Re: this forum

[Mike Zugschwert] "It is because this forum is ugly and has a poor format. Creative Cow is a great website with lots of helpful information, but their forum layout is horrible."

Michael:

As we have now have to pay for additional new banks of servers every quarter just to support the fact that our traffic has more then tripled in the last year -- up from over 250,000 totally unique users a month in August of 2007 to more than 800,000 totally unique users a month by July of 2008 -- the one thing we are not suffering from is a lack of traffic.

Most people who want to talk about After Effects, go to our main After Effects forum -- which gets way over 150,000 totally unique users a month. This forum is mostly for notes about meetings, follow-up, etc., but the heavy AE lifting is done in our AE forum -- which for years has received more traffic than Adobe's own AE forum. (Oh, and not a single person in the last year there has told us that our forums are horrible, ugly and a poor format. So, as a percentage, your opinion is pretty low.)

The site you point to is one of many thousands that use the same off-the-shelf software that is great for sites that do low traffic. (Their own stats showed when I just visited: In total there are 7 users online :: 4 registered, 0 hidden and 3 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes). Most users ever online was 140 on Tue Jun 26, 2007 12:33 am).

That kind of mechanism is cute for sites like that, as they get so little traffic that they can do those calculations in all of the server's spare cycles when no one is visiting, etc. Our site would require a whole server just to track that kind of thing, so we have static stats at the bottom or of main pages. We have better things to do with a whole server than do such cutesy things, so there are no "there are now 7 people online and it can go as high as 140." Why?

We have to support many thousands of users online at the same moment; that takes horsepower -- oh, and that takes money. So we have lots of ads. Lots. If we didn't, there would be no COW.

Just since January, we have had to buy and pay for a new and second Cisco router, a new Coyote Point 550e hardware load-balancing system, four new quad AMD Opteron servers (added to the 8 servers we already had), two Apple Xserve servers running OSX Leopard Server (for secure email and other services), added a new 100Mbit unmetered bandwidth pipe (try and buy one of those, they are NOT cheap -- we have two).

Do I care you don't like the COW? No. Will I change it for you or lose sleep because of your opinion? No.

But it would be nice if you could read and maybe even follow instructions. Did you know that the COW's interface actually can be set to display any one of the THREE most popular forum interface styles???

Just below the host's picture are two drop-down menus that let you change it from the default threaded interface (our default because we've been at this 13 years and many in our audience like the classic threaded style), to the topical interface (which about 15% like and is the style you pointed to), or to the date sort interface (preferred by less than 5% but we wrote it into our interface anyway).

As we just crossed the 800,000 totally unique users a MONTH marker -- according to Google -- I don't think we are hurting for traffic. But you can think what you want.

There, I feel better now.

Ah, and my Sweetie just brought me a cup of coffee -- now, I am really going to feel better.

;o)

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom

Remember: Burt Bacharach lied. What the world really needs now is an undo button.