Posted by: Captain Haddock July 26, 2007
Nepali News and World News on sajha
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San dai - Yeah, I noticed that neat editor widget the other day and meant to say thanks but forgot Given the history of having to wear body armor to thank you , I hope you wont hold it against me that I missed this one - LOL!! I have used the HTML editor a couple of times and like it. I am still trying to learn the ropes of the table tool - it is very easy to create a table using the tool but editing it can get a bit tricky at times :) But tables are messy things anyways so I should probably stop blaming the tool like a bad carpenter .. he he Thanks for being open to suggestions about the blog section.The suggestion I have is it should be given more space than four lines in the main page and perhaps the sort should work the same way as Kurakani in terms of being sorted by the blog with the last comment on top. I'd also suggest having a featured "Blog of the day" where you pick one blog item and feature it. I make these suggestions with a couple of things in mind. The success of a site, as you might agree, depends on being able to generate traffic and as research has shown (there is a Forrester survey out there somewhere on this), it is ultimately good content that generates traffic. It boils down to the better the content, the more the traffic and the more the traffic the better the business. In light of this, besides the suggestion about the blog, I'd also suggest moving to a model where the thread owner gets administrative control over his or her thread. I have made this suggestion in another post as well. How it might work is the person who starts the thread can lay out the rules for posting to that thread and delete any posts that violate those rules. That way it would free you up from having to police each thread and also serve as a disincentive towards those people who mess up threads and prevent a sensible conversation from happening on any issue. Doing so will also discourage people from having to be Gabber Singhs and Bandit Queens here on Sajha ie taking the 'law' into their own hands. Today when people post to Kurakani, they have to prepared to take crap from people whose main intentions appears to be to disrupt the conversation. The only option people have in dealing with such miscreants is to become jerks themselves and give the shit back. Which more often than not distracts from the main conversation at hand. That I believe is one important reason why good content might unfortunately stay away from Sajha. You might be aware, for example, of the conduits of a very famous deranged individual who prowls several Nepali websites. How fair is it that a thoughtful and sane individual who intends no harm to anyone should spend the better part of his or her time on Sajha warding of lunatics in order to keep a conversation going? Of course there are others too, who are ok mentally, but are willfully disruptive and destructive. Currently, there is no remedy for such people other than referring them to you. That can sometimes be a painful process because what someone might consider a violation of their space another person might not. I think it should be left to the thread owner - just like it is in the Blog section and Ramjham - to decide what constitutes that violation. This I believe will to give people a greater sense of responsibility and might even generate loyalty and commitment towards Sajha. In case someone doesn't like the owner of the thread, or is unhappy about their posts being removed, they they can stop posting to that person's thread and start their own thread.This will free you from having to intervene on every issue that comes up and allow you to focus on enhancements etc. The one place where you might still need to intervene would be in case of personal attacks. Which begs the question, why has Sajha been so lenient about personal attacks? A lot of the other networking sites out there have a much lower threshold for tolerating such attacks. While I have you ear, if I may, I'd like to make another suggestion regarding groups. If you look at the way internet socializing has evolved, we've come a long way from the days when bulletin boards were the main platform of socializing to the MySpace world where groups are the main platform. Things have evolved from what it is that you want to talk about to who you want to talk about it with. I think the idea of having groups on Sajha would be terrific. Each person could have a friends list and share information with that list that they dont want to share with everyone. Today the only option to to that is to create a group in Yahoo, Google or MySpace and have a little Sajha away from Sajha. Some of us are already spending quite a bit of time on these "Little Sajhas" only because of the lack of groups here. Thanks for hearing me out. These are just some thoughts made in the spirit of openness. It's your call as to what you want to do with these. I'll leave you with something Tom Friedman said in "The World is Flat" where he talked about change: What can be done, will be done. The question is will it be done by you or to you As always, you rock! :)
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