It's that time again....the time where you tell me how WSO can improve and I smash my head against the wall and wonder why I didn't think of that earlier... or I tell you that you are crazy.
So please, fellow primates, let me know what annoys you most about WSO and how your day to day on the site could be improved...
Want to hear a certain type of content more? let me hear it.
Want a feature we don't have? let me hear it.
Usually when I do these it's a bit overwhelming for my team, but we also usually get some great ideas over the last few years and have implemented them. So even if something is a great idea and we want to implement it, it may take us a few weeks or even months in some cases if it's a harder technical issue.
Thanks to this series, we have the WSO Company Database and have made dramatic improvements to that tool (see video below):
Along with that, we tried to make a lot of design improvements in 2012 to make it less painful on the eyes, with clearer calls to action.
We've also implemented better mod controls which allows us to easily track and remove violations to our user guidelines and ban repeat offenders if needed. Not sure if you've noticed, but the trolls no longer rule the forums here.
Happy hours and traffic continue to grow and we are on pace to hit 200,000 registered users by year end (in other words, doubling in little over 1 year after 8 years in operation....)
Talk soon!
Patrick
I think we definitely need to pitch together for a site redesign, a fresher look. We can definitely fund raise organically here from our very own users, and maybe a bit more at the conferences and meetups.
It's time for some Web 3.0!
Thanks Lambie, can you give us some specifics on how you would take us to a 3.0 look?
Always open to design criticism...
Honestly, a less steep simple spin on the TechCrunch layout is the proper way to put it. Just subtract the fancy features and whatnot, just really bare it down, and readapt it for WSO. More spacious, less utilization of real estate (non-compact), a prominent "trending" list, a solid "top informational posts" list, and etc. etc. as other users above have mentioned.
I enjoy the simplicity of WSO right now, but we just need it represented in a different way aesthetically. Especially if we're talking about the mobile aspect of it all.
WSO 3.0 morph in progress...see new comment/forum design. You like? More coming in future weeks....
Also, I would like to see the ability to buy monkey shit as a WSO currency parallel to silver bananas. That way instead of just buying credits, we can buy silver bananas or monkey shit, and/or a mix of both. WSO credits should still be functional though.
The "start discussion" button is broken/way too big for me at least. (At work right now. I'll check the mac at home)
But other than that and possibly a site redesign, everything seems great. Glad I finally started posting instead of just creeping for years.
Thanks CRE - when you say broken do you mean when you click on it, nothing works or that the button size is too big so it's wrapping / messing up layout?
Thanks!
Also happy you stopped creeping :-)
Sorry, the button works fine. It is just too big (maybe a font issue? maybe wrapping?)
Hah, and you're welcome. The less creepy the better
CRE, is this better now for you?...we tested it cross browser and saw that it was too wide on ipads...is your browser set to 100% zoom? If you're zoomed in further that may be the issues...thanks man!
was this fixed for you now? Thanks!
What WSO should do is start a revenue share like youtube and the people who post and attract the most comments start to share in the revene from the ads posted on that page
Occasionally when people include graphics in their posts it stretches the display box into the side panels which blocks the text on the right side edges (using Chrome).
I kinda wish the option to PM was more prominent, as I think certain conversations done within threads would be better done over PM. I also think it helps users connect on a more personal level. Not sure the best way to go about this.
Not sure how others use the site, but I basically only navigate through the "All Recent Content" and "My Recent Posts". It would be really cool if I could customize/filter these screens.
Yeah, the grpahic and link issue is if someone posts a very wide image or if someone quotes a link, it pushes the left column into the right. I think this is a crss browser issue and we will keep trying to fix (it is very annoying, i agree).
Hear you on the PM side...that's why we inlcuded the little "pm" button on every comment on the site, so that you can pm anyone with 1 click. not sure how much more prominent we can make it but open to suggestions (also have mailbox in upper left corner of user bar). We are trying to get away from more buttons and have it be a cleaner / more elegant look. I hate clutter and there is still a lot of distractions on the screen imo.
Would love to hear how you'd like to customize / filter those screens? We have "My feed" which allows you to follow any companies or users you want (we are in the process today of improving that query so it loads faster)...
Thanks Duff! Patrick
Would be cool if I could filter out Job Postings and Company Data changes. Also, maybe have a checklist of forums that would show up rather than all of them.
ok, this is now partially fixed. Now hen someone quotes a super long link, it won't mess up the layout and the link will still be active in the quote. We are seeing if we can limit image width now.
Thanks
Pat, I have noticed that when I go to track a poster to see what threads he has posted on that the list of threads flys far right off the screen and I can only see the first few words of the thread titles. Not sure if everyone is having this problem or just me. I use Firefox and have not had this problem before.
Random Suggestion: I think you should do some kind of promotion to make Job Board access freefor a certain time frame, or a certain number of visits/jobs applied for. There are lots of good jobs in there, but how many (paying) monkeys are actually in there viewing and able to apply?
