Chester Zoo Chester News Threads Announcement and Guidance

[Zia]

To be honest I don't understand the want to splinter off conversations. Personally I like a rambly thread with a variety of topics and good conversation - it is a chat forum after all - but maybe that's just me and it is not a big issue.

Here is a thought though - if the goal is to create at least one thread that is easily searched and an accessible resource specifically for news, why not have a thread for this maintained by specific individuals (mods or member volunteers)?

I don't even know if it is possible to set up posting permissions in this way - but a (pinned?) Chester News post maintained ONLY by a couple of people who monitor the zoos own PR, lift notable reports out of the member discussion thread, link to the inevitable 'offshoot' conversations etc would be a much less onerous / more satisfying task than mods perpetually moving member posts around. All posts in the News thread could end with a "Discuss this here" link to the discussion thread to direct people to the right spot.

The reports & discussion thread could then be a bit more informal without members having to worry about where they are supposed to be posting.

 

[FunkyGibbon]

I was careful with my example. "I went to the zoo today; the bongos are off-show but saw a baby elephant being born." Your application of the guidelines is that such a post should be in reports, but the guidelines state reports are "...for minor news, pretty much anything you have noticed when you visit the zoo." The key being "minor news". I doubt most users would think that an elephant birth was minor news. Major news is "...news which can be linked to, i.e. from the zoo's website, from social media or from other news sources." In this example it may not be possible as news takes time to release. A day later however when it's all over the Internet... I think we can all understand why there's some confusion.

I don't really want to debate this point because we both agree that the system hasn't worked, but since we're here:

I can see why changes are being made but one question what about births, some are reported here before they are on social media for example the birth of a Sumatran orangutan which is very significant wasn't reported by the zoo for a few days but we all knew about it thanks to those who visited the zoo so which thread would that information be put into just for future reference?

For simplicity, and clarity, in that example it would be reported in the second thread, Reports, until the zoo (or other body) releases the information, at which point it would be also posted into Headline News.

That specific example was immediately raised and dealt with in this thread; it is a bit of an intuitive loophole in the current system but if people wanted it the information was right here to be read. Again, I think it is optimistic to think that they would, and I'm not criticising people at all for not doing so. The hope was rather that over a few months people would learn through example when posts got moved with notifications explaining why. The vast majority of cases of stuff being in the wrong thread were more 'blatant'; and indicated more that people were oblivious to a system rather confused by it.

It's hard to win, but forum activity has declined. There will be a number of factors, but perhaps the guidelines introduced this year are partly responsible. From the numbers above: 2016 ~1,380 posts, 2017 ~2,710 posts, 2018 ~1,980 posts. 2019 to-date ~788 posts, which if the average continues would put is at approximately 995 for the year.

The guidelines were introduced two years ago, so we can see that although they coincide with a drop from 2,710 to 1,980, they don't explain at all the drop from 1,980 to (predicted) 995. If you look at some of the charts in Sim's excellent Stats thread you can see that relatively significant changes to overall post counts have happened on ZooChat in the past three years, making it very hard to isolate what has happened in the Chester threads.