Congratulations and many thanks to Bazza, Marchey, Aunty, and Carl, and friends over at the ChinesePod forum. They have, as I now look, 1,000 members and a great community of smart people. Just looking at the sheer number of posts that the moderators have done, you realize the effort they put into it - Bazza 1,758 posts, Marchey 445 posts, Aunty Sue 641 posts, and Carl 451 posts!
I want users to feel that the forums are free of any influence other than the users themselves, but I do read them and get lots of ideas from them. The question of community is one that I really want to look into this year. You’ll be hearing a lot of the concept of communities of practice over the coming weeks and months.
Keep up the great work, everyone over there. This kind of collaboration is a really great way to enhance learning.
Why not head over and register, if you haven’t done so already?
Ken Carroll
Congratulations forum poddies. The growth has been phenomenal. I was one of the first to set up a forum identity, but my 70+ posts pale in comparison to the “posting machines”. Although I don’t get to post very often, the forum has been an invaluable resource in my learning Chinese. Lots of great discussion, links to other resources and fun too. Thanks !
Thanks Ken.
I think I post too much really, accordingly to the stats I make up 18% of all posts, I must talk to myself alot LOL.
Ken we don’t mind if you and the rest of the team join in the forum, just posting occasionally doesn’t mean you have any influence over it.
The forum has proven its value more than once. After all, when you have a question or a problem, where can you turn to except to your friends? The forum is not only about chit chat but also, even foremost about helping each other with technical matters, helpful resources, moral support, the odd translation job, cheering each other up and on, etc.
As a moderator I find that the forum community has been exceptionally well behaved. The instances where moderating was necessary have been very few. We had some problems with spammers registering (bots and human) but thanks to Bazza’s effort in adding the right ‘mods’ this has never developed being a real problem. I must say that our registering process is quite strict and that Bazza and I are constanly on the lookout for spammers trying to slip through our defences. As a result of this I can vouch for the fact that our membership list is really clean. Ok, not every member will log on every day. But the growing number of members online every day is very encouraging. Also, at any time, there are about 10 guests online for every registered user. This is in itself very promising.
Marc in Belgium
Marc, do you think the spammers are starting to give up trying now? Lately there doesn’t seem to be as many. I just activated another 6 users and not of them appeared to be bots. Unless they’re getting harder to spot.
I think the fact that they can’t added a website link until after approved and are also hidden until activated, makes any bots completely useless, unless they manage to get through all our checks and actually post an advert but those cases they’re usually human spammers.
Maybe they’re starting to think they’re better off finding easier targets.
For the moment it seems that we do have the upper hand. Let’s hope that we can keep it this way.
Marc in Belgium
Hi, I signed up for the premier subscription a week ago and I would LOVE to register to post in the forum, but unfortunately, every time I try, I get the message that my email address is already taken! Surely that can’t be right, my email address is unique to me, isn’t it? Could someone respond to this please and see if I can register. Thanks.
Barry (aka, Jarralad)
The forum has been a great asset to Chinese Pod learners. CP complaints, honest and straight discussion even of the competition. It’s a pretty healthy community.
There are probably many lurkers and maybe even registered users who don’t realize the forum runs independantly from the rest of the Chinese Pod site. It’s also nice that Chinese Pod now hosts the forum, but this has been a double edged sword. Before this was the case, when the CP site went down, we still had a place to go to gripe about it.
Ken, thanks for the mention
As Marc says, the forum has required barely any ‘moderation’ at all - which I think is a testament to the people posting on it.
Bazza, of course, deserves the most credit for the work he has put in (more, probably, than most people might suspect).
Carl
Barry, just checked the userlist and there is a ‘barry’ listed. Does your email start with baz40? If so you should be able to login.
Thanks for the reply Bazza, but I still can’t login. My email does indeed start with baz40, you couldn’t send me a private message and we’ll take it from there, could you?
…and as if to prove my point!
Its this kind of behind-the-scenes troubleshooting that most people won’t see - all of which, Bazza does for free.
Barry, it could be a password problem. I’ll just delete your current profile and you can register again if that’s ok?
A lot of work concerning the forum has been done in the shadows of this website. One of the things that may be annoying to some users is that we set up a very stringent registering procedure that actually requiers a personal approval by one of the administrators (that is Bazza 80% of the time and I try to do the remaining 20%). And believe me this is really necessary! Spammers are very interested in our forum and the last thing that we want is to have the forum swamped with spam. So if you resister patience is the keyword. It usually takes less than 12 hours to get your username approved.
I am learning so much from these short learning modules. They’re entertaining but highly instructive. I love Jenny’s energy and clarity. Thanks and keep up the great job!
I can personally vouch for the hard work that Bazza, Marc, Carl, etc. has poured into the ChinesePod forum! They are phenomenal and ChinesePod couldn’t ask for more dedicated moderators!
Our community continues to grow each day and it is people like Aunty Sue, Fu Da Wei, theabc, Bob Mrotek, happy_hk and the many others that make it such a wonderful and enjoyable forum to go to everyday! Lurkers and poster are always treated well and very much respected, regardless of level.
And to James Theron’s assessment - “the forum has been a great asset to Chinese Pod learners. CP complaints, honest and straight discussion even of the competition. It’s a pretty healthy community.”, I couldn’t agree more!
Checking some random pages on the forum suggests that it is unusable. Something like 50% of the chinese characters shown display either as ? or as a black diamond with ? in the middle.
What causes that? I have no problems viewing characters both here on on sites like zhongwen.com and the dictionary.com translation page.
Richard,
There are some technical problems now due to a migration from server and hence from database. It is an encoding issue on top of a migration issue. The idea is that we get this solved in the coming days, hopefully without too much hassle. Thank you for your patience.
Marc in Belgium
Maybe this wasn’t the best time to promote the forum, I think most new members will be put off by the character problems.
Hi Ken, Jenny, John and Aric,
I was happily surprised that you selected Intellectual Property Rights as the subject du jour.
I am gathering, commenting and sharing information about intellecutal property rights in China, to make it more transparent, since 2005.
Now I refer to Chinesepod.com and put the lesson on my site, so my readers actually can learn to say IPR relevant things in mandarin.
Personally I continue learning mandarin with your lessons. Xiexie nimen.
Cheers,
IP Dragon
http://ipdragon.blogspot.com
Hey look, we’ve got a link to the forum on the front page now, right up top!
Hello world.