How can WSO Get Better?

Dearest Fellow Primates,

It's been a while since I reached out and asked for advice, so I thought I would take the time now to explain what we've done recently, what we're working on and see how we could make the site better for YOU.

Design

So we just changed this to a tabbed design with icons to make it easier to see that we have trending and best topics for easy access/browsing. We also made it so that the Start Discussion "button" is just a tab, to clean up the design and save vertical space (hope it's not confusing)...so you can see it here

Coming Soon: In our user tests, we notice that whenever someone wants to go into a specific forum, they keep having to go up to the forum drop down menu and select their desired forum (annoying / takes ~3-5 seconds). To make this transition easier, we are going to rework the header nav to have small direct abbreviated links for each main forum (IB PE RE AM TRD CON JOB OFF etc) so that no matter where you are on the site, you can jump back easily to your favorite forum and keep it open in a tab (or not)...

Any other suggestion here?

Content

We continue to go through our massive merge & purge task to improve the user experience for users finding us through organic search, but we also are trying to find the right balance in terms of content that is useful and entertaining for both the experienced professionals and the students trying to break into these careers in finance.

We recently started a syndication deal with Morning Brew Daily (example here) and we're looking to do more deals like that as well as bring back more fun contents (now that we can send out and sell WSO T-shirts again!).

Webinars are going strong - some great ones coming up in the next month, so the video library continues to grow at a steady clip.

Happy hours are becoming more common around the world but would love to get more cities involved! Reach out to [email protected].

Search has recently been tweaked to make the Advanced Filters easier to see/use...and encourage users to try "exact phrase" matching as well...

What content would you like to see more of?

Course and Services

We've recently invested heavily in building out the team to make the customer experience for our products and services even better (brought on several extra people to do thank you calls, answer questions, etc).

The interview courses have been given a full on redesign and massive content infusion (from all the ongoing webinars) and we are very close to launching an exciting partnership for Series 7 Exam Prep this week (stay tuned!).

WSO Resume Review and Wall Street Mentors continues to grow steadily as more and more members realize there are massive benefits to hiring professional help for their CV and/or interview prep. Our mentor and resume team now stands at over 170 elite professionals from around the world, all with extensive experience at top firms.

We have another very exciting partnership/initiative that will be announced at the end of next month for something that will help a lot of you in your goal of breaking into investment banking.

What do you want?

How can we make WSO better for you? what do you like best, what do you like least?

Thank you for all of your advice. I think all of you have really made WSO what it is the last 12 years, so thank you for your continued support and I hope that the next 12 years we can keep improving!

Thank you,
Patrick

 
Best Response

DESIGN I think you're good here, WallStreetOasis.com. I'm one who prefers simple, clean designs that do not change very often. I do wish you'd use BBCode, HTML, or something more intuitive for post editing.

CONTENT Morning Brew is surprisingly good, which brings me to my next point....these blog posters who post on WSO to drive traffic to their blogs need to go. I'm not naming names, but if you look at any of their threads, they add nothing of value to WSO. It's all fluff to get you to click that link in their signature.

COURSE AND SERVICES Nothing really to add here, other than get some more clients so I can make more money :P

WHAT DO YOU WANT? Reddit has bots that find information for FAQs and posts it in relative threads. This would be helpful for when college kids ask (for the millionth time) if networking is worth it, how to study for interviews, etc. Is something like this possible on WSO?

 

Design are the markup/ buttons worse than before? would it help if users could select their input formats? maybe if you like writing in html you could select that as a default, but if you prefer text markdown, that can be the standard default?

Content Please feel free to flag these and/or just PM me and I'll take a look at them. Honestly it's hard for me to keep up with all of the forum content all the time, so if you see annoying spam (even if it's sneaky spam), please report it.

Course & Services ha, we're trying...it's growing, but steady, not hockey stick :-)

What do you want? That sounds pretty awesome, but also something fairly advanced...it sounds like maybe if the bot sees certain keywords in an OP/thread, then it would automatically make a comment and/or post the FAQ and answer to the FAQ? I'm not on reddit much at all, so if you could give me more detail on this, maybe we could build something similar...

