Pal wrote: It was this quiet during the previous long weekend too ...
Shall we kick start a weekly contest and have a prize for the member with the most posts? Thoughts?
Strangely, I personally didn't encounter the MySQLi error, not even once.
...
Yup, I agree. The new members are not contributing like the old regulars which is a pity
New members should stay in the forum and participate more instead of asking question and leave ....
A problem that might bring is that is that it would encourage quantity over quality. And quality is what is going to see people returning.
There is another forum I use (a financial one) where you can 'Recommend' others writer's posts. The users name/avatar gets stars and mini-trophies (like earning medals) the more they are Recommended. You can also 'Favourite' someone, and they can get another medal and vie to be in the 'Top Favourites' list. And so on. But it can alter how some people write... into an unnecessarily populist and flamboyant way, 'playing to the audience' to maintain their rankings/medals, rather than focusing on content with value. - So I conclude that approach adds little value.
It'd be interesting to understand the approach and relative performance of the 'other forum' for SG expats. As I recall they require a new members first 5 posts to go via a pre-approval queue, and that keeps out almost all spam. (That said quite a lot of what
is posted is pretty 'out there'). I can see that could also be a bit off-putting as newbies tend to have questions, and they seek an answer ASAP. Having those questions held up somewhere in an invisible queue is not ideal.
What other fora are there, re: expatting to and in Singapore? What is their approach, and audience size?
I'm packing up and reposting elsewhere in a while and was looking at what expat-type discussion groups that country has. As a newbie I have the usual macro-type 1.01 newbie questions. The only one I could find is called 'InterNations' [
http://www.internations.org/]. It turns out they are German based, but they have sub-fora for all the main countries, sub-sub-fora for cities etc. I've signed up but haven't used it yet; it'll be interesting to see how they go about things. I'll be sure to 'feedbacks' anything of potential value I find.
IIRC only one other person has mentioned the MYSQLI error, so I suspect it must be browser specific. Maybe I'll try writing to this forum via Firefox for a week, rather than Opera and see if that resolves the error for me. It's weird though, sometimes I get it on every post, and then at other times not for days.
It's a good point re: the back-to-back long weekends, I'd not really registered that fact as I don't work according to the SGn calendar, (or even clock - sigh). That's going to have some impact, perhaps not quite on the scale of the mass exodus during JPnese Golden Week, but it's sure to be having an impact on visit/post count. Well fingers crossed.
We keep reading about tightening FT visa quotas and stuff, ... rents are meant to be easing suggesting dropping demand, it could well be that there are simply less people getting posted here. And as the hurdles to get here rise, the kind of people moving here are more experienced/older, and less of the kind of people who hang out on the internet.
- FWIW I think the level of moderation here is good. I've been on sites that have little, and that's off-putting. And then I've been on sites where it is over-moderated (IMO), condescending and 'nannying'. Example: I've just had a post deleted from the 'gongs+trophies' site I referred to above, and it was a long and considered post, and it was deleted on the basis that 'The post to which you were replying was deleted, so we deleted your reply'. In fact when that happens they often delete the entire thread, and you're just left wondering why you bother. And that last instance has decided it for me, I can't be bothered any more. And rather mourning that, as I've posted there for maaaaany years, I realise that pretty much all the useful info I glean there, I can source elsewhere. Perhaps this is where the internet is these days, there's so many resources, that getting people to stick around long-term is increasingly difficult...
ps. edit/add. I'm adding this via Firefox, and I'll use FF for a week+/more, and try and determine if the MYSQLI error is browser specific. FWIW If I don't or forget to revert on this point, you can probably conclude the issue lies in using Opera as a browser on this forum.