Hi guys,
I'd like to ask every member to take the time to read this post and post feedback about the forums.
We're open to suggestions on how to improve the forums to make it an easier and more worthwhile experience for every member.
So what do you like? What would you like to see? Fancy and huge ideas are welcome, but more logical and fundamental ideas are most preferred.
I'll start out with my own opinion:
- Spell checking. I rely (mistyped rely on my first draft here too) heavily on spell checking as I type furiously throughout the day on a number of forums, websites and email programs.
We're mainly looking for technical suggestions. How to get users on here and interacting more often and more efficiently. We're also open to forum reorganization/new forum additions and the like, but the focus is mainly on improving things on the forums that a lot of members would like to improve.
I'm happy with the progression of the forums since we launched almost a year ago and I think that this thread can be a step in the right direction to keeping them active and informative.
2 suggestions to get this started:
a) Built-in hand converter: This should encourage people to post more hands....
b) A way to see all threads that have been edited since you last visited the site instead of a simple list of the most recent posts...saves time.
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Goats!!! MORE GOATS!!!
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Goats!!! MORE GOATS!!!
1) Easier way to post videos, pictures, etc
Well I've been here less than a week so maybe some of this is already here and I'm missing it but here goes.
How about doing a Concept of the Week much like the Micro Stakes FR forum does on 2+2. Basically a coach writes an article on a topic and it generates discussion off that. Or it could just be a coach starting a topic rather than writing an article. This might generate more traffic. With this you could send out a weekly newsletter to everyone's email letting them know what the topic is.
Make it easier to see what topics are new from the forum lobby rather than clicking on each subforum. Right now I either have to go to each subforum or rely on the recent topics unless I'm missing something here.
One idea to generate more HHs is to maybe have a coach do a biweekly or monthly video on HHs pulled from the forum. Let it be known ahead of time that this is going to happen and maybe more guys will post a few more HHs.
On a grander scale, maybe come up with a hand replayer like CR and PokerXFactor have where we could load up a whole HH. This might generate more hand discussions.
Also, keep doing what you doing as far as the coaches being active in the forums. This is a huge benefit for those who take advantage of that.
Outside of that, I think a lot of people are just lurkers or lazy. I definately fall into both of these categories. I've been here a week and I think this is my first post. I don't post HHs because I feel that most guys will just feel they are standard and I don't do a good enough job during a game or after to pull these out. Thinking of that now, I think I'm going to force myself to post a few hands this weekend.
@titan: You shouldn't be afraid to ask (what you might consider stupid) questions! You are here because you want to learn, and you are paying for it. You NEED to ask questions to learn, so just go ahead and ask...I'm 100% you won't get flamed.
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Goats!!! MORE GOATS!!!
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Goats!!! MORE GOATS!!!
Radeh, your right and I would say my problem is more lazyness than anything. Kinda like the fact I've won at just about every form of poker I've played but never mastered any of them for the past 5 years. I never take the time to really improve to the mid and upper levels. This is something I'm working on and I will be trying to post some HHs as HUSnGs are fairly new to me.
Rypac,
I'm new around here so I guess I'll give you the viewpoint of a newb.
The videos are your biggest selling point of the site IMO, I started out by buying the beginners pack & loved the videos & it took me 2 weeks to take out a full membership. So I guess from a business point of view the beginners pack should definitely be a prominent part of the front page.
I like the blogs, but I think these should be vetted first. I've seen a couple that would be more suited to BBV4L.
As yet I havent used the forums much so I don't think my opinion can hold much weight, but the fact that you & all the other coaches actively post is a major plus.
I think space is wasted with the twitter section, I added a few of you & haven't seen many updates especially from the main sites twitter.
Thats all i can think of right now.
I think that the site and forums put people off. I think it could use a revamp design wise. It also seems that the forums lack functionality.
Like many others members, i'm a low stake (new)player . I found here more than I need for the moment and videos are very good.
Personnaly i very like Articles format (Bankroll management is my favorite) .Maybe more Articles based on starting requirements for new players and others tips abouts players styles, generals lines against differents villain and others kind of stuff that we can refers. A ''Tilt forum '' could be a big success............................................
If your just talking about the forum, then yeah I suppose making it look a bit nicer will certainly help :)
Also, I don't what is is, or if it's just me, but the speed seems really slow e.g sometimes i dont click on comments for videos as I know it takes a long time to load up. I mean it's not major long or anything but there is certainly a delay.
Having flash enabled on any forum is also a + imo, it's just a cool feature that allows animation, embedded you tube vids etc (even embedding hands from vids if you want to talk about it) also there are some hand replayers that use this which is also fairly handy when posting hands.
Also maybe having some sort of competition or HU league set up. This would probably get a few more people (especially ones that don't post) to get get involved and once people post once it may encourage a bit more activity. We had something similar to this that started at sit n go academy and it was very popular.