Full Disclosure: I posted two great jobs in there and haven't gotten a single response. :-(
Hi FeelingMean - thanks for your suggestion. There are a decent # of paying applicants so I'm surprised to hear your jobs got no apps. Can you email me the links so we can test it and make sure the applications aren't ending up in your spam? (WallStreetOasis.com>[email protected])
We have some things in the works over the next 1-2 weeks to get more applicants into the system.
Thanks, Patrick
It is a compatibility issue depending on the browser, does it in IE7 and IE8 sometimes as well. Hard to get it right for all browsers. Faced the same issue with my site a while back, ending up just redoing the template and it wasn't a problem in the new one. You might want to look into setting up a clause in the code that automatically resizes images.
Also, only use "All Recent Content" to look at stuff. Feel like the site design is a bit crowded/scattered. For example, I am not sure but rankings, friends, members, groups on the sidebar are probably not necessary to have.
edit: You should actually make image uploading not possible if the image is over 'x' width. Pretty simple change and should fix that issue.
In addition, I could send over some images of the compatibility issues. I get different design ones in IE7 and IE8
hey yeahright, would be great if you could send me some screen shots of different IE browsers...thanks! WallStreetOasis.com>[email protected]
You should improve the search function. I have a really hard time searching for specific questions. I guess this could start by including better filters. Just a thought.
A sight design would be great. How about a vbulletin-type message board?
On a less serious note, it would be great to get Brady back. He was nuts, but his posts were hilarious.
Hey KKS,
Also wish we could have Brady because he was entertaining at times, but he just kept ignoring repeated warnings. Unfortunately sometimes we are forced to block users that are active and "extreme" in order to keep the overall quality of the discussions higher. We welcome a wide range of opinions and let a lot slide, but if someone repeatedly violates the guidelines and ignores warnings we don't have much choice.
...and a transition to v-bulletin at this point is not possible since there are so many custom modules and interactions that are intertwined with our forums. However, if you could be specific about what you like about vbulletin that we don't have (design and/or features), maybe that would help us improve.
Thanks, Patrick
I completely understand regarding Brady. That was a not-so-serious suggestion.
I like how vbulletin message boards are organized. The overall design and ease of replying to messages is nice. The reply, quote, PM, etc. buttons on WSO are bit too small IMO.
How do you like new forums/comments? More changes like this to improve UI coming....
Looking good, Patrick!
I would love to see a chat function similar to what Facebook has. At times I know it would make communicating with members easier.
I would really like to see more organization/combination of the many old threads. What I mean by this is there are thousands of threads like "What do BB background checks look for?" or "What do the drug tests look for?" and if they were combined into a "Pinned threads" at the top of the page people might be less inclined to keep asking the same question over and over again. I know there is the search function but it doesn't always return what you're looking for.
A second thing that would be a nice change would be removing "company interview/salary/review" updates from the "recent" feed. They clutter it up when I'm actually looking for content but that may just be me.
Third thing, some of the best threads in my opinion are the Q&As with people like duffmt and harvardgrad etc... Since the thread is mostly questions with a response every 10 or so questions I think it would be nice if the thread was reorganized or again turned into an FAQ where you can easily sort through the questions and easily find answers.
Not sure how much of this is possible, Just my 2c, take it for what its worth
We made a HUGE effort last year to consolodate all of these common questions into a very extensive FAQ section here: //www.wallstreetoasis.com/frequently-asked-questions This also includes all of our best threads, our best Q&As, our best interviews, by industry and overall...not sure if that is what you are thinking? Every single new user is sent these FAQs and encouraged to read them first, but obviously it's one thing to encourage and one thing to actually have people read it...we also have an extensive finance dictionary and common abbreviations and words are auto linked to those definitions so that we have less questions repeated. I think considering how fast the userbase is growing, we've done an "ok" job (B) on keeping those threads to a minimum, especially through recruiting season...
We are still in the growth / promotional phase of the WSO Company Database and this year is crucial, which is why we float those content types into the Recent content list. This encourages more people to take advantage of this resource and add in their own data...so we're a bit hesitant to remove it. But maybe it could be a benefit for reaching certified user status or give it to users that have already contributed? Will think about this....
Thank you for your suggestions, Patrick
I've been talking with my buddy (who is our WSO campus rep) and we both agree you need an app. Yea it can be expensive, but keep it decently simple and I know every time I have a second I'd be on it. Especially at work, when I'm escaping in the bathroom lol.
Not that the mobile site is terrible, but an app would be fantastic. Probably be able to get a bit of revenue in there as well.
Just a thought.
kraziazi, can you tell me what you envision the WSO app would be and how that would be different / better than the mobile version of the site? Also welcome how you think it could be monetized...Thanks man!
Yes, dear lord, we need to make a WSO app. I'm sure it would provide a platform for our user base to grow!
Well, an easier way to navigate is obvious. For example, in order to comment and do certain actions on the HTML5 website now, you have to have pixie-sized hands/fingers. An app would be more thumb-ergonomic.