 

WallStreetOasis.com

Design Yes, the markup buttons are a lot better. Excellent job there. I just do not like the editing language and think it's counter-intuitive. That's all.

Content This isn't just random users....this is Certified Users too. The worst part is is that they post their thread and never come back for discussion. It's just blatant blog advertising. Perhaps a solution would be a more robust moderating staff. Honestly, I really do find it impressive that you still come around here to engage with users. I've been a member of many forums, and it really is impressive that the owner of such a large one as WSO still does this.

What do you want? The bots that Reddit uses are fairly diverse. Generally, most operate based on keyword search. For example, if a subreddit has an FAQ that lists the best pizza places in town and someone posts a thread asking for the best pizza places in town, the bot replies with a link to the FAQ section about the best pizza places in town. Or if a user posts a question about a town ordinance, the bot might reply with a summary of the ordinance. Like you said, I imagine this is fairly complex. It's just an idea and a way that would help cut down on the amount of repeated threads and the need to constantly rehash the same answers.

Thanks for the hard work, Patrick.

 

hmm, i like this. Also, noticed on reddit the user data on each posts is really simple / deemphasized...tiny font, only has username and points... wondering if by default we remove user profile images and collapse the industry and status line, but allow it to expand.

So we'd still have the Certified User star, the username, follow link, userpoints rank and date, but font would maybe be smaller and the 2nd row and user image would only appear if you hit a down arrow to the right of the username to expand it.

Could save a lot of vertical space and make the forums much easier to read...exciting

 

Sil hit it pretty much on the head.

Couple of random ideas: School/firm meet ups might drive engagement. If I was still in undergrad this would have been helpful. Case study challenges - IB/PE/RE/Consulting, again might help those in school as well as those lateraling. Post a teaser and 2 weeks later post the solution.

Like the FQA idea, as well as a FQA idea surrounding lifestyle/pay/exits profiling major firms instead of people bumping old threads.

26 Broadway where's your sense of humor?
 

Piggybacking off of this, might be interesting to have some sort of "Discussion" area linked to the Company Database, so the "whats this firms culture like?" and other firm-specific questions are more neatly kept in one place for those interested in a specific firm. Thinking this may help make the company database the first stop for general firm discussion before bringing it to the topic forums) and hopefully cut down on the repetitiveness of some of the major firms. No idea if this is feasible from the development side, just thinking through it now and it may be a big mess to maintain sub-forums on every individual company (maybe just for the major firms?)

Site is great and really clean. Similar to the collapsing comments, I like how SBNation's sites have navigation with the keyboard and highlight unread comments as yellow. Very helpful for when i've read most of a thread and check back in to see what's new (especially given the non-sequential nature of some threads)

Array
 
<span itemprop=name>ai215</span>:
highlight unread comments as yellow. Very helpful for when i've read most of a thread and check back in to see what's new (especially given the non-sequential nature of some threads)
This x 10.

When you go into a thread that has multiple new comments, there is no easy way to tell which ones are new. They aren't grouped or highlighted in any way. Obviously a bigger problem for threads with a large number of comments.

Also, when an SB or MS is thrown your way, it would be nice to have it say which thread it was referencing on the first page instead of having to click multiple times. I think you have something like that for replies, if I'm not mistaken.

Other than that, keep up the good work

 

"Couple of random ideas: School/firm meet ups might drive engagement. If I was still in undergrad this would have been helpful."

THIS +1SB

Just an Undergrad trying to get a job. Something you disagree or dislike about my posts? Let me know by PM'ing me or commenting constructive criticism.
 

yeah we tried that when we had the campus rep program 2010-2015 but even with a dedicated group the meetups were small and infrequent. since then haven't really had anyone at at a university write me to organize any kind of meet up, but i'd be open to the idea if someone wants to host something at their university

WSO Content & Social Media. Follow us: Linkedin, IG, Facebook, Twitter.
 

Feedback from heavy users probably doesn't mean much to your bottom line. For instance, my comment above helps me save time if you make that change, but probably costs you money with little to no discernible ROI.

