Call for Suggestions

Yes! Lose the monkey!

While tweaks and improvements are nice, expanding the userbase is probably the best way to enhance the experience for the current usergroup.

It needs to be improved. When a user wants to search a term that contains 2 or 3 letters, it will yield no results. A lot of users like to abbreviate especially when they write firms it will be like ML,MS, CS,UBS, GS, and so on.

I think it would be cool if the "active forum topics" part contained more posts or at least linked to somewhere that did

Yea, something needs to be done to expand the user base. I feel as though all the responses come from the same group of people. And yes, I think making the site look more professional will help in getting more jobs posted and people may take it more seriously.

NEVER lose your BlackBerry www.conveniencesoftware.com

I think you should create an archive or data base that houses relevant information. A lot of the inquiries on the site are redundant (i.e. what books to read, what modeling software to buy, are my shoes cool enough, etc.).

We could compile a list of helpful information that could be edited and updated by all or some users. Enjoy the trip.

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HAHAHAHAH. i totally agree with johnnyhoward33. some of the ads are not exactly the most appropriate for work environment. But as much as i want this site to be a lil more professional, i would rather keep the site friendlier, i mean afterall, coming to this site is more or less an escape from current work load. some of the other sites are just way too professional looking and they just make me want to leave. hope this helps.

I think you should make the site cleaner and more elegant/professional. It currently looks way to childish. For one, its too obvious that you are on the site while at work, and secondly, its just ugly. I'd remove the monkey, sea/oasis, cheesey buttons, the fades on the boxes, and stream line the ads. Think facebook. Simple colors and elegant lines. Simply put - if you want to add more professionals...make the site look professional.

Sorry Pat

The monkeys got to go.

"Oh - the ladies ever tell you that you look like a fucking optical illusion?"

Not a comment about the website but rather, your trip in KL. Eat dinner one night at The C. Club... it's in the gigantic mall complex across from the Ritz. Good food and fun atmosphere over looking the city. Was there a few months ago.

I'm positive that I cant be the only one experiencing this problem, but this website is running extremely slow wherever I run it (work, home) so its obviously not my internet connection. I find the only way to make pages load sometimes is to hit the refresh button.

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I can't be the only one that loves the monkey. MONKEY STAYS. I will protest the monkey's departure unless its replaced by a hot bikini clad babe.

As far as the inappropriate adverts, i think there's a way to optimize what kind of ads show up with your random ad generator thingies (adsense or something else?)...kind of like search engine optimization...but not.

You gotta have some kind of monkey theme - that's the whole tradition, and it's an important part of the brand. The banana points, the chimp/baboon/gorilla rankings. People remember this as THE monkey site. It's got to have an irreverent side too.

If people are worried about monkey graphics looking unprofessional at work, can't they just view it through an RSS reader? You can set that up to look like anything you want.

If the ibanking oasis name is still open maybe make a pansy professional version on that or something.

I think a real issue is the fact that there are so many threads nowadays that some of the most interesting ones just blow by and if you weren't on the site for a few hours you missed them.

Gotta be some way to seperate the repetitive stuff from the good stuff (besides voting-which has issues). I still advocate the idea of a way to differentiate "discussion" threds from "advice" threads.

Search has been such a great function of this site to use, but as some others have mentioned, it's very bad. Semantics stop searchers from finding relevant topics (for instance, "salary" will not bring up every topic related to "pay".

I think it also might help for new users to recieve a disclaimer to first check the archives, since alot of questions are asked over and over again. Though, this might decrease activity, so consider it how you will.

Great site, thank you for your hard work.

yea the monkey theme stays! but maybe make the monkey logo less cartoonish.

I haven't thought much about new features but these are my comments/suggestions for some features already on the site, for whatever my opinion is worth. The site is already great though, it's definitely a fun site to visit if you're bored and occasionally informative as well :) It probably took you a lot of work to program the forum and site the way it is now and it seems a lot of people like the site.

I think an important change would be to organize the content better. Current the links and content are all over the page and it appears messy, you can divide the layout into different sections like user control panel, site navigation, newsletter signsup, etc. If you care also a lot about your site's appearance you can probably get a logo, forum theme designed that would make your site look really nice and professional. Blend the ads better with the site (e.g., the ad at the top of the page doesn't look good covering the sky background). You can probably also place your ads more effectively around the site, I doubt having those 3 ads at the bottom of the page is effective (although if someone paid to have them there I guess it doesn't matter). There's a lot of whitespace at the bottom of the page.

