Dearest Fellow Primates,
So, just to keep myself on track and accountable, I wanted to write down what our main initiatives are over the next 12 months to make sure we continue to continue to improve the WSO platform, community and services/products. Along those lines, I wanted to outline our plan over the next 12-14 months and where we are spending a lot of time / $ investing back into the community.
1. Upgrading from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. I've held off from this transition for a while since transitioning to a new version can cause a huge # of headaches. In order to make a smooth transition in April / May of 2015, we are starting to plan for this now. Module inventory, design, etc. While it's not super urgent, with Drupal 8 around the corner, Drupal 6 will soon not be supported. I think it has been ~4 years since we went from D5 to D6.
2. New truly dynamic theme. One of the benefits of upgrading to Drupal 7 are some of the adaptive themes available for the site that would look great across any tablet/mobile phone, etc. Right now, our theme has become somewhat of a patchwork off of a base theme called Genesis and I'm not happy with the overall use of space in several areas, typeface, etc. I'm leaning toward something like this: http://refaktorthemes.com/demos/?theme=Porto (welcome your thoughts on this theme) by mid next year as part of the upgrade to D7
3. More video webinars and video content. One of my goals is to continue to build the WSO Video Library over the next 2-3 years to make it an amazing resource of lectures about all things related to finance and management consulting careers. With our pace of 2-3 webinars per week, we should be able to hit our goal of adding 100+ videos and 100+ hours of content to the video library each year. Along the way, we are building out our team of Wall St Mentors (now over 100+) in order to provide each client with an extremely specific / useful match. This is a lot of work to recruit, schedule, host, record, edit and promote the videos, but the system we have now seems to be working well...so we'll keep plugging away!
4. Along with #3 above, we will be looking to integrate much of this video content into our interview guides and products. This started for the first time with the Prop Trading Interview Guide (comes with a 3 month subscription to the video library and had a lot of video content we did in house), but we want to do this eventually for many more of our products and services. We think the video library bundled with the interview guides makes a lot of sense and makes the PDFs much more valuable / interactive for the client. Along those lines, we are already hard at work scripting out a ton of video content for version 2.0 of the PE Prep Pack that we want to get released by January 2015 so that we give applicants enough time to absorb the content and do the 9 LBO modeling tests so that they are ready if megafunds jump the gun again this year in Feb/March! After that, we'll likely turning back to the IB Prep Pack and look at ways to make it even better.
5. That's about it for now. I would love to hear what you guys think about all of the above...particularly the new theme and/or anything that we haven't been able to provide / fix as of yet and what you think our priority should be as well.
Thanks guys & gals!
Patrick
Thanks for an already great site! Updated mobile functionality would be nice, not every feature is available mobile. I know an app is out of the question at the moment...
Theme looks good
Theme looks great and I agree, a mobile app would be awesome.
yes a mobile app would be great
Is a mobile app feasible right now? If not, what would it take to make it happen? I'd pay for that, most definitley.
i think getting rid of all the spam would make wso more usable
have you seen more spam recently? ...the report violation red links typically help remove most of it pretty fast (i thought)...
Definitely much more spam during the last few weeks.
This x1000. I usually sort by "recent", and if the first 100 posts are spam, it makes it pretty hard to browse. I don't think it would be relatively difficult to institute a new thread limit (ex 1/hour), so that an account cannot spam the same thread constantly...
how are we doing now / recently? throttle and stricter measures now in place :-)
content is king, don't worry too much about themes and etc.
thanks!
Thanks...do you feel the webinars we've been hosting every week have helped on content? Anything else we can do or type of content you'd like to see more of?
not a webinar-type guy, but sure they were.
huge work has been already done and separate thanks for that.
bringing in people like Damodaran is certainly a step in a right direction.
well, it's UGC and just keep track of interesting changes happening in financial world and put those on the main page as you already do.
try to attract more interesting contributors with unique content.
design, usability and apps - pleasant but not urgent minor things.
thanks again!
great site! One feature that I would like to see added is the ability to see previous comment on a reply even if the previous comment is on a previous page. E.g. Right now this happens: Lets say that a comment on page 2 of a particular thread is replied to. However, at the time of reply the comments have grown to, say, page 3 on the same thread. In this case, the reply posted would have a link to the earlier comment ('in reply to XYZ'). but this 'in reply to ...' link would not show the earlier comment. 'hope that is clear. If it matters, I use chrome and safari for the most part.
ditto.
it'd also be good if after spam was removed if the thread was actually gone instead of just a dead link
500+ people at happy hours every month, free open bar, etc.