Because it is important that you are successful and make money for this site to continue, I think you should probably push your paid services (or whatever revenue streams you have) more strongly. I barely even notice the ads for your services. Granted, I get that I'm not your target market, but if you believe in your services, you should feature them more prominently.

Happy that you're collecting feedback, but I hope that you're not taking it as a roadmap. As we all know opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and they all stink. The stinkiest are those that are non-revenue generating opinions.

Best of luck.

 

been meaning to respond to this...I think feedback from heavy users, especially the senior heavy users is incredibly important. It doesn't mean much to our bottom line in the short run, but keeping senior users around, engaged and interested definitely helps us from devolving into college confidential and pure speculation.

I think it means a lot when younger members know that they are getting advice from an actual professional when they see that star next to a username.

In terms of our products and services and featuring them more prominently...I'm not sure I agree. I think rule #1 is keep the user experience top notch for the community. We removed all 3rd party ads now ~2yrs ago and haven't looked back. As a result of focusing more on promoting our resume review and mentor service, we've seen those grow steadily (and they should, the feedback we get on them is consistently awesome).

We have hired a lot more recently and I don't plan on slowing down, but I do agree with what computerized mentioned below. Where we've really fallen short (so far) is in pure content creation. I think that is a function of us being run so lean and not wanting to hire a huge writing staff (on top of all the other jobs that go into a forum), but I think we need to make a better effort here and it's something that I'm focused on in the 2nd half of 2017.

We have continued to host high quality webinars and cases, we now have the podcast, syndication of The Morning Brew, etc...but we can do more.

Stay tuned! Patrick

 

I agree WallStreetOasis.com regarding content creation. If I wasn't working full-time I totally could do this and at least get discussions going. The challenge is IMO that sometimes content is too advanced (i.e. Damodran analysis) which are great but go over the heads of most people.

Or they are too generic such as discussions around a new article however these allow for anyone and everyone to chime in and get involved in discussions.

With this being said what types of content do you hope to see? More thought-provoking analysis or more general discussions around the latest M&A deals and such?

Instead of staffing writers why not perhaps provide perks for writers who contribute posts that attract attention or at least generate lots of responses via post replies?

 
<span itemprop=name>BillBelichick37</span>:

content: I think allowing frequent users like tna, dickfuld, sil, etc. the ability to moderate or outright ban certain users would be great.

Disagree, totally. I mean - I use this site fairly regularly, would you want to give me that power? I am sure that WSO's current controls are just fine as they are. Besides, Flingin' Monkey shit is half the fun. We shouldn't take away our targets.
 

I think a lot of spam gets through the filter so having mods with limited power to pull those threads quickly might be worthwhile

Make Idaho a Semi-Target Again 2016 Not an alumnus of Idaho
 

we had a group of mods in the past like that but decided to work with a tighter knit group for a few reasons.

i would say the spam filter methods are a lot better than they used to be, i see so much less than before, a lot of preventtive measures in place

WSO Content & Social Media. Follow us: Linkedin, IG, Facebook, Twitter.
 

WallStreetOasis.com see below:

DESIGN

No major complaints here although the Search button doesn't yield the results I am hoping for at times so maybe tweaking this feature to generate more accurate results? Especially true for company and interview searches.

CONTENT

My biggest complaint is the herd mentality that develops at times and constant slinging of MS for no reason. I don't care about internet points but I always understood that high SBs equaled a more informed and knowledgeable poster whose posts were worthy of being read.

The spam has decreased so kudos to your team on this as it was becoming annoying at times. Lastly there are posts that are done newsletter style that may not generate much traffic but offer very valuable and well-thought out views so keep these going and encourage the posters to continue.

COURSE AND SERVICES

Maybe see if discounts or specials can be done? I know you guys do this already but it'd be nice if a modeling course could be made a bit cheaper perhaps? I don't know what the "fair" value would be and I understand your need to be profitable to keep the site running so I'll leave this up to you guys.

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

I'd like to see (and this is more on the user) more discussions around deals that have taken place and are in the news or serious finance-related topics being discussed instead of the "Who tie bar should I wear" and other goofy and overdone threads that pop up.