That's just an example of something that could be improved ... but think about it. An app could push your alerts to PM's, etc., and keep users more engaged to WSO on a more constant basis. I'm not sure how your contracts work with your sponsors, but more engagement is always a plus. Something to do with location-based integration would be cool as well (maybe friends who are near you, or events ... not sure where I was going with this).
And, (obviously) people spend so much time on their phones ... who doesn't have an app these days haha. I'm curious to see WSO's numbers on mobile vs. traditional visitors per month. Additionally I, for one, would pay $0.99 for a solid WSO app. I'm not sure if others would hate that, but that's money in the bank.
I'm not going to pretend I can guarantee a huge increase in engagement, but I know quite a few people who would spend more time on a WSO app.
On a more unrelated note, you should make the top "toolbar" (recent/forums/FAQ) more accessible. For example, when I want to go to the Monkey Around forum, my laptop screen resolution can't fit it in, so I have to zoom out to get to it.
One thing I've noticed is that when you click on the "new" comments for a particular thread that you've read previously and that oldest new comment is on a page other than the first page, it will just bring you to the first page of the thread. I would think that it should take you to the oldest new comment that you haven't yet read whether it is on the second, third or fourth, etc. page of the thread
sorry, i swear we've fixed this 100x but looks like it broke again...will update you when fixed, thanks for the heads up.
I am in chrome and this is not an issue...can you tell me what browser you are using when you have this issue?
Thanks! Patrick
The webinars were the shit.
Agree. Working on bringing these back becasue they provide great content and are a good way for the community to meet our Wall St Mentors and resume reviewers.
I prefer to use the Chrome browser, but on WSO Chrome will frequently mess up the website layout. Everything that should be on the top right (forum topics, upcoming events, etc.) is moved to the bottom left, below all the posts. It happens on both a Mac and PC. Maybe something to look into.
are you still having these issues in Chrome? i use chrome on WSO with no issues...anyone else?
At the moment, the layout in Chrome is fine. Up until last week though, it was off. It will be fine for a while, then be messed up for a while. If it was only one computer, I would assume it was an individual problem, but the fact that I get it on both the PC and Mac makes me wonder.
Hey Patrick,
Just one quick thing: when using an ipad, thread pages (except the first) become distorted. The comment boxes run into the sidebar.
This isn't necessary a redisgn but important topics and ones that get asked over and over again should get stickied.
Search never really works for me, better filters would be great.
Is there a way to see what you have posted in the company review section? Its possible I am missing it but I cant seem to find anything I have submitted
I'll +1 this as well. I never want to be "that guy" posting something without searching, but sometimes search just really doesn't cut it.
We literally just reindexed our entire site and can bias different things like recent, # of comments, etc...there are also filters on the upper right side after you search so you can filter by date, content type and by forum (the forum filter has to be fixed still but will be done this week).
We will be moving these block filters into a more prominent place right above the search results since people seem to consistently miss them...
If you have specific concerns about search, would love to hear them. Examples really help us improve the biases, but obviously every search won't be perfect.
Thanks, Patrick
I know a lot of finance blogs and other sites have a ‘top 10 reads of the day’ type post and Eddie essentially does this every Friday with his bonus bananas but I would definitely like to see this become a daily event in some form. Even if it was just an open blog in which people contributed in the comment section throughout the day by posting any worthwhile reads.
I would love to be able to better identify users when they comment. Maybe an industry flair system in lieu of reddit (i.e. it would display "Equity Research" next to my username when I comment) would work. There are some users who I always recognize, but it would be nice to better understand the backgrounds that users are coming from.
The ability to tag users (a feature in Reddit Enhancement Suite) would also be cool.
Wait, what? hah, it already says "equity research" next to your username when you comment
Wow, I honestly never noticed the little emblem haha. Please disregard my previous suggestion.
I think we should make a permanent sticky board where we tack on the most informative posts all WSO users need to read like the recent Anatomy of a 10k.
Not really a suggestion for the site, but I discovered the 'My Feed' thing a few months ago and like it a lot. It allows you to follow someone and go directly to their comments.
Also, I'm not sure what the friends thing is or what purpose it serves. Does anyone?
are you psychic? we are eliminating friends and keeping follows from now on (by later today). If you are currently friends with someone you will automatically be following them so their content will still show up under My Feed. (friends were just 2 way relationships whereas follows are 1 way). Also trying to improve load speed of My Feed because we know that is an issue...
I'd love to have a more robust mobile experience. I spend a lot of time browsing on my iPad / iPhone. It's harder to write a long comment that way. I spend more time on Quora answering/commenting on stuff rather than WSO because of that.
I assume your ipad shows the full 2 column layout and the iphone shows the 1 column mobile layout? Can you explain what we are missing or what Quora does better here? Just a few things could be very helpful. Are the fields too small, buttons too small/big, etc?
Thanks man!
