Why hiding all member releases?

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1

Hey guys,

I have been wondering for a long time why the member releases and listening booth are hidden from visitors who are not logged in.
Imho that serves no purpose but has extremely negative effects for members as well as for the site itself:

  1. release visibility. member releases can only get found by people who made an account and are logged in. even when people made an account on the site but are not logged in, they don’t see any releases. this reduces visibility for all releases of all members.
  2. evidence for site activity and reduction of circle-jerk aspects. potential users come here and see only a part of the activity in general since a lot is happening related to releases and WIPs. hiding all that activity from potential new members does make it look much slower and private than it is.
  3. I guess it also affects visibility in search engines?

Just a thought. Well, make that a recurring thought.

Cheers
Meta

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Thanks for pointing this out - i wish admin/mod changes it.

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3

Maybe it’ll prevent idmf from becoming a 404 page not found.

Will spam increase ok…Maybe…
But trade off is increased traffic and Maybe a turnaround for the forum.

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Yeah I think it’s a good idea.

Lots and lots of keywords related to mixing and production in general in all the feedback, which are things people are most likely to arrive at this forum at.

Also, the apparent activity to potential users is really important. There’s a lot of research on the social influence of statistics and numbers to back this up.

I think that there would be more spam is a null-point, and should not counter into a decision, since it would happen anyway if more users just happened to find the forum and posted more stuff.

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Heard. I’ll take it to the backroom. I don’t know why we set it up that way in the first place. Perhaps a default setting.

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6

So, did I fix it?

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Yes, thank you! Member Releases section is visible for me now when not logged in! LB is still hidden, but that makes more sense I guess - I personally often deleted the WIPs I posted there after a while. Thanks again! :smiley:

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Cool. Not that it matters what we have always done but I don’t think the LB has ever been visible to non members

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Always thought it didn’t make much sense to have LB private if the staff isn’t acting as A&R shaping up w.i.p.'s they want to release.

It’s hard enough to get the community involved in responding to a w.i.p. let alone the staff, so to cut off the possible random person visiting always seemed a bit out of place.

Glad to know that you lot have reconsidered this.

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Hello good people,
I was going to post an IDM tune I made here, but the strict rules won’t let me do it.
I wonder if you should ease them up a bit.

Chris

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We are discussing opening up the LB. Hold tight.

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I would drop the “member releases” section and switch up the rules for the LB and make it all much simpler.

Let people post whatever music links they like in the LB. Listening Booth for anything listenable. (There’s even a case to be made for putting the netlabel releases inside that as a subsection, but I digress.)
Nobody ever seemed to understand that “member releases” was supposed to be for IDMf member’s own personal releases, wherever they are on the net and released by whatever means. It was supposed to be the pre-designated graffiti wall for your IDMf link spam.

The LB was hidden because it was supposed to be for feedback on WIPs and so on, it even tells you this n the homepage. Unfinished music that people wanted help with, without letting the general public have access to it yet because unfinished.

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13

I still write my responses based on the differences between LB and member releases - if something is posted in the LB, I start with the intention to provide (hopefully helpful) feedback, for releases I just listen and maybe comment if I really like something without commenting on stuff that could be improved. I think the two sections still make sense, even if the LB is going public, but I have no strong feelings about it, since people can write if they want constructive feedback or not…

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