Lastly an intro into formatting and how to embedded graphics or charts in posts would be helpful. I'd like to take my posts to the next level but can never figure out the formatting stuff.

Keep up the great work guys!

 
<span itemprop=name>RedRage</span>:

@WallStreetOasis.com see below:

DESIGN

No major complaints here although the Search button doesn't yield the results I am hoping for at times so maybe tweaking this feature to generate more accurate results? Especially true for company and interview searches.

yeah, this is a constant struggle...I can see why Google needs thousands of engineers for this. There are so many use cases that making search work as expected for how they use and their specific questions is always a unique challenge. Can you give me a few examples of what you were looking for and what you expected to find? PM is fine as well if you dont want to share publicly. (We've done a lot of user tests and that has led us to emphasize more results that have more comments and are higher ranked vs always the highest relevance)
CONTENT

My biggest complaint is the herd mentality that develops at times and constant slinging of MS for no reason. I don't care about internet points but I always understood that high SBs equaled a more informed and knowledgeable poster whose posts were worthy of being read.

The spam has decreased so kudos to your team on this as it was becoming annoying at times. Lastly there are posts that are done newsletter style that may not generate much traffic but offer very valuable and well-thought out views so keep these going and encourage the posters to continue.

Thanks for the spam comment. Yes, we've implemented stricter systems...occasionally new users get banned temporarily as a result, but it keeps the forums much cleaner. As for the MS, I hadn't it noticed it getting out of control and I think if we are in the forum, even if we give great advice, sometime we're going to get hit with fake poo. Crazy world we live in...
COURSE AND SERVICES

Maybe see if discounts or specials can be done? I know you guys do this already but it'd be nice if a modeling course could be made a bit cheaper perhaps? I don't know what the "fair" value would be and I understand your need to be profitable to keep the site running so I'll leave this up to you guys.

Yeah, the interview course packages are already heavily discounted (vs if you buy the video library and company DB distinctly)... the financial modeling training is through Wall Street Prep and you can get a 15% discount through WSO -- if you look at the players here and what is being offered, I think you'll agree that with the discount it's a great deal: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/financial-modeling-training
WHAT DO YOU WANT?

I'd like to see (and this is more on the user) more discussions around deals that have taken place and are in the news or serious finance-related topics being discussed instead of the "Who tie bar should I wear" and other goofy and overdone threads that pop up.

Lastly an intro into formatting and how to embedded graphics or charts in posts would be helpful. I'd like to take my posts to the next level but can never figure out the formatting stuff.

Keep up the great work guys!

Fair point on more deal analysis and intellectual debate...working on bringing someone in for this ASAP. The formatting, hard to have a tutorial of sorts...if you see the little image icon, you can upload and/or link to an image to embed it into your post. See that?

Hope this helps and thanks for the feedback!! Patrick

 

WallStreetOasis.com so I tried a few searches (mostly for companies) and didn't have any issues there so it looks like you guys resolved them so thanks for that.

The one example that was a bit weird is "Cameron International" under Company search...it doesn't get you to the result right away as you have to click through list of names not relevant to what was searched.

However when you search "Cameron" it takes you to the Cameron International name right away. I just thought this was a bit weird but no big deal.

 

Design

Personally I think new FP looks great. Only additional function that may be beneficial would be a preview of the various forums alongside/below the FP'd content. Some sort of second-tier FP content if you will. Maybe something that takes the top 3 - 5 trending, non-FP posts from each forum and displays them under a header on the FP.

Seems like it would free up some resources on the site's end by not having to keep such a close eye on FP-worthy content, increase user interaction on a large section of the site that (at least for me) tends to go unnoticed, and encourage forum-specific posting that are more than just quick answers to interview questions or other similar triviality.

Content

To drive traffic to Video Library, perhaps consider doing video posts / interviews.

Personally, I have never put 2 & 2 together to go to the Video Database when I need help with something - even though I am sure the answers were there.

Also, content in this section could benefit from the type of visual logos used on FP content, rather than the generic monkey/computer currently there.

What Do We Want?

Monkey Shit! - When do we want it? NOW!

