September 26, 2016 6:22 AM EDT
Honestly...I'm not sure, I wanted to say Social Engine immediately, I personally have 0 problems with it at the moment, I mean, a lot of my discussions actually kept their pictures, and the few that didn't took me...maybe 10 minutes each to fix, I I mean, my build design was accidentally made so that it was pretty much the same no matter where I post it. (Google Docs, Word Doc, Ning, SE, whatever it works with minimal effort)
But...then I look at activity and honestly it just seems like people don't want to be here. II don't have the analytics, which I've been told are rather promising but I'm always more for visual, physical activity and I dunno if it's just SE's kind of awkward ways it handles discussions and groups, or if there's been a rapid fall in activity but I really don't see activity like I used to on Ning. It's not rare to have an hour, or a couple hours with literally no activity, and when there is activity it seems...well quite brief. That just wasn't something I ever really recall dealing with on Ning, I remember at the very least someone would post a picture and it'd be quite rare to have such long gaps with nothing happening, usually only on big holidays or when we were moving.
So I'm going to do an exercise that usually helps me (decide what pizza I should get :P), the Pros and Cons of each option.
Going Back to Ning - Pros
- It's familiar
- We'd have a majority of our content, and it would all be in perfect condition (well near-perfect)
- We don't need to mass install modules to make it work, Ning...more or less works with what we want it to do perfectly.
Going Back to Ning - Cons
- We'd have to deal with 500 errors, so far there haven't really been any site-wide errors on SE.
- Ning could go down, possibly without warning.
- The cost is pretty massive, $1440 a year is a fair bit of money... I doubt it's something we could afford at the moment, so we'd either need to see a lot more donations, or ads...
Staying on Social Engine - Pros
- Its cheaper
- It might...might be better in the long run than Ning was.
Staying on Social Engine - Cons
- It's going to take a long time to make it work for us, if we can.
- We're losing members who can't really put in the time to learn a new site/are having trouble with their content/whatever...The important thing is that the site is a lot of extra work for some people, where Ning would make it a lot easier for them to be around.
- It's harder to navigate SE, the way groups are handled right now, simply makes it harder for anyone to get around.
- I won't pretend that I've put all that much effort into it as a whole, there are people who've spent much more time than me on helping sort out the site (Albino's CB likes copying is one thing, not to mention the Admins putting in their work) and from what I've seen it's simply an insane amount of work. As I said, I've barely put any time in, and I could easily rack up 5 hours in CB alone helping out with archiving, which is nothing like what the others have done. Putting in the time to fix this site up, is simply a lot of effort
- Photos...is honestly a mess, I dunno if it's fixable, but the Photos section just seems like it's going to be a mess, everything is posted in albums, even photos you send via messages, that can be private, but it just creates a very cluttered system. It's difficult to move them around using the text editor, a pain to upload them to the site (what used to take me...like 3 seconds now takes me a couple minutes), and it just generally is difficult.
My problem, is that I can't think of many positives to staying here, at least with Ning I could list a roughly equal amount of Pros and Cons, but for Social Engine...Well it's just a lot of current Cons.
Down the line, sure I can see Pros, but the amount of work that I see being needed to get to those Pros is simply...well I'm not sure if it's worth it. The problem I have is simply that we can't know for sure if SE will work for us, and at the very least it's going to take a long time to really know. What if we spend the next year here, putting in hours upon hours of work to just make it bearable to stay, only to end up with us figuring out that it won't do what we really want it to do. On the flip side, we don't know if Ning will be a long-term investment, we could move back, only to find out that Ning's being shut down within a week.
To me there's no easy answer, Social Engine requires waiting and a shit tonne of work, and it might work out, but it might not. In the meantime, there are people who've left because Social Engine's shit at the moment, there are people who won't end up fixing their content (for CB this can be as good as losing them for some builds), there are people who aren't going to be active because of how Social Engine works. That isn't a problem that Ning will have... Which is where I get twisted up.
I dunno, I could go on in a circle for weeks and still not know the answer... To finish up my (I'm sure predictably) long comment, my main concern now is that in the process of making SE better than Ning, we lose too many active members to really function properly, I can't predict the future so I don't know if that concern is justified, but I think there are enough (minor) issues that would prevent people from becoming as interested here, or just stop them from wanting to be here.