The search doesn't seem that great right now, the results aren't always relevant and if they are don't always show up first and are spread throughout a ton of pages so it's hard to find what you're looking for. Maybe you can use a google search on the site. I am not sure what to do about this or if anything should be done, but it seems that only the i-banking forum seems to be active and contains over 90% of the posts! Some of the other forums haven't had posts for weeks. As for getting the word out, maybe you can have a referral contest, but I think people already working in the industry would just find out about the site from their friends eventually anyway. For some reason I like the monkey/bananas. Maybe I'm just used to it but I think it gives your site a unique theme and allows you to have features like banana points, monkey rankings like chimp and gorilla, etc. if you took away the monkey you'd lose the whole monkey theme, and i don't think oasis has the same effect and is not as distinctive.

Some features that I like: New forum topics feature Interesting threads featured on the main page the forum is different than most forums on the net which all look similar because they use the same forum scripts like vbulletin or phpbb

Also I think the zwinky ads are going toward the wrong audience :) You probably didn't have much control over what showed up on the ad, but maybe you can change the ad content, I don't think these people are very interested in creating a dress up doll! I don't like the recent jobs section being near the top of the page either, there doesn't seem to be too many listings. When I change pages the "new forum topics" box disappears.

I probably can think of more things later but for now that's all i can think of

Put the monkey in a brooks brothers suit with a winchester collar and french cuffs

Also, I would probably want to read more of the news or blogs or whatever but again its kind of unorganized and it seems like theres so many news pieces i wouldnt know where to start.

Amazing site btw, kudos

Seeing as though i'm in the minority in regards to the site design...can you set up the site to have two skins? The traditional one and a more professional one, where the user can just select the skin they want to use?

Going in line with the search improvements, you might consider implementing some sort of tag or category system. This would be separate/parallel to the "ibanking oasis," "traders train," etc. forums. Think, for example of a "compensation" category that included all of the bonus rumors across industries/functions. Tags take this a step further but can be a bit less reliable—for example, it would be nice to pull up all threads tagged with "Goldman", although to make sure you didn't miss anything you'd also want to check posts tagged with "GoldmanSachs," "GS," etc.

For an example of tags in action at another site: http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/

this is a pretty small flaw, but when I open the WSO site and before I log in, I would like to see the cursor already in the 'username' field, saves me clicking it. eBay and Google do this, why not WSO!!?

Also, if possible, could you try and get the "My Posts" page to load quicker please, it takes freakin' ages at the mo'

Great site though overall, thanks P

hell, my username is "little monkey"

i really think you should keep it going... in order to appease the concerns on professionalism, maybe you can have small little monkey logos/silhouettes around the website.. like maybe at the bottom right of the last post/page or in the top right of a post. you could probably get away with some faded out white monkey silhouette on the current blue "header" of each post. maybe even the blue boxes on the website (that have your personal acct info, threads...) can have a little monkey on a corner

heck, maybe even the magnifying glass can be held by a little monkey that would match the design of the banana in the banana points..

anyhow, if you implement all these little changes we're obviously back in square one, but maybe a little monkey here and there could replace the cartoon monkey on top if you really must make the website a bit more professional

oh, and keep the banana points!

The monkey really only shows up in one place, right on top. Could just make it so that you can click to display something else...choose your logo?

a small suggestion would be to possibly put a thumbs up or down next to certain replys (like on youtube) and on a similar line of thought, i find sometimes i will come across posts where the question of the OP hasnt been answered and ill put as a reply "i'd also like to know the answer" or whatever and i find this happens a lot with some posts that have really good questions, so possibly having a tab under new posts with certain posts that warrant or deserve a response.

Also, i was serious about putting the monkey in a suit in the banner at the top of the page; it would be amazing.

I like jmdude's second suggestion... sort of like a more sophisticated version of "bump"... maybe a bump button in the thread that flags a question in the forum list until the next reply?

You know what would be cool? A favorites folder for each member b/c ill frequently come across great articles Id like to look at later (ie GMAT posts etc) or articles which have been recently posted but have no replies yet.

Do something so people can edit job listings and also remove job listings when the position has been filled :)

thanks