Seriously though, this site rocks, I feel like forum content quality is great, and has been on an upward trajectory since I joined a few years ago.

Just had a thought - Ever though of adding tags to Forum Posts/Searches ? It may make for a more navigable forum database, which may be getting to be on the "too big" side of manageable for users (an earmark of success for the site to be sure) especially when asking specific questions.

 

https://www.globalscopepartners.com/about/overview

WSO Global Alliance ("WGA"), a global network of investment bankers. WSO already has a user base. Perhaps to cater to more senior people on the site. Sort of like a membership club to sell wholesale support package for anything to do with investment banking (i.e. group discount on dataroom services, hotel booking, freelance M&A consulting). The key is to establish WSO as a trusted source (not just monkeying around, no pun intended), for senior levels.

So far, WSO has been doing a great job for entry and mid level executives with their job search and career development. WSO is aging and perhaps it is time to cash in on the senior level people. Just a thought.

 

Brilliant.

I wonder exactly how WSO gets its revenues? Just the prep packs?

GoldenCinderblock: "I keep spending all my money on exotic fish so my armor sucks. Is it possible to romance multiple females? I got with the blue chick so far but I am also interested in the electronic chick and the face mask chick."
 

New forum for all matters recruiting / school / studying related and a purge of the IBD forum to keep it job relevant.

Echo the comments above on a) not having to click through to see where you got MS thrown at you and b) some sort of highlighting for unread new messages in a thread.

Would still be excellent if there was a 'theme' toggle to remove the sidebars, logos, links etc for browsing in an open plan office!

You and the team are doing a fantastic job though and it's great to see how far the site has come in the last 5 years! Keep it up.

 

In terms of appearance and design, post quoting/replying can use some improvement. Half the time I can't tell who's replying to who on multi level replies, and quotes within quotes are all jumbled together. Also quoting only the most recent post on a multi reply chain requires navigating a minefield of tags and text in the post edit box to get what you want, which is considerably more frustrating on a phone. I seem to remember these things not being a problem years ago, but with all the site revamps it's gotten noticeably more difficult to follow complex threads in terms of reply layers

 
Going Concern:
In terms of appearance and design, post quoting/replying can use some improvement. Half the time I can't tell who's replying to who on multi level replies, and quotes within quotes are all jumbled together. Also quoting only the most recent post on a multi reply chain requires navigating a minefield of tags and text in the post edit box to get what you want, which is considerably more frustrating on a phone. I seem to remember these things not being a problem years ago, but with all the site revamps it's gotten noticeably more difficult to follow complex threads in terms of reply layers

Going Concern Please check if quote is better now. We are working on quote of quotes. Thanks.

WSO
 
jgsantos:
In terms of appearance and design, post quoting/replying can use some improvement. Half the time I can't tell who's replying to who on multi level replies, and quotes within quotes are all jumbled together. Also quoting only the most recent post on a multi reply chain requires navigating a minefield of tags and text in the post edit box to get what you want, which is considerably more frustrating on a phone. I seem to remember these things not being a problem years ago, but with all the site revamps it's gotten noticeably more difficult to follow complex threads in terms of reply layers

@Going Concern Please check if quote is better now. We are working on quote of quotes. Thanks.

I'm not sure what the difference is. What change was made?

 

I think it is much better than before. Two thoughts I'll offer that I got from another online discussion site (not finance related) which I frequent:

1) The ability to multi-quote. Sometimes if I'm replying to a thread I want to address multiple posts simultaneously in my reply, and I don't think there is an easy way to do that currently. One way that could be implemented is to put little boxes next to each post, and the user can click those boxes to select those posts to include as quotes in their reply

2) The ability to see aggregate SB and MS in a thread. I'm not sure if this is already there and I just missed it. But what I mean is to see the total count of SB and MS that were given in a thread, including the OP and all comments, combined. This is just a good metric to gauge the quality and activity level of a thread

 

not sure if this is possible with our set up & Drupal but what do you guys think of an "infinite scroll" option for viewing content?

eg when you get to the bottom of a post it loads up the next one in the series http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/comey-wrote-memo-saying-trump-urged…

so if you're reading a post in the IB forum it auto-loads the next Ib forum post (after x seconds) once you scroll down to the very bottom

WSO Content & Social Media. Follow us: Linkedin, IG, Facebook, Twitter.
 