I think kraziazi touched on the points I was going to make but I don't think monetization is the end goal for your mobile app, but rather to help create a more complete experience for your users. I don't think you need a full-blown site as kraziazi suggested (not sure what the incremental cost would be but I'm sure it is high!) Most of us would pay $0.99 for the app just because it is awesome (and also we should all be able to afford it thanks to the community), but it's not a recurring revenue stream for the site.
Here is some stuff I'm talking about in terms of mobile experience. I'm sure you use both so this is just to illustrate some points :) Disclaimer: I'm not saying Quora is a superior community by any means but rather just the mobile experience front.
Grand entrance:
I think right off the bat you see the difference in the UI. Quora has a lot more content in on my screen at any given time than WSO. And truthfully WSO isn't a image/video-driven site (well, my new blog post links to a bunch of videos but..yeah anyways). So text content drives both Q and WSO.
Content viewing:
I had to zoom in and out multiple times on my phone to get to optimal viewing size. And even then stuff gets chopped off here and there. So it becomes somewhat of a chore (I do spend a lot of time perusing WSO on my phone, but generally Q is my first go-to for some productive reading just because it's easier! I prefer the content here).
2013 should be a year of no target/non-target talk. Also it's always nice to see some great contributing authors step in.
Advanced search function with a lot specific filters would be very useful
Filters are now highlighted in yellow in right column so you can't miss it and we tweaked the search algo to put more weight on the thread title...we still need to get certain filters back up there, stay tuned.
Thanks, Patrick
Patrick- awesome job on the site and I can't say enough about how transparent this site has made the world of Wall Street atleast for us junior folks. The one thing which I would really like to see is for the WSO company database to become even more search friendly like for eg. is there a way to search for comp figures only across PE firms at the associate level? In the past I've had to go into every fund's profile and check on whether comp figures were reported or not, and then get back out to see if the others do. If this degree of customization already exists within your search, I'd appreciate if you could let me know.
Hey Patrick,
First I want to point out that WSO is an awesome community - it's not even just a website anymore - and I think that it has a lot of potential to grow.
Lambie's W3.0 idea is great, and I think a focus on making the site compatible with new browsers and platforms should be a big influence here. There are 2 sites I'm thinking about primarily: Quartz (qz.com) and The Next Web (thenextweb.com). Those two sites have a really clean look that makes it easy to find information. I know that WSO is very focused on individual threads, however, and the search function is more useful than in sites like those; I think that taking some tips from Quora on design might be a good idea.
Just to throw an idea out - perhaps writing the site in HTML5 (which is a huge undertaking, I know) would solve a lot of problems in terms of eradicating technical issues and simultaneously giving the site that 3.0 upgrade that I'm sure Lambie is referring to.
The integrated chat sounds like an awesome idea and I think it really makes the Buddy lists worthwhile.
An idea I'd like to contribute: I think that WSO would benefit greatly from a notifications service. Each time something happens, users can get a simple notification (similar to that other "social networking" site people use) instead of having to sign up for emails or to be PM'ed when something happens. User turns to Senior Gorilla and gains points? Notification. Somebody throws MS or a SB = Notification. Replies to threads you want to be notified of = Notification.
That feature might be redundant/unwanted, not sure!
Lastly, the ability to call out users in posts (and perhaps give them a notification when this happens?) would be awesome! Similar to what twitter does with the @Person feature.
Maybe I should just get a FB.
Anyway, thanks Patrick! WSO is awesome.
First off, HTML5 is a MUST. We all know where the internet is going these days. HTML5 allows that. Notifications would be nice.
What I take away from this post is that WSO is a community now, more than just a website where I go when I try to break in to IBanking.
Oh and Patrick, Thanks for everything.
Thanks, I agree.
Those sites are beautiful - thanks for sending! Yes, I think we could use a site redesign, although many peopel have different opinions on this. Some what bigger images, less text like qz.com style, other want more text with shorter previews like seekingalpha.com or reddit style. I think the idea of making things cleaner and more streamlined is a good one though and one we should aspire to, I'm just not sure what the best way to balance that with making sure people can find everything they want and our products/services (which are the main tile and nav section along top). We rely on those to keep WSO alive and improving, so any design has to balance user experience with ads and products/services which is not always easy and why you can easily get "feature creep" and end up with 30 icons if you aren't careful :-)
Spoke with my mobile developer who knows a lot more than I do and he said the following: "Users talking about changing the site over to HTML5 don't know what they're talking about. Ignore them....one of the biggest pain in the asses right now that you guys have is that you're maintaining way too many stylesheets. If you use Less (or sass or whatever), it'll make dealing with all this stuff way easier. There'll be pain for sure initially in converting over, but it makes changes and tweaks easier moving forward." ...so I think when you think html5 you are thinking of a beautiful web 3.0 theme like qz.com and other sites that have likely a lot more resources than WSO, but that doesn't mean we can't aspire to get better in design. We can definitely borrow some of the more elegant solutions to design they adopt and try to take away some of the clutter from WSO's design...any suggestions where to start?
