I know this is a site feature designed to promote active participation and generate more unique registered users for the site, but it is incredibly annoying to not be able to see full threads without signing in. For those of us who cannot sign in at work due to company policy regarding posting on interactive sites (basically all of us on the sell-side, at least at BB banks), it's a huge turnoff to only be able to see the first handful of replies before the gray barrier prevents you from reading the rest of the material.
There may not be any real workaround, but I would love to start a discussion on whether or not it may be appropriate to modify this policy.
Thanks in advance for even hearing me out on this, Patrick. I have a tremendous amount of respect for how interactive and transparent you are in running this site, it has really grown and become more valuable over the years.
I completely agree APAE.
I can see the reasoning behind getting people to log in/create accounts, but I think there's already a lot of content only available to users only. Perhaps removing this barrier but putting one up to read the 'Best interviews and Forums' or some others FAQ's could do the trick?
hey guys, I appreciate the thought / concern. We actually just reduced the amount of blurring so that there are blurred comments on every thread, BUT how many blurred is a function of how many comments there are in the thread.
1-5 comments = 1 blur 6-10 = 2 blur 11-15 = 3 blur 16-20 = 4 blurred....etc etc...
Basically, for every 5 additional comments, we blur out 1, so we are blurring out ~20% of the comments across the site. This has increased our user registrations ~50-100% depending on what time period you are looking at
This past week we actually just changed the formula so that longer threads are more open - before we were just blocking everything after 15 comments... -- so a thread with 50 comments would have had 15 visible comments and 35 blurred. Now that thread has only 10 blurred and 40 open.
I think there are other ways to increase user registrations, but none that would have anywhere near as dramatic an impact as this.
afromman - a lot of content only available to users? I assume you mean the Company Database? because 99.9% of the content on WSO are the forums and blogs, which are still ~80% open and 100% free.
Hey Patrick,
Yeah I guess the Company Database is the only thing I could think of only available to users.
Good job changing the formula for how many comments get blurred on forums now. That being said, it's slightly frustrating to have to log in to read all the 'New' comments (all at the bottom and blurred out).
That's why I suggested opening all that up but making people log in/create an account to read the Best Interviews and Threads (LOTS of valuable info in them) and maybe even other sections in the FAQ. By blurring out the post with the answers to the interview questions or the posts with high quality info, lurkers would have to log in or create an account. Maybe creating a 'Best Of' section in the FAQ and putting all these topics there is what I'm trying to say. Lock that to non-users.
You could then leave all other forums and comments readable to anyone. Just a thought.
At the end of the day, this site is still fantastic and 100% free like you said, so maybe I'm just nitpicking.
You can post from a BB bank as long as you remain anonymous and do not offer your opinion as a representative of your firm.
Trust me, I do it all day. I also am on the team that writes the policies for these rules and every other rule in the investment bank.
who watches the watchmen?
'Socrates' answer to the problem is, in essence, that the guardians will be manipulated to guard themselves against themselves... and "it would be absurd that a guardian should need a guard."'
How's that? ;)
Impressed again with the rapid development and evolution of the site, keep up the work.
Agreed that it's a bit annoying to read topics, but apparently my BB has blocked logging into WSO.
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