I think that idea works well for news, not so well for forum type content. There's probably a lot of threads that individuals aren't interested in - I know I generally have a quick look at the front page and then a skim down the headings of threads in a forum.

Also, given the suggestions above about it being hard to find new posts, I imagine a lot of people quickly scroll down to the bottom of a thread which would be a lot more difficult if it was infinite scroll!

 

still on your profile, but the theme of helping to make the threads easier to read, we decided to make the font of the author and signature and action buttons smaller, remove the avatar and industry and status spelled out (were taking up a 2nd line).

So for comments like this one I'm responding too that are short (like 1 line), the height to content ratio is still not great, but much better than before and I think much easier to read as you scroll. was a tough decision, but I think as you get used to it, you'll see that the content / text of the conversation really is much easier to read/follow (that was the goal).

Your avatar will still be on your profile when anyone clicks through to it.

Thanks, Patrick

 

Just a thought:

It might be nice to have an optional area on your profile where you can give a generic overview of your career progression. So for me, I'd list "No-Name liberal arts school (2012-2016) -> CF internship at F1000 retailer (summer-2015) -> FLDP at F500 A&D company (2016-present)"

Definitely not trying to make this linkedin, but I notice that when someone gives advice, they are generally asked about their career progression. It might be helpful to be able to have the option to list this yourself in as generic terms as you'd like. Heck- Maybe just a small text box on your profile where you can write anything you'd like?

Also: Morning Brew is great. Absolutely love it. I'd prefer if you made it stand out from other threads though- Maybe make it it's own box on the side or top or something maybe something that can be expanded/collapsed on the front page so that you can read it without actually clicking it? And then get rid of the previous brews once a new one comes out.

 

I think WSO is doing just fine, in terms of bringing in new individuals who want to work in finance and folks who are already in the industry. I'm on the trading forum a lot and WSO provided me the chance to mingle to finance peers like myself, so I strongly support keeping WSO alive as long as we can and obviously, this costs money. So I think you should find ways to monetize from this. I don't think to sell banana points is the way to go, though you should still keep this. Courses are great but maybe add something else.

 

ha, yeah, i think we make ~$10-20/yr on WSO credit sales...

Well we have the resume review and mentor services which are growing every year, especially as we have a lot of repeat business / customers once people try it once :-)

But yes, I think forums by their nature are expensive to run and hard to monetize...but we're doing fine. Even though we've grown the team (and expenses) a lot recently, we are still pretty lean. Always open to ideas though!

 

Just a heads up that the bar at the top cuts off the rest of my header, so the words "Interview Prep", "Career Boost", etc., plus my name, avatar, search bar, etc. are only showing the bottoms

Make Idaho a Semi-Target Again 2016 Not an alumnus of Idaho
 

Can we have a fashion forum? Most of my questions pertain to what people are wearing and how they purchase/acquire their wardrobe. Also opportunity for you to advertise shit to us and get us discounts on BB or CT or something

"I did it for me...I liked it...I was good at it. And I was really... I was alive."
 

A few things are out-of-date, don't function, or are inaccessible:

  • Most active 30 is referenced on Monday @mentions and can be accessed via link but there is nowhere on the site that directly links to it now
  • Rank and percentile (when you click on your name/logo in the banner) haven't been updated in ~2 years and should either be culled or updated
  • I think WSO Groups is dead, and you're unable to post companies in the WSO Company Database? If so those should be removed from this list, and regardless getting points for adding companies sounds like massive bananaflation.

WSO should sell merch as well. Would love to see mugs or something I can use at the office. In addition branded "FratLord" bro tanks, Lakers jerseys with Andy Louis or Patrick's name, or maybe @TNA"'s name and number of banana points as the jersey number would be sweet too.

Beyond that, I think physical silver bananas (color, not type of metal) should be sent to people who break like 1k silver bananas or some other insane threshold, but that's just a thoughts. Same could go for physical monkey shit.