We had an integrated chat room before and there were consistent user violations in there so we had to shut it down - we do, however, have a Certified User chat room in the private Certified User group that is fairly active every day...just another benefit of becoming a Certified Users once you are a FT working professional (remember, it's also free to attend the WSO Conference if you are a certified user :-): http://wsocon.eventbrite.com/We have most of these and you get notified through PM. If you don't check your PM, you will get an email notifying you that you have an unread PM in your inbox...all of these can be turned off/on in your user settings/account...don't think we have the SB/MS notification but that would be a cool one to add - thanks for the suggestion!
Yes, this has been on our to do list for about 2 months now...will try to get more time for it because I think it would be a very cool feature to improve interaction.
Nah, we prefer you don't rot your brain on FB...WSO is much better for you. and thank YOU for a great list of suggestions! Patrick
Hey Patrick,
Whenever I click my username in the top right, then click "track" my list of forums goes so far to the right it's basically off my screen. Maybe it's just me or Firefox?
Keep up the good work!
Also, we should have a second shield next to our names signifying how long we've been in WSO. That way it increases the awareness of the validity on the information being received.
All new WSO users should be subject to a pink or brown emblem with a monkey inside it.
OR an emblem signifying your B/MS ratio, the more bananas, the more darker the emblem, the brighter the emblem the more bananas.
I'm surprised no one has been shot up with an SB for a good suggestion. Kassad and Kraziazi deserve one for emphasis, sadly I only have one credit... so Kassad since you commented first, here you go!
http://www.housebeautiful.com/cm/housebeautiful/images/hp/hbx-banana-va…
West Coast, thanks...I will forward some of these issues to our mobile theme guy to see if he can address them. I can see the issue with overlap w long usernames, etc...
Thanks for the screenshots, very helpful. As far as a mobile app is concerned, I think it would be cool to have, but we don't know any mobile app developers and our budget is very limited. All the research I did was putting a pretty basic app in the $3-5k range for each platform (iphone, android, etc) so we instead took the approach of a dynamic theme that jumps to 1 column and changes nav when screen wdith gets below X pixels...
I think we can deiniftely improve this experience though and shoudl be given some time and investment since ~20% of our traffic is now mobile.
Thanks, Patrick
Perhaps somewhere in the company database, we can have a section where it shows whether recruiting for certain jobs is in full swing. You can probably get this info on a company's website, but it would be cool if it were all aggregated into one place.
My main problem are the layout issues people mentioned. I generally use WSO from a mac (safari as a browser) at home and my ipad. With Safari I also have the problem where some threads display text behind the columns in the right and in the ipad it does weird things, basically what West Coast Analyst posted.
I think it would be nice to be able to customize the front page. There's a lot of content, too much in my opinion, and I don't read many of the threads there. It's useful because I generally just read the traders forum, so the front page is how I receive content from the rest of forums but if I don't read WSO for a couple of days I have to go through more than one page to see them all, which I don't do. Plus, since some threads are front paged more than once some threads get "pushed" to the back, so I miss content I would have been interested in. I can think of three ways to improve this: - Ideally this could be done automatically based on the threads you read (something like the book recommendation e-mail I get from amazon), - Finding a way for people to adapt it manually based on tags, forum, topic, etc.. could also be good. - Putting 4 boxes with something like the most commented, most read, highest ranked and the ones selected by the mods.
I agree with the people who talked about changing the layout, specially of the front page, so it only displays title, author (just the name instead of the whole bar) and a one or two line summary instead of 15. I would also remove the picture. This would make it look much cleaner IMO, and leave all the info and pictures for people who open the thread. I'm thinking along the lines of seekingalpha display with top articles, recent articles, macro view, etc.. but with WSO categories (this links to my previous suggestion). Also put all the less relevant content in the right column as a row at the bottom of the page or remove it, things like top members or SB rankings, because I honestly think no one reads them.
I would also enjoy easier access to the forums, because like I said I only browse through trading specific threads. Maybe have the recent/FAQ/forums/.. bar integrated in the toolbar or as a column or just bigger.
1) When you click new on "Forum Topics on the right hand bar - nothing new appears as much as topics with 180+ responses from years ago.
2) I'm saying this being slightly facetious - add a high school forum section.
3) Half the time the home page is clicked on, a message saying "You don't have access to this area of the website" appears. Takes 2 clicks to ge to the homepage, not suggesting its a big deal but merely pointing it out.
1 and #3 sounds like cache issues...when I click on new, I am taken to the newest forums from the past week (with option to change the date), sorted by the # of comments. You don't get that? Are you hitting these pages when youa re logged in or logged out usually? Thanks!
This happens to me as well. Used to be all the newly created topics now it seemsto be random and older topics
I'm not sure how feasible this may be but I would love to see like a list of professionals in a designated field. So like if someone is in compliance for example, there may be 10 users who also work in the field on WSO. If those 10 users are identified when they received their Certified User status as compliance professionals, someone could directly contact them using this list (similar to the company database I expect) via PM to discuss rather than post about 20 topics on the same issue, like someone did recently. I know it'd make the site more efficient but not sure how people may respond to it.
