The Larsen effect thread. (feedback thread)

Hi guys,

Just thought we could kick this about here. Is there anything us mods can do round here to liven things up? Make things better? Improve in anyway?

I really like the fact we are now in the process of turning into a discussion forum for musicians as opposed a "Bands wanted" forum.

I would love to hear opinions from regular posters and anyone else who wants to stick their oar in.

I'm gonna sticky this for a couple of weeks.

Cheers,

Papa S.

mr_angry

Personally, I think it should always keep focus on a bands-wanted system. There's more traffic here than on any other musicians forum I know, and while the success rate might not be particularly high, its re-assuring to think that people are at least reading your ads.

I think Ireland could really do with a musicians database that lists the following:
- Name
- Contact details
- Instruments played
- Influences
- Preferred style
- Casual / professional
- Currently seeking band / not
- Location
- Samples

This is unlikely to work on boards though, without a lot of the information going stale.

raindog.promo

mr_angry wrote: »

Personally, I think it should always keep focus on a bands-wanted system. There's more traffic here than on any other musicians forum I know, and while the success rate might not be particularly high, its re-assuring to think that people are at least reading your ads.

I think Ireland could really do with a musicians database that lists the following:
- Name
- Contact details
- Instruments played
- Influences
- Preferred style
- Casual / professional
- Currently seeking band / not
- Location
- Samples

This is unlikely to work on boards though, without a lot of the information going stale.

I've seen this done on other sites and while a good idea, I don't think it works in practise due to a number of factors, one of the foremost being many musicians' lack of follow through.

(that's not a dig at anyone but honestly, one of the biggest gripes being that people don't respond/reply to PM's and the preferance of many musicians to conduct their business "herbally challenged" means it will end up half arsed, half finished, half baked)

Besides, myspace sites would most likely provide that info if the band/musician had any cop on at all.

What I would like to see is people seeking band members to put up samples online more often.

Perhaps some sort of reviews of forum users samples and maybe a competition every month or so where say 3 or 4 bands/musicians that put up samples would be picked to play at a bands/musicians wanted forum boards bash which would also give a chance to settle the score about those comments that so and so posted about me put a face to names and strenghten the community aspect of the forum.

In regards the forum becoming more of a discussion place as opposed to straight posting of wanted ads, as people become more familiar with each (and I do recognise a fair few of the regular posters names here) other, you may see more bands being formed due to familiarity or people recommending other forum users to jam with so and so because they think they may work well together and so on.

Kudos

That_Guy

Papa Smut wrote: »

Hi guys,

Just thought we could kick this about here. Is there anything us mods can do round here to liven things up? Make things better? Improve in anyway?

I don't think it's really the mods that need to do anything. You're doing a good job from what I can see.

It's a very busy forum with a lot of threads starting every day but I think posters starting threads could help make their posts that bit more informative. It'll help themselves and musicians as both parties will know automatically where they stand.

A lot of posters do give lots of information and post links to sample music but I've opened a lot of threads and it's usually posts like:

Starting a band. Need a drummer and bassist. We're in Dublin

with no real information given. It involves a lot of PM's trying to figure out what age the band members are, what music they play, what they hope to achieve etc. Sometimes I've sent 5 or 6 PM's to try and establish what type of band the OP was in and it nearly always ended up being a waste of my time.

Just a little more information from posters would be great.

Malice

Great idea for a thread, it's one I thought about putting up myself

That_Guy wrote: »

Just a little more information from posters would be great.

That was something we tried to address with the template but sadly I've seen very few people use it. Lack of information is something that annoys me and I usually encourage people to expand on their posts if fairly important information like their location is missing. I realise Boards is probably fairly Dublin-centric but for those of us who aren't anywhere near Dublin it's annoying to read a suitable ad, make contact, arrange to meet up and then realise that the interested parties are a few hours drive from each other.

drumdrum

I agree with posters not putting up enough info. Tis annoying to check out a band and find out that they live 200 miles away or something!


Ive noticed myself recently that due to the astronomical popularity of boards, threads tend to get pushed back pages often. There is currently no filter as to what people are looking for, wether that be a bassist, drummer, ...20ft monkey whatever! I know there is a search, but to be honest, Ive used that and I didnt find it too user friendly (or effective TBH) to use. Maybe boards could get it google powered to improve effectiveness?

Just an idea, but what if you subdivided the "bands "& musicians" thread into, say, one general forum each for guitar, bass, singer, drums, keys, other, general discussion or something like that?
It would make looking for people easier (IMO). Instead of going to the current forum and getting everything plonked right in front of you, the viewer would go "ok, Im looking for a drummer, so I will go to the drummer forum". The same forum could be used for people looking for bands too, so that there aren't too many subcategories and the community doesn't get separated too much.