Make Idaho a Semi-Target Again 2016 Not an alumnus of Idaho
 

sorry for delay idaho ...as you can see we've been busy :-)

jgsantos pls create new cards for Most active 30 & rank/percentile check...

We removed WSO Groups a LONG time ago since they were rarely active.

Love the idea of some sort of silver banana deal toy we could send out to those that reach 1k silver bananas. :-) AndyLouis , can you look into that and see how much that would cost us? :-)

 

Mine came to the office and I had no idea what it was-- I opened it up and busted up laughing. My colleague whose office is next to mine poked his head around the corner and was like "what is that ... is that a WSO deal toy? Wait, do you spend a lot of time on there?"

NOPE NOTHING TO SEE HERE MOVE ALONG

I'm going to proudly display my SB award in my home office.

"Son, life is hard. But it's harder if you're stupid." - my dad
 

Really appreciative, didn't ever expect you all to ever send anything like this, I've got it on my desk at home.

The packaging though, the way it was set in front of my apartment, I couldn't see any labels other than a tag in French that said Canada.

I spent about a half hour the other day on the phone with my dad and then the local post office, trying to determine if it was a bomb.

After poking it with a broom a few times and flipping it over, I figured it was probably safe to lift up. I then set it on the other side of a brick wall and started opening it with just my hands exposed.

Started laughing out loud when I saw the banana

 

My biggest suggestion would be to add more content creators who can create thought provoking topics & discussions, perhaps more relevant for older users. Eddie, of course, does (did) this very well, but there's only one of him and he doesn't post as frequently these days.

Once you've graduated college threads like 'GS vs MS vs JPM' or 'What tie should I wear to my interview' are just no longer as interesting, but these posts comprise the bulk of the content on a day to day basis. Eventually I think this causes many people, particularly those who are older and long-time users of the site, to shy away from coming back to the site and contributing.

 

yes, for sure...agreed on this 100%. I think we're trying to build up new forms of content that are higher quality (recent podcast, for example), it's really just a question of finding the right people that are willing to be consistent and put in the time.

That's not easy to find, but we need to do better. I will keep pushing on this initiative.

Thanks, Patrick

 

happy you like it! what do you mean "return the sidebar"? do you mean include more blocks by default?

On the sidebar we do show most recent threads...see the block labeled "Forum Topics"? Top posters we have Silver Banana Leaders, but we could add back in others as well. jgsantos do you remember what we had previously and/or why we might have removed those user ones?

 

If you are in an individual thread, such as this one, if you scroll to the top, you can see Popular Content, Career Resources, Forum Topics, etc. on the side bar. It seems like that same side bar is gone if I view an entire subforum, such as if I click the IB or PE links at the top of this page to view those respective subforums. I hope that makes sense. It's just a minor thing. Othewise, like I said, I like it. Definitely happy the avatars returned, haha.

 

no, that's a pretty major change -- and one that doesn't show who is replying to whom which I think is more important to keep things somewhat organized (there are often sub-discussions that evolve, like in this thread)...

BUT you should be getting jumped to new comments automatically (and they are now yellow = easier to see) if you click on any of the "new" links in forum container pages and/or all recent content page: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/tracker

Is that working for you?

We are also thinking of implementing better notification systems that allow anyone to "subscribe" to a thread (similar to bookmark), but then select how they want to get notified when there is a new comment...PM, email or browser notification.

 

Not reading through 89 replies - sorry. But if I were to fix anything, off the top of my head, it would be to create a delisting function for the job board. I haven't used it in some time, but I remember there were jobs still on the board from maybe a year or more ago, making them irrelevant.

If I was running WSO, maybe increase the sales teams to get job postings on there. Not sure if that's a revenue model there, but it certainly could be. It's a win-win for both sides, as someone will find a job, and the hiring manager has a large pool of talent.

 

AndyLouis & WallStreetOasis.com

Not a life-ender, but y'all took away an easy route to "my recent content." I can click on "all recent content" from the community drop down or the real estate forum from the RE link, but there's no easy way to get to "my content."