Other than that, the usual. Solid work though Patrick.
+1 Completely agree.
Option that will let you bookmark/save posts that you like.
bookmark icon to the right of the "pm" icon in the original posts...then you will see a tab called My bookmarks under Recent...or in the drop down.
everytime i go to the home page, it defaults to the middle of the screen
browser? thanks
same for me. Using Chrome
can you tell me what browser and if that has stopped? thanks
I'd agree with those saying the FAQ needs to be more accessible, it seems that a lot of the same questions get asked over and over.
What I think would work; when you enter a certain forum, have FAQ's or threads related to that board be on the sidebar, rather then having a default 'forum topics', 'upcoming events' etc. Ex. If you enter the Trading forum, on the side you have 'must read threads' and an 'FAQ' directly related to that board. I think it'd help make some forums more specific, helpful, and you'd cut down on a lot of questions that get repeated.
Browser issues involving post stretching
Ability to throw SB or MS to PM's
Better post/comment tagging and/or cataloging to improve search and accessibility of content
More demarcation between help seeking posts and industry related discussions
More forums to discuss specific technical aspects of the industry, such as accounting or quant for example
Forum revolving around academic literature / white papers
Monkey poo forgiveness program
Also forum for discussing market views
I agree. I think the two content growth areas need to be more interviews from users and other financial professionals on a wide variety of topics and a more active trade idea forum similar to seekingalpha. I think we definitely have some good trading talent on the site, but we need to incentivize more of these posts--possible asking them to do a write up and paying them based on the number of comments.
Patrick, Eddie--you guys actively manage your PAs and talk about different stocks. I think to get the ball rolling you should do a post about a particular trade. What made you think about it, how you expressed the view, what catalyst are you looking for, entry and exit points. I don't think it needs to be the most detailed post, because the discussion/questions that are asked with drive the thread.
"Ability to throw SB or MS to PM's"
I agree with SB, slightly, but MS no. You shouldn't get penalized for responding to PMs. If you tell a hard truth, you shouldn't be penalized when someone specifically sought your advice. I guess they could MS another post anyway, but I still don't like the idea.
Let me just say something. The core issue with the banana/poo ratio is that it has negative banana convexity (in a sense). Allow me to elaborate a bit.
Say you have a 2:1 ratio, composed of 20 bananas and 10 clumps of poo. Now for a single banana addition, this ratio changes to 2.1, or an incremental change of 0.1 in your favor. However, for a single clump of poo that's hurled in your direction, your ratio changes to 1.82, or an incremental change of 0.18 against you. Therefore, in this particular point in your banana-poo cycle, 1 clump of poo = 1.8 silver bananas. However, it costs the same number of credits (uno) for a user to throw either banana or poo.
While the specific numbers depend on where you are in your banana-poo cycle, the end result is the same: negative banana convexity. I think this intrinsic aspect of the banana-poo paradigm is the source of your misgivings about my suggestion...that's where my proposed Monkey Poo Forgiveness Program (MPFP) comes into play.
We will put this as a priority because it is very annoying
We've looked into this and it's actually not easy to integrate the private message moduel with the userpoints and vote up/down module...in other words, would take a ton of time that I think can be used elsewhere to greater benefit, and would like to encourage public discussion / advice so that more than 1 person benefits from the advice.
We have bookmarking, we have an extensive FAQ and a search that can be filtered by date, content type (those filters need to be made more obviosu since many miss them), etc...can you be more specific? Not sure if there is an easy way to automate this and how you woudl suggest marking them without confusing more people? Disagree here. I think less is more in this case since we already have close to 20 forums, especially when we have a lot of posts going in the wrong place.....however, we have lowered the # of misplaced posts dramaticallly simply by improving the create content form (section where people select what forum to drop a discussion in, etc)...Thanks for your suggestions...
The arguable benefit from increasing the number of forums is to encourage discussion in additional areas. There might be an incremental number of posts that are misplaced at first, new features are bound to have tradeoffs. For those that are well out of school it's just not super fun to unintentionally wade through post after post of help-seeking threads vs discussions that would interest a much larger audience. Right now they're all jumbled together within the current forum framework. It would be nice if they were separated out. Forum for market/macro views, forum for trade ideas, forum for finance academic literature, forum to discuss technical concepts, specific forum for news, etc. That would be much better.
This is still not resolved, see thread below. The post area should either auto-wrap text or auto-resize an image/video.
//www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/upenn-suicides-whats-going-on-here
^ In case you missed it Patrick. Would be great to see something like that, especially as I'm looking for internships soon whilst in grad school.
Not sure if we can, but I will see if we can add to the user search and ability to filter by industry and Status (title)....I agree would be very useful.