I dont know if the mods here have the administrative power on boards to do this or not, but hey!....its just an idea after all!

seanwhite20

What about moving the musicians wanted/available to adverts with a template there that has to be followed.and then using this as a discussion page??

Malice

drumdrum wrote: »

I agree with posters not putting up enough info. Tis annoying to check out a band and find out that they live 200 miles away or something!


Ive noticed myself recently that due to the astronomical popularity of boards, threads tend to get pushed back pages often. There is currently no filter as to what people are looking for, wether that be a bassist, drummer, ...20ft monkey whatever! I know there is a search, but to be honest, Ive used that and I didnt find it too user friendly (or effective TBH) to use. Maybe boards could get it google powered to improve effectiveness?

Just an idea, but what if you subdivided the "bands "& musicians" thread into, say, one general forum each for guitar, bass, singer, drums, keys, other, general discussion or something like that?
It would make looking for people easier (IMO). Instead of going to the current forum and getting everything plonked right in front of you, the viewer would go "ok, Im looking for a drummer, so I will go to the drummer forum". The same forum could be used for people looking for bands too, so that there aren't too many subcategories and the community doesn't get separated too much.

I dont know if the mods here have the administrative power on boards to do this or not, but hey!....its just an idea after all!

There's a few points worth addressing in that post, hopefully I get them all. The forum search facility is a bit difficult to use but I don't think using a Google search would make much difference (I am assuming you mean something like what's on the front page of the site at the moment).

Adding a filter is something that was discussed before and maybe if there's a solid consensus of what it would contain then we could look into implementing it. For anyone who doesn't know what I mean by a filter, have a look at the Software Development forum. Between the announcement(s) and the forum threads there are a set of dropdown lists. The first one allows thread prefixes to be set so where that forum has "Solved" and "Noob" we could have "Guitar", "Bass" etc. Straight away it can be seen that there are a lot of potential prefixes that could be used, not to mention the potential difficulty of distinguishing between positions wanted and positions available.

I definitely wouldn't go down the route of sub-dividing the forum. It's hard enough getting posters to adhere to existing forum charters without having to ensure they post in the correct place as well. The moderation workload would increase enormously.

As for threads getting lost, a simple bump every day will keep it on the first couple of pages.

seanwhite20 wrote: »

What about moving the musicians wanted/available to adverts with a template there that has to be followed.and then using this as a discussion page??

I'm not that familiar with adverts.ie so I don't really know much about how it works. I think moving the focus to there rather than keeping it here wouldn't be a good idea.

The template idea originally came from the Help Wanted section of http://www.gamedev.net and I know that it is now mandatory for posters to use it. If someone posts up a thread and doesn't use the template, the thread will get deleted after a while. I still think that's a little harsh but maybe I'm in the minority?

Dord

The main suggestion I have can't really be implemented on this forum. It involves a lot of musicians in Ireland getting a healthy dose of "copthefookon".

I like this new ad format that was brought in a few months ago, and it really should be mandatory.

Only other suggestion I had is for some sort of Bands & Musicians beers or meetup. It's always nice to get to know other boardsies and especially musicians. The most important part is that it would help people in terms of networking and finding new bands.

miju

seanwhite20 wrote: »

What about moving the musicians wanted/available to adverts with a template there that has to be followed.and then using this as a discussion page??

We could always propose to the admins a setting up of a sub-forum for bands wanted / offered etc.

Dord wrote: »

Only other suggestion I had is for some sort of Bands & Musicians beers or meetup. It's always nice to get to know other boardsies and especially musicians. The most important part is that it would help people in terms of networking and finding new bands.

I've been thinking the same thing actually and have started putting together a little something that I will expand on once I have all details finalised / discussed with other mods

pauliewallie

the meet up for beers trick sounds like a splendid proposal

louloumc89

Hey, I'm not sure if this is the right thread to post this in. But I was looking at the venue list in the sticky for Band/Musicians resources. It's all just venues in Dublin and then one heavy metal punk venue in Galway. Perhaps you should look into other venues in Ireland.

For example the two main places for bands in Limerick are

Dolans (Warehouse, upstairs venue, plus pub all do live music) -
Contact Seany 061 314 483

and

Baker Place - Contact Shane - 061 418414

But it would be handy for bands planning little tours around Ireland.

gdr

m

Dord

miju wrote: »

I've been thinking the same thing actually and have started putting together a little something that I will expand on once I have all details finalised / discussed with other mods

Anything ever happen with this?

Hey lads, I'm gonna close this next Monday, so any other ideas get them in quick!