coder27 wrote:
According to the book author, Element14 is doing a terrific job:
http://www.feverbee.com/2012/05/key-lessons-from-a-terrific-branded-online-community.html
I think element14 owes a lot to RasPi and its Foundation. I joined element14 on RasPi Launch Day 29 Feb 2012 when raspberrypi.org locked their site so they wouldn't be overwhelmed with traffic. There was lots of unsatisfied interest in RasPi and lots of unanswered questions, so a number of us who had been following RasPi saw a need to answer the easy questions and direct people to the RasPi Wiki for more details. When RasPi came back, cranky admins and moderators had short fuses and a lot of people got banned from there. I sympathize because they were being overwhelmed, but I think it's generally better to get a good night's sleep and answer questions tomorrow than to snap at someone today. OTOH, different people have different approaches to life. Banned people who still had questions to ask and things to say gravitated here, and some became some of our top contributors.
Then there were all sorts of delivery problems, and RasPi told everybody to talk to the distributors rather than have RasPi get definitive answers and post summaries. Fine, that moved a lot of traffic here, and people discovered there were people who knew what they were talking about and you could talk freely about issues here without being banned.
Then there were problems with LAN chips overheating, which RasPi insisted couldn't happen in spite of evidence that was developed here. So that gave element14 credibility. Just mentioning the issues at RasPi would likely get you banned.
So yeah -- element14 did a terrific job with RasPi by just providing a good forum where people could discuss things freely, and while we've had occasional trolls the moderators here have only had to intervene occasionally. Perhaps we're just lucky that people here are nice and show respect to the opinions of others even when the discussions get intense.
And now RasPi has removed the link to the RasPi Wiki from their front page. So we'll probably get even more traffic here. I've always thought that answering questions on forums is great for the short run, but at some point interested parties need to update a Wiki for long run support or they'll end up answering the same FAQs over and over.