I think profile views and PM should incorporate some ajax. Real time PMs would be useful for conversations. Also, when someone clicks on a username or their own, a lightbox with their profile information should pop up rather than a whole page load. Just some little tips to modernize the site
This is interesting...will see how hard it is to incorporate these lightboxes with ajax. When someone clicks a username and the lightbox appears, woudl they be able to click on stuff in the lightbox to complete an action like PM the user, view their blog, etc? or would it just be for information purposes? If so, how would they get to the users page? Thanks!
WSO 3.0 on the way...to start, some new icons in the comments and some jquery to clean things up. Thoughts? Still like a lot of your suggestions. We have a small team and are pushing forward.
So we improved mobile (which admittedly was lacking) and we just improved comments/forums UI. Much more needed here and we will be focusing on that for at least a few more weeks...
Thanks for your suggestions, they make us better! Patrick
As was previously mentioned, a WSO app. I have probably been the biggest cheerleader of this idea for over a year.
The mobile site can get the job done, but just getting the job done isn't good enough. I can wipe my ass with a leaf and it would get the job done, by why do that when I can use toilet paper?
Check out this new app that just came out, clean, minimal, to the point and works in both a smartphone and tablet mode:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.quantumbadger.redread…
I think the main thing people are looking for is a way to access their account/profile and the board in a clear and concise way without having to constantly pinch and zoom. A lot of people would like to catch up on some of the posts and articles while on the go without having to sift through the entire site while constantly pinching and zooming.
I can probably get you in touch with the dev of that specific app if you want to talk to him.
Other than that, I am sure someone on this board can code in Java or Objective-C (or knows someone who does) and can help you out or point you in the right direction. Obviously the thing that has stopped you from pulling the trigger on this is the money, but I am telling you there are a ton of intelligent coders out there (many of which still in college) that would probably do it for free in exchange for WSO allowing them to use the creation of the app in their portfolio and possibly even having the coding of the app count as an internship on their resume.
I still haven't been told exactly why we need an app to make the mobile experience better. Just making it an app won't make it look better. Obviously we need to improve the mobile version of the site (as discussed above), but nobody has expressed why making 3 different apps across 3 different operating systems is superior to adaptive design (especially on a business cash flow vs. incremental improvement level)
If you hate our mobile experience now, let's fix it. Images will be removed, the overlap issues will be fixed, buttons will be made bigger so you don't have to zoom in and out to select what you want, etc...that doesn't need an app. you can be logged in to your acocunt in mobile, and access your PMs, but we need to make it easier to get to your inbox and type messages...etc etc etc. We're on it.
Thanks, Patrick
Nefarious, any thoughts on our new mbile "app" / version of the site? We fixed a lot of the layout issues, made search and the primary nav buttons larger at the top to make nav easier on a mobile device.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this iteration.
Thanks, Patrick
That is a huge improvement. Looks a lot better and is a lot easier to navigate. The only comment I would add is on some of the pages (inbox for example) a few of the buttons seem to be jumbled or overlapping each other. "Write new message" seems to be interfering with "Delete" and "Actions". Nothing major, but just thought you would like to know. I am on a Galaxy Nexus using Android 4.2.
Also, something I have noticed on this site for the past year (and this might just be me having this error and no one else) is every time a change seems to be implemented on this site by the admins, it requires me to re-login when I come back to this site. This could be intentional or it could just be me, just thought you would want to know. I typically use Chrome on Windows 7.
Thanks!
I know other forums do this but not sure how hard it would be for WSO, but one of those "xxx users browsing this topic: [insert user names here]" and then one of those green circles or something next to your name if you're surfing WSO. One of those ones where you hover your mouse over it and it'll say "Online" or "Offline." Can be helpful for when best to send a PM, identifying hot topics, see who else is reading, and whatever else.
Plus also an awesome way to keep track of those metrics like 'most users ever' thing that a bunch of forums had that keeps track of the peak # of people that were online at a time since X date.
^^ Also total number of unique views/visitors for a given thread
Just wanted to comment on two ideas:
The problem with the list of professionals in a designated field is that they might get absolutely harassed. I am not even close to a popular user here and I still get a lot of ridiculous emails and PMs, with things like questions from an application form and expecting me to give them the "right" answers. I can still perfectly manage to reply to the people who are genuinely interested and have done their research, but I assume people like SirTradesaLot, Blackhat, derivstrading, etc.. would get too many PMs and therefore it would be more difficult/impossible for them to filter and answer the deserving ones.
There definitely should be something about the SB/MS thing, because some people can't stand being corrected so they will throw MS at you when they're wrong, which discourages people from helping in the forums.
Agreed. Perhaps having a filter mechanism by who can access these lists of these professionals. I just figured it'd be a useful idea considering the amount of repetitive posts we get on here asking the same question, and not actually yielding the desired answer.
I would love to see a quant forum section, market views, and excel forum. That would be cool. That way I could stop going to quantnet.com
Ban AnabelleCalthorpe from creating threads until she can be given a tutorial on the search function.
