb have to offer vs Dazah? Vice versa?

The "<title>DaniWeb IT Discussion Community" is in the first page of HTML code and in the Wikipedia. I didn't go looking for it further but if this is ancient history then your choice to dust off the vestiges. This is not going to make any difference in my opinion so it's just left overs for cleanup.

As to being clear these are tech forums, I have to write that it's missing so many areas and the home page isn't strutting its stuff. I already noted that the Join/Login is not where you find it across many sites and if I read you right you are going to tackle that along with making the login be a DaniWeb sign up and login. Sure, "Powered by Dazah" would fit in nicely but leaving Daniweb to sign up, then the "Continue as _____" has confused many. And I'm not conversant in how a Facebook or other login works so I leave that to others to comment.

PAIN POINT: The home page as noted above feels like we landed randomly on the site.

Now this area could help a lot! Ask folk for ideas about that!

Now this area could help a lot! Ask folk for ideas about that!

The homepage is the least of my worries right now because that's all cosmetic and can be easily changed at any time. It's the infrrastructure stuff that is weighing heavily on me right now.