When I go on WSO, those are the only three things I really check with the off-topic board being a potential 4th. It would be nice for "my recent content" to return or for us to be able to somehow customize our shortcuts.

Commercial Real Estate Developer
 

Interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. That does remind me that the "rank" function under the user drop down menu is still broken though.

I don't use the bookmarks, but I was meaning more the new "forum" shortcuts on the top right instead of specific threads. I really only click on Real Estate, My Recent Content, and All Recent Content links when I'm here, and sometimes the Off Topic forum, so the IB, PE, HF, CO, TR, AM, ER, CF, JOB, BSCH, FASH, TREND, and BEST link shortcuts are wasted on me. It would be cool if I could manually make that only say RE, MY, ALL, and OFF by selecting them in my settings or something.

Commercial Real Estate Developer
 

andy/patrick, I keep getting notifications "comment flagged as abuse content" anytime I try to edit a comment. happened earlier today when I found a typo on a comment I'd made. thinking that one may have actually been flagged, I moved on. happened again just now, was trying to answer a kid's bond question and realized I'd left out a detail.

what gives?

WallStreetOasis.com edit feature works!

 
thebrofessor:
andy/patrick, I keep getting notifications "comment flagged as abuse content" anytime I try to edit a comment. happened earlier today when I found a typo on a comment I'd made. thinking that one may have actually been flagged, I moved on. happened again just now, was trying to answer a kid's bond question and realized I'd left out a detail.

what gives?

Clearly you are an abusive poster. You should probably try to actually contribute to this website instead...

Commercial Real Estate Developer
 

a way to verify people's company/position would add a lot of credibility / color into these forums. maybe WSO can require verification with a company email, or a business card. name would be kept private in the back end, of course. only company and current position would be displayed publicly, as a signature of sorts under each post.

 

Just a thought for WSO, but what if we incorporated a couple more position/industry options (e.g. Leveraged Finance and Real Estate Private Equity). I think this would add some clarification and credibility when reading certain individuals' posts. PE REPE, and I think most of us would benefit from this clarification. I recently saw someone with e PE certified user star get chewed out because he could not properly calculate the NPV. Maybe I am getting off topic here, but I think properly vetting some of the certified users a little further may be necessary

 

A couple of things. First one is a thing my eyes don’t appreciate: You can see the ‘Best Response’ badge above the LinkedIn, Facebook and so on logos. Second one is that the current organisation of threads isn’t top. Let’s say I am reading a discussion where 3 users reply to the OP, then I’ll see the 3 messages 1 level inward. Let’s say now that from the first reply come a number of long comments at level 2, 3, 4 and so on. Once I’m done with that part of the thread, it would be useful to have a collapse function to close that part of the discussion without the need to scroll up to the 1st level comment.

 

WSO strongly lacks information / education in the arena of Trading. I suppose for a good reason...trading is very hard, and most of those who really know how to trade, don't spend time on WSO...and even if they did, they wouldn't reveal their "secret sauce". That said...if you could make an effort to gather training videos (maybe partner with other sources that have good content)...that would be a good place to start.

just google it...you're welcome
 

Without reading all the above, a few comments: 1) I think the UX of the job board could be better. My biggest recommendation from a UX perspective would be to change the layout so when you click a job, you view it on a portion of the screen while remaining on the main job board screen (I believe indeed does this). If the job board is a long-term focus for WSO, adding additional features like more advanced searches/job views/job applications (when applicable) would be great. 2) To my understanding it isn't possible to delete comments/posts, so when X posts something and 'deletes' it after with EDIT----------- it just spams the recent posts board. Also, your link https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/faq-how-do-i-edit-delete-or-move-a-thre… says deleting is possible, but it is not something that exists to my knowledge. 3) For new users who register and immediately post a new topic, maybe it should not appear in recent content until some vetting/SB threshhold/anything. Be it a mandatory designated side-forum or something else. This probably would be difficult to actually implement without harming the community in reality, but the constant troll 'im in the 7th grade can I join Goldman' comments make me bring this up.

“I’m not fat. I’m cultivating mass.”
 

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just google it...you're welcome
 

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