Site is awesome... gonna renew my 3-month.... it's paid for itself. I was a total newbie.. but since joining, I'm crushing the $5's... (Overall 14.7%...this month 23.9% roi)
My suggestion is to have Ipod compatible downloads for all your videos. I like to take them with me: review and such. It would save me tons of time converting them.
Glad to hear you're doing well.
We'll look into the Ipod conversion and see what it actually requires on our end and assess the benefit vs cost (probably mostly made up of time).
This likely won't happen until at least mid May.
We have some more important changes to the site that will be happening likely in early May. Once those changes are made, it'll likely allow me to free up some time to focus on other improvements such as the ipod videos.
For now, I've been very focused on content related things, so once those changes are to our satisfaction I'll be looking into other things.
Hi Ryan,First off I' like to say thanks for the videos. Your first few specifically have improved my discipline any enabled me to move up a level in the micros immediately. I think perhaps bimonthly quiz with a prize of a coaching session/bonus/subsidized subscription from a coach/prospective coach/senior poster could really generate a lot of activity(basically ripping off aon's pooh bah post). You post the answers, and everyone really gets to think and post poker logic.I think you would have to post a link on homepage as I suspect members for different reasons(time restrictions, members of other forums) bypass the forum and head straight to the videosAlso perhaps a monthly tournament(eg stars private tournament $2 buyin)for members. Bragging rights and possibly a hh review of the final match posted in the forum as an additional learning resource, it may also generate a decent video.Cheers
I'm happy for Primo :)Yeah, he contributed a TON to this site, but it's not as if the site suddenly crumbles because one pro leaves. __________________________Goats!!! MORE GOATS!!!
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Goats!!! MORE GOATS!!!
Hi Anthony, Those are some good suggestions. Once we have all the kinks ironed out from the update, as well as expansion of the free section somewhat satisfactory, we'll be looking into many new and exciting improvements, including your ideas.
Hi Ryan, I think the idea of a private tourney is great. I would like to ask you to give us more details about the standard membership, like how many new videos they will get per month and if there are any restrictions as the price difference is quite steep. As well what will be the required mgr rake for the standard level. Thank you
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It is like a horse but with shorter legs and bigger ears...(and we all love it!)
Hi Spiky,It's 12+ new videos per month from Cog, Fydor, myself and a few other random ones mixed in.You get full forum access, as well as access to pretty much every $1-55 video on the site as well. It is a big price difference, but it's designed mostly so that lower price point users can really get a tremendous value from the site and improve at a quicker pace.The premium membership still has a ton of value because it'll feature 10+ videos (in addition to the 12+ basic videos) from the best husng instructors online, including Hokie, xSCWx, Skates, ITRIED2WARNU, Mersenneary, Croixdawg and more.Basically, if you play at $55+ consistently, the Premium Membership is pretty much required for you and should easily make back the investment. If you play lower, look at your budget and make a decision, you can't really go wrong with the new setup (in my subjective opinion). But it still totally makes sense for somebody at the $5 or $10 level who is very serious about learning and improving to buy the Premium Membership, as the insight in some of those higher buyin games is very unique and beneficial.
Thank you Ryan.By the way the new look looks cool. In another post I think you said HUSNG would lower the required mgr rakeback to get the standard subscription for free. Is that correct?
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It is like a horse but with shorter legs and bigger ears...(and we all love it!)
Hi,Yes that is correct. We're still unsure of the actual requirement, but we have a good idea. It should be up by Monday.
The new pricing and structure makes sense and is very good. Just wanted to make a quick suggestion that in the master video list we could do quick searches for standard membership videos or premium videos. Would help.
Thanks.This is in the works, shouldn't take longer than a week. The filtering process is already completed, so the page just has to be coded and created.
+1 for skizzy...I actually came on here to suggest that. Another thing is the file names. I might be nitpicking but if you could save the files in a cleaner format it would make it it a little more convenient to organize. For instance... Rypac Video 1 Low Stakes Calling Station...pretty much saving the file with the same title it would have on the video list.
That's something we've talked about Ace.The problem is, thousands of people have our videos saved already, and at least some % of those former members will come back at some point and need to know what videos they missed. If we change the videos that they downloaded, they will have difficulty remembering what they downloaded.One solution to that would be the members downloading all the videos again. That's not particularly ideal, as it's rather wasteful (and increases our costs which has at least some % of hand down to the customer in any business).If you have a good solution that allows us to do this, please let us know. We're jut not really sure how to do this with over 200 videos on the site without being disruptive to some segment of members.Originally we made the number system for this purpose though. Besides Skates videos, every video should at least be numbered, making it not too difficult to see what you have. As for Skates videos, just download them in order, that way when you need to watch a new Skates video you can just organize them by date and know which ones you have from past to present.