.
As already mentioned, the search function could greatly be improved. The best way to do this would be to just add an option to search by thread title. That way we could find the most relevant threads that we are looking for without having to google site:wallstreetoasis.com search term (this works much better).
Also, the UI could be improved in some ways with the use of jQuery. jQuery could be used in many different places here, but I will give a random example of a cool effect I have used before. Right now when you quote someone in a post, you are sent to another page to submit the post there. Not only does it take longer because you are sent to another page, you then can't view the other posts while you are writing. A better way would be when a user presses the quote button on a post, jQuery is used to take the text from the post and put it in the comment box at the bottom in the form of a quote dynamically. You could even give the text the effect of floating all the way to the comment box at the bottom. This would be much faster than directing users to a different page, would look much nicer, would be easier to quote multiple people, and would allow users to read the rest of the posts while typing.
This is just one example of the many ways that jQuery could be (easily) implemented to give this site a dynamic and exciting user interface.
I don't know what jQuery is but I do like suggestion.
I really like the suggestion about jquery...we will but it in the queue for sure. As far as search goes, I will see if we can allow to search just by thread title, although i now have the ability to weight a lot of different things and right now, the tags and body associated with a thread is weighted heavier than the title of a thread since those typically are a better indication of what the topic is about.
Can you give me an example where google returned "better" results and/or why you feel that way? It may allow us to change the content type and other biases we have control over.
Thanks! Patrick
ps - in the meantime, mobile improvements discussed in this thread are high on the list as well...
Yeah, Patrick I have to agree with the above in that the search needs to be retooled. It gives you a lot of options and results, but when I type in 80% of a thread title because I am trying to find it from memory and it doesn't pop up...there is a problem. I either end up using Google or by tracking a poster that I know posted in it. I think the priority of the search function should focus on thread title first followed by tags and content---I think one of the problems that arise is that so many articles have the same tags that you end up getting search function overload regardless of how granular you make it.
These are awesome suggestions...we have changed the search weighting to be much heavier on the thread title and we are looking into more jquery.
MindOverMonkey, can you tellme if search is better now for you? Thanks
Just an update....sorry on the delays...hoping to have a new version of mobile WSO out by next week...
Multiple quote option?
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/basic%20codes
You can see the post you are quoting, if you want to quote different users in the same post, you will need to open a different window copy and paste, and use the standard quote code.
Well yes, you can do that. Other sites (bb.com) have a "multi-quote" option which is convenient
IE sucks for devs as well as users. Just make the switch.
..unfortunately still the 3rd highest browser behind chrome and safari...and even ahead of FF for WSO.
hate IE with a passion...literally increases web development costs by ~30-50% for online businesses...
New mobile site/app improvements coming tomorrow...
yayuh :)
FYI I hope when WSO is super big you're still willing to take advice/comments from us monkeys directly!
always - it's one of the reasons I think we've come this far. If anything, I want to get faster at iterating and not get bogged down in all the minor things - but I also realize we need better UI, etc.
It's a tough balance whether to invest more in design, etc or to invest more in finding better bloggers / content. We have a strong community, but we also need to support it with our various revenue channels...so we're contantly balancing new ad units, new products, product improvements, etc with site design, content generation/editorial calendar and site promotion/PR/SEO....
ok, new mobile chnages either late tonight or early tomorrow...layout issues (with video stretching screen) should be gone, bigger buttons, no images, etc...it's already looking much cleaner. stay tuned...
ok, new mobile site live...we listened to the advice. No images, bigger buttons, fixes for things that were messing up layout like videos,e tc....
thoughts?
The mobile site is much better now. Thanks.
awesome, thanks for the acknowledgement :-)
@Bobb, great, thanks
Patrick,
Interesting idea that popped in my head. Will email you about it.
did you email me? sorry, been jammed up if i didnt respond...
Ha yea I did. Emailed re: b-school ideas.
...stay tuned, some very cool changes coming to comments/design in next 24hrs. along with some more minor fixes to mobile
One thing I don't like about current incarnation of mobile (chrome in ipad)...when you click on a thread once from tracking or feed, it brings up a pop-up with a snippet of the comment, and then you have to click on the thread again to actually open it up. Kind of annoying that you're forced to click 2x assuming I'm not doing it totally wrong (just got an ipad recently).
I don't know if anyone else has this problem, but lately when I vote or view the poll comments I get an error saying I don't have acess despite being logged in.
we getting better? Buttons larger and new quote function keeps you on same page...
we getting better? check out new quote using jquery and new icons...
I really like the new buttons. They are more classy and easier to use. Also, maybe it is just me, but it seems like the site is faster (I have not gotten faster Internet or anything). Good job, Patrick! You rock.
what do you think of new redesign so far? http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/new-wso-header-design-version-20-…
This has been fixed. working now for you?
the fact that we look more like thenextweb.com is thanks to you. great suggestion and really helped us develop our new header design which is much cleaner..
but we aren't done cleaning yet...
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