TBH I’ve hated the front/boards page for a long time, as it just looks like a list of in-jokes and incomprehensible stuff, unless you’ve been here for ever. ILM gets broadly equal billing to HTML playground. In the past, people arrived at ILX mostly because they Googled something and it linked to a thread... From there they could orientate themselves.
Google is going to stop this pretty soon, I…
This assumes that one of the goals of the site is to attract new users. Do you think most regular posters would agree with that view?
Agree, and it might not be, I don’t know. Intuitively, in my opinion, it would seem a pity that if someone shows up and they don’t engage simply because they don’t know what it is, but if people actively don’t want new users, then sure, that’s a totally different thing, and fine if that’s the view.
What I do know is that its usage for the last 20 years has declined on average 8% each year, so it doesn’t stand still—roughly an 80% drop between 2005 and 2025.
Just out of interest, are you actually against attracting new users to the board?
No, I’m not against it on principle. But I guess I chafe at decisions being made under a presumption of a goal that I don’t think has been adequately proven to be the consensus of the community. I guess I also worry that changes aimed at attracting new users could have an unwanted side effect of alienating current users and wonder if perhaps retaining users should be considered more of a priority for this particular redesign.
Anyway, going to back to regular ILX now.
I think that’s a good point, re: retention. TBH the new stuff wasn’t based on attracting new users, retaining them or otherwise, it was primarily in making all the same pieces of functionality that already exist, plus a bunch that’s been requested over the years—I just asked that question upthread.