Definitely a mobile app. Strengthen the campus rep program and break into Unis globally.
I agree. There isn't much sense in creating an app while the mobile browser could still use a few improvements. A few of the menu options disappear on mobile and I can't visibly see/discern new posts vs old posts on a given discussion.
We are at Unis around the world...but always looking for more great reps. Anyone looking to apply as a WSO Campus Rep can do so right here:
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/wso-campus-representative-program
Thanks guys! http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/wso-campus-representative-program
If we switch to the theme I linked to in my OP, then there will be even less reason to develop a mobile app. That theme looks great across all form factors (fully adaptive)...
I think there should be a forum dedicated to specific regions of the country, i.e. NYC, LA, San Fran, Boston, Charlotte, etc. I think more localized questions could be posted to those instead of general forums
City/region specific forums under each of the ~18 forums we have now? I think that would mean 100+ forum containers...Don't you think it would be hard to organize / find given that people frequently post things under the wrong forum even with the # we have now...?
Thanks, Patrick
I agree, because while I don't live in those places, I can help with questions because I travel frequently. Also, I have many friends from Charlotte and have visited there numerous times. I think it's best to post city specific questions to monkeying around as well as PM'ing specific users if you have a very local question.
Patrick I understand that leaps and bounds have been made with the mobile design, but what's the reason for not having an app? is it cost prohibitive or is it simply lack of interest?
even if you don't make a mobile app, some type of Tapatalk integration would be great. Not sure if you have it already as I gave up trying a year or two ago.
Hey guys, I would say improved mobile site functionality (app not necessary) would be awesome. Also, I find that most of the time I come back to the site (open interested article in new tab)I have to re-log in... I use chrome (safari for mobile) and have found that to be the most frustrating issue. Thanks for the great site and support!
yeah, i think the mobile site will be much cleaner when we move to a more adpative theme like the one I linked to above...this will still be a huge investment of time and $, but I think April / May 2015 is a doable goal!
Mobile app please
This isn't a technical improvement by any means, but don't allow people to delete top posts once people have replied. I always see a bunch of OP's go back and bulk delete posts, sometimes when they don't even get ms for it and it's a legit question with legit responses. I don't know why they do it (they got their question answered and are protecting their anonymity even more?) but I feel like once people have replied and those replies could be of use to other members, OP's shouldn't be able to take them down. I'd leave carve-outs for situations such as when the long time user (corpfinhopeful/guy?) offered fellatio for an analyst position, but other than that people shouldn't be able to pull down OP's once others have taken time to reply and it could be of use to the community as a whole.
Ok, I think we finally got the spam issue under control. Please continue to flag spam and other violations to the WSO User Guidelines...
Thanks guys for the heads up! Patrick
Is there any way to see all the blog posts on one screen (kind of like the home page for WSO, but only with blog posts)?
Also, is there any way to view the combination of all forum posts for the different sub-forums on one page? Kind of like how reddit has a reddit.com/r/all that doesn't filter by specific subreddit.
not currently...although if you search you can filter by content type, so you would be able to filter and only search blog posts. is there a reason you'd want that?
Under recent, our tracker page is like the /all. It shows all new content coming in... http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/tracker is that what you mean?
For the blog posts, I think there's some interesting stuff that people post that I miss a lot of the time, since I don't really follow individual posters and the blog posts don't appear on one of the forums. I thought there might be some feature that would allow you to scroll through the most recent blog posts quickly (kind of like the tracker link, which is pretty much what I was looking for! Thanks!).
SPAM update...we now also have a throttle in place. Max new forum topics = 3 per hour per user...so that should slow down some of the spammers. Please continue to flag so that we can wipe them quickly. Thanks :-)
More posts from retired CEOs would be my only suggestion. Keep up the good work.
Thanks Dick :-)
Mobile app is not something I would use, for whatever that's worth.
theme looks and works great
FYI, we are looking for a few beta testers now! http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/beta-testers-for-new-wso-site
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