CM Crossroads ‘upgrade’
CM Crossroads is pretty much the place to go for CM-related conversation. A few weeks ago they announced an ‘upgrade’ to the site: there would be a few days of down-time, and then things would be back to normal.
In fact, the upgrade (and the site outage) lasted for 10 days. The new site is (I think) running Joomla 1.5, so it’s probably a big improvement behind the scenes. (Patrick Egan, site founder, mentioned that this was an important reason for the upgrade.)
But with all the awkwardness of the upgrade, I’ve had to track new posts by querying for them with “New Posts since last logon” or “New posts in last
As a result, I’ve noticed that there haven’t been many new posts. That’s gradually changing, but in the two or three weeks after the upgrade, there weren’t very many new posts at all. I hope this is because the 10 days of down-time really depressed the user base, but that things will snap back.
But I wonder, because a lot of other sites have user communities that are strongly invested in their site. I can’t imagine SitePoint, for example, ever going down for 10 days. But if they did, there would be 400 posts the first day they were back up, most of them talking about the outage and what happened while the site was down.
There are a couple of alternative explanations. One is that there aren’t that many users at CM Crossroads. This is contrary to the numbers published by the site administration, and definitely contrary to the site’s page ranking, per Google. Another explanation is that nobody cares–that CM specialists aren’t spending that much time participating in their own professional development. Or, maybe it’s a cultural thing: CM folks are using the site for the Journal (and for CM Basics, the other monthly) and not paying attention to the forums. Finally, it could be that the new site is turning users off. If the users are coming back, but being driven away by the new site design, it doesn’t bode well for the future, but it would allow for continued high traffic with few posts.
None of these is particularly palatable, and I don’t really have a clue which, if any, is true. I kind of have to hope that the “temporarily depressed” explanation is the right one, since all the others are worse. But I sure hope that things get back to “normal” soon.