I didn't really mean go back and change all the previous videos but moving forward have some sort of labeling system in place for your new videos. I'm sure most people rename the files so they have some sort of method for keeping track of what they have downloaded. I have all of mine named in a similar format to what I suggested and it really does allow for much easier locating of videos by instructor, stake, or concept. This also allows me to easily check my fliles on my computer and see that I'm missing Croix's video 6. Because its formatted the same way as the list on the site I can quickly locate the paticular video I need to download. Now if it was labeled "HUSNGCOM10-220sAgainstVariety" I might not find it as easily.
I dont know a ton about forums but is vbulliten too much. It's so much more usable. And more FTP games would be nice. The site is very PS heavy... I think.
Place to post articles from other sites/magazines. I posted a link to an article (http://www.husng.com/content/how-does-your-game-change-when-you-add-multible-tables) I was happy about the responses I got. Maybe there could be a new section in the forums just for this. Would love to have other peoples take on things.
Here's a good solution to not downloading duplicate vids. Keep all the vids in one folder initially, HUSNGU for instance, and the U means unwatched, then as you watch them move them to a separate folder, HUSNGW for instance. Then when you look to download a video and you're not sure if you have it or not, save it to the watched folder first, if it says the file is already there then you have it, if not do the same with the unwatched folder, if it says you don't have it then you really don't and can add it there. Pretty simple stuff and you can keep track of your watched vids pretty easily and not have any duplicates.As for improvements to the forum, there doesn't seem to be a lot of activity, an obvious idea would be to look to get the other coaches more involved generally, I know you're on here quite a bit Ryan, it seems like there's 3 or 4 active people and that's about it, I think that getting more of your people involved here would help this, at the same time I know that they may feel their time is limited, that's fair but I think few of us spend enough time away from the table and I think that they may find that the extra time spent thinking about their game on here would be worthwhile in itself :)
Hey Cobra.Any other ideas for forum participation? I think it's something that I want to really look into addressing soon. There's hundreds of members here, but not too many posters. Perhaps some incentives?Ideas that get the community interacting with each other is best. Since there's over 200 videos on the site I'd rather ask the coaches to use their time answering questions about the videos, and then answering hands in the HH forum as priorities. I do have a few ideas I wrote down a month or two ago, with the new changes and some other stuff it hasn't hit the top of my list yet. That should change sometime this summer.
Incentives are an interesting idea, given the current state of things, you would think that there would be more activity on here, I think that a little prodding may help. I think that a lot of players and especially those who are newer don't understand the benefits of posting on forums, in this case the forum is certainly secondary to the videos in terms of what people signed up for and they underestimate the benefits. However the benefits increase a lot when you have more activity, so in terms of increasing the value of membership here it's something worth looking at seriously. If you offer out a free month to folks who you feel have significantly contributed to the forum, both in quantity and quality, that might get some more people going at it more, and then the idea is to use this increased activity to leverage more participation. This is made more challenging by just having yourself as the voice of the site, it's understandable that the other instructors have limited time they can spend on it, but that alone should be enough reason for people to participate more. I think that you could do more in terms of starting threads, maybe break the forum into beginner, intermediate, advanced so people who want to think on a higher level won't be bored with newbie questions and the newbies won't be intimidated either, so for instance you could have a section for $20 and below, 30 to 100, and over 100, wouldn't take a lot of work to set that up and it probably would help a little. I also take it that there's a premium member forum, I'm not sure I'd want to make that separation, you may want to allow everyone full access, I don't think that anyone would upgrade simply based upon that, the vids would be driving this, so exposing everyone to all the sections can only help here.As well, this might sound silly but you might want to reconsider the fish category in the activity level, especially given that everyone is a fish and I've no idea how many posts you need to move up but it's less than I've posted and I've been the most active guy on here I think since I've been here :) I think that this isn't something many people care about, I don't, but it is something that forum masters still want to pay attention to. I'd start out with guest/member depending on the situation and then have them move up to more "honorable" levels as they go along :) This surely would be preferable to starting out with an insulting level and then keeping them there forever ;)I'm just visiting here for the month to check all this out, I've been impressed with the value that you offer and I'm real glad to see a site of this quality just dealing with HUSNG's, it's really needed, I think your site has a real opportunity for growth, of course getting the forum more active would add some real value, value that players themselves are for the most part missing out on, so hopefully you can get this thing kick started a little more :)
Thanks for the response.I'm thinking about perhaps making some rakeback/coaching offers available for users who participate in the forums. Nothing crazy, but something that gives users that participate some more clear value. I suspect, once they start posting and engaging in the forums they will realize that it alone is of value to them.A freeroll type thing may be in the works as well.
