Lately I am feeling like imechanica is becoming a craigslist for mechanics than a forum. Most recent blogs are simply ads that do not generate any discussion. Neither do questions from people get any reply, not any where near to what it used to be.
The last journal club had about five or so replies and the current one has no comment with two days to end.
Is it just me or does any body else feel the same too? I feel we have to think about how we can have a community here than just a repository of mechanics related stuff.
Re: Is imechanica evolving into mechanics.craigslits?
Thank you very much for expressing your opinion. As you know, users provide all conent of iMechanica, both the posts and the comments. Each individual moderator decides whether he or she promotes a specific post to the front page.
If users feel they would like to see more discussions than job ads, then perhaps moderators can leave the ads in the Job Channel, and promote the posts that are likely to lead to discussion.
But if many users are really interested in job ads, then mixing job ads with other posts may promote the other posts.
Let's hope other people will join the discussion.
In reply to Re: Is imechanica evolving into mechanics.craigslits? by Zhigang Suo
I think the job ads and
I think the job ads and conference are fine, but the journal club topics are too narrow for most people, that might be the reason why there is no many people to reply the post. I think we can have more broad topics and some subtitles for dicussion.
iMech and Craigslist
I guess I see two issues here. I think the job postings are one of the greatest strengths to iMechanica, so I don't think they're at issue, and I'm willing to filter through those on the front page. I think the real question here is "does every blog post make the front page or is there selectivity?" which I believe has been the most difficult part of the growth of this site--some of the "front page" posts are clearly of interest to the broad community, including jobs in mechanics (generally) and conference announcements, where some ("How do I do xxx in Abaqus?") are clearly specific and detailed questions better suited for one of the forums.
Jobs and Conference announcements
<In my opinion, Jobs and Conference announcements should be an integral part of imechanica. I would like to suggest that posts like these may be placed on the still left or right columns (grey background with blue fonts) of the homepage.
By this, interested users will always have updated access to the posts. Moreover, these posts will lessen the heavy traffic on the front page. >
Ashfaq Adnan
Post Doctoral Fellow, Mechanical Engineering
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208
In reply to Jobs and Conference announcements by Ashfaq Adnan
Re: Jobs and Conference announcements
Dear Ashfaq: In the header of iMechanica are the Job Channel and the Conference Channel.
When I typed iMechanica in the Google search box today, the result listed the Job Channel at the top. It seems that job ads need no promotion. Rather, job ads possibly promote other posts.
Why should I comment on other people's post -- round 2
Prompted by this thread of discussion, I looked at the thread, Why should I comment on other people's posts? The thread was initiated by Teng Li over 2 years ago, just a few days after the launch of iMechanica.
Now that we all have more experince. We can try to answer this question again.
You are probably right,
You are probably right, though now such period many work with new projects in a consequence of it not so a lot of time allocate to their discussion.