With rakeback for coaching deals, what you'll probably see happening is they often won't play much at the new room, meaning you're collecting very little for your time, you'd probably be better off just offering the coaching, you wouldn't have to offer much, there's a lot of players who can't afford coaching and a half hour for free would get them plenty excited :)
i have had an idea that i think could be usefull for the site. i think it would be really good if u could add a podcast section where the 1 or more coaches talked about a certain topic and discussed theory/concept behind it. from really basic stuff to tilt control to more advanced stuff like image or 3bet bluffing.although overall it is going to be easier to make certain points or explain things with visuals i sometimes find that it is hard to set aside the time to watch a bunch of videos and being able to listen to something while driving or working out would be very usefull.i also think that by only having the audio the player will be able to focus more on what the coach is saying and think about the thought process without having to keep up with the game in the video so will have some benefits from a learning point of view aswell.just my 2c would be keen to hear some opinions :)
We have a podcast planned with BCM11. Our end has caused the delay, we need to get it setup and running smoothly for him and I believe he'll be ready to go within a week after that. You'll see a newsletter and front page ad/blog post by me about this when it's near launch. We'll probably run one or two and see how he/we like it and go from there. But guests on the show from the heads up sng world would be an obvious addition to that, BCM knows quite a lot of successful players, as does our team.This might be more geared towards a radio show that talks about some heads up sng topics than a more focused concept audio file, but it should work well from both a strategy and entertainment standpoint.
Brand new member who is semi-grunching here, so please ignore me if this has already been suggested. Adjustable forum background and text colors. Staring at a bright white background with black text is murder on my eyes. Most other people have less severe reactions, but it has been proven to cause way more eye strain other color schemes. If you could provide the option to have a color scheme similar to the "Slick" theme that is available on 2p2, I would be tremendously grateful. Edit: Also, there doesn't seem to be any method to subscribe to a thread that I have posted in. It's a pain to have to hunt down every thread you post in to make sure you haven't missed any new posts. Having an option to be notified via email or PM when there is a new response in a thread I have posted in helps ensure I don't miss any posts directed at me, and I believe also fosters more debate and discussion instead of single posts that are not followed-up on. Hit and run posts, if you will.
We'll try to at least give users an option for forum themes. If not, we'll find one that is more neutral to people.
Thank you! Man, you're quick.
Ok,Changed the theme a bit. We're not done and will change it again some tomorrow.We plan to also do:- Slightly darker background color (the white you see throughout the background here into more of a light gray, I think that should be easier on the eyes).- More visible forum descriptions as well as dates at the tops of posts (as of now this blue covers it too much).Any other suggestions?
Also we switched from left to right into the top to bottom theme, as you can see here.The reasoning there was that we're more constricted left to right than top to bottom, this should make posts smaller from top to bottom and flow better left to right.Let me know if you disagree.
I like the new forum layout much better than the old one. It makes it a lot easier to read long posts since more text fits on the screen.
I'll repost what I added in with my edit, since you posted while I was in the process of editing and may have missed it."Edit: Also, there doesn't seem to be any method to subscribe to a thread that I have posted in. It's a pain to have to hunt down every thread you post in to make sure you haven't missed any new posts. Having an option to be notified via email or PM when there is a new response in a thread I have posted in helps ensure I don't miss any posts directed at me, and I believe also fosters more debate and discussion instead of single posts that are not followed-up on. Hit and run posts, if you will."
rewards for posts have been done on other forums with little to no success. i think that money would be better spent to make this forum more user friendly. this site is hard to navigate and seems to be missing many important features. i'd like to see a "new posts" button for one.other than that, i have one idea that i think would not only be fun for the coachs but would bring in heavy traffic to your site.how about setting up a live radio show. if one or more coachs has the time to do a live show once a week or whatever works then i would think it would be a huge hit. you could send out email notices and hopefully the site doesn't crash when you have 100X the normal traffic. ;)
Is there any chance to improve hand history posting in the forum ?This HTML editor is just badly broken. I don't know what's going on, but whenever I try to post a hand, it looks ok in the preview, but the final result just completely sucks.For instance, using the converter from this size, the form software doesn't like the tables very much, so stack sizes get completely messed up. And when using flopturnriver, it rejects <br /> tags, so everything shows up in one single line.This makes posting hands really painful.I just posted a hand at 2+2 and it just worked, but here it's always 5+ minutes of manual editing.
Jack, are you saying that you're having trouble getting the HHs to turn out like this one here?If that's the case then what you need to do is:Paste your HH into the converter making sure that the output dropdown selector is set to html and copy the resulting output.Now when it comes to posting the HH you want to:Click the small HTML icon in the toolbar on the posting page. Then paste the html into the pop-up box that appears before hitting Update in that window and then Save in the main window to post the hand.It's really important that you do it exactly like that otherwise something somewhere along the line has the chance to scew it up.Hope that helps.
Can we ban RyPac13?
I think that a page where you can see all of the threads that you have posted in, in order of which was last updated would be a big improvement and make it much easier to keep track of postings.