New site – what do you think?
Dear songwriters,
Welcome to our new virtual home. We’d appreciate it if you’d let us know your thoughts on this site, particularly things like…
- Previous SWF-ers – does the site sum up the experience fairly/accurately?
- Songwriters who’ve never been to SWF – does the site answer all the questions you have as a potential visitor?
- Songwriters worldwide – if you’re not planning to visit the Festival, but want to stay part of the SWF online community, what’s working well here, and what would you like to see more of?
Please comment on this post to leave your replies. Looking forward to seeing some of you at SWF09!
hello all. I’m jason from 2008 song festival.
much more professional, smart looking site now. well done. shame the old forum is gone, used it now & then.
anyhow, love the site. post up soon what is the main artist catch for this year,please? will it be very folk-lead again this year?
I hope u do the course so it starts off with computer tech. and garageband on 1st-2nd day, cause the computers opened up so many old timers creatively, it was great fun being in that computer room with all the established folky-types i met messing around on the AppleMacs.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Song Festival, &hope this year is a great success.
May come along, depends on few things, but once again Love the Site, and hope all u other songwriters out their are ticking over nicely in your creativity. And if not, and u r local to Bristol, come join us at http://www.bristolsongwriters-circle.com to help you.
J
Early days, not sure about it yet. Am I getting old..?
I think I was just taken aback by the old forums disappearing. I’m sure I’ll be fine when I get used to it.
I think the site as a whole is better structured and easy to navigate, but the chatter feature is such a change from the old forums (and there’s not much on it yet) that it feels a bit alien so far.
Who’s going to be the first to post lyrics on the new site then…?
Mike
A couple of questions:
Are you going to compartmentalise the chatter section? If not, it’s going to be harder to follow a conversation over specifics, I think?
Erm …. that’s it for questions!
Layout is light and easy to use, and once i’m used to it, i’m sure it will be fine!!
All the best
Barry
Hi Joe,
I’m wondering if there is somewhere we can access an archive of the forum that’s just been shut down. I hadn’t been posting much recently, but there are a lot of posts by myself and others, some of which it would be useful to return to.
I don’t know why the previous forum wasn’t used as much it could have been. It perhaps had to get over a certain threshold before it took off. I certainly wrote a hell of a lot of words on there when I was posting regularly…usually I was giving more critiques than I was getting….and in general I’ve felt I got better feedback from collaborating, face to face contact, and performing. I know my tendency when I got critiques was to defend my songs vigorously. This never meant that I didn’t take critiques seriously, and often led to changes later if not sooner. I know you personally spent time critiquing songs, which is obviously time consuming. There weren’t any other UKSF staff getting involved that I was aware of.
To be honest I can’t see myself using this chat section at the moment. The previous forum, though not well used recently, was well laid out and fairly easy to get around. I kept going back even if I wasn’t posting. It didn’t feel like it was part of UKSF though, which this site does. Like Barry says it would help if there were specific sections for topics.
Perhaps not much help, but all the best with the changes.
Nice layout.
No way to add start a new post though? Am I missing something?
So in WordPress you folks at SWF would need to change in the Users -> Authors and Users SubPanel our ‘Roles’ to be ‘Contributors’ and not just ‘Subscribers’ and then we would be able to add new posts … We would then be able to add new posts and edit them (but not edit or delete other people’s posts)
Hi Edwin,
Thanks for the comment. Yes, we’re aware that the site does not currently allow users to add new posts, and that the ‘contributors’ option would enable it. Currently, though, we aren’t technically able to restrict posts to a single category (i.e. ‘Chatter’) meaning it would be possible for people to add a post in the ‘Featured’ and ‘Video’ categories which would potentially risk some damage to the homepage layout if contributors checked the wrong category by mistake. We’re working on some code for category privileges – watch this space.
Admin team
We’ve given a few select contributors ‘author’ privileges to enable you to create your own messages. For now, we’ve chosen people we actually know IRL – i.e. previous SWF visitors. We’re still tweaking how we handle categories, so for now could you please only post in the default ‘Chatter’ category. With that one proviso, please do post anything you like – including embeddded YouTube code, pics, hyperlinks etc.
If you find you can’t write new posts, it’s because you don’t yet have an Author account. If you’d like to be able to post in the Chatter category, please just reply to this message with a request, and we’ll be happy to upgrade you.
This is a bit of an experiment to see what the demand is – we’ll come up with a more robust solution over the coming weeks.
Site admin team
Hello Joe and co.
I like the new site, but miss the forum – agree with Barry it would be good to compartmentsalise the “chatter” section
All the best
Andy Brice
I’m testing to see if I can post now
OK. I seem to be able to post again. Could you say how we can start new threads? I can’t see how. I’m assuming I can get “authorship privileges” having posted more than anyone (if not much recently) on the previous forum. (Mostly under the name of potatoman). And I’ve been to the festival. If I can post threads, it’s not clear how .
I’m asking here because my attempts at following the “contact us” links have not led to any contact.
Plus, I would still be interested (I asked above) to know if there is an archive where I can access all the posts from the previous forum. I committed many hours of time and many thousands of words to that, and it would be a shame if our perusings were lost in the ether.
The forum even if it wasn’t used as much as was hoped, is a good place to advertise your wares, apart from being a potentially useful resource for songwriters. If forum members start to feel like second class citizens then it can reflect badly on UKSF as a whole (this is even happening in some ways to huge institutions such as the BBC). Better, from everyone’s point of view I feel, to have no forum at all, than a half-hearted attempt at one. Sorry if this sounds overly critical, but it looks like that could be the way it’s heading if you’re not careful.
Many thanks for the feedback and suggestions, hikersong. You can post (in the ‘Chatter’ category) via your dashboard using the ’site admin’ at the bottom of the right-hand column.
We’re trying this new comments-based system at the moment, and we want to find out what people think of it. If there is demand for something closer to the old forum (as this feedback seems to suggest) then we’ll explore that further.
Joe, Simon & the admin team
I sort of understand your attempts to give it a different approach…it might have been polite to raise the possible changes on the old forum first however.
I do think somethings about this new forum (apart from it’s usability) are good:
1) I think that the chance to talk about songwriting in general might attract more users…as opposed to the focus on the previous forum of putting songs up for critique.
I don’t know whether it is easy to get a positive critique enviroment without some face to face contact…without some sort of relationship with the folk who are critiquing. I speak as someone who gave a lot of critiques on site…and as someone who got defensive about some of the critiques recieved;-)
I get critiques on a one on one level in other places, and they proved to be more helpful, and easier to digest than the “from a distance” impact of the forum. Maybe it’s a british thing!
Anyway, I feel this forum could be more useful as a place to talk about songwriting in general rather using it for the nitty gritty of song critiquing. Others might feel differently of course.
2) I do like the fact that this forum feels potentially more connected to the UKSF in it’s present format. However, for it really to feel part of that scene staff members, and possibly resident students, need to be getting involved in the forum on a regular basis. Maybe you could persuade some of the “known” names that you are connected with to get involved. I realise that it can be a very vulnerable enviroment, where some people will start to get lippy…but hey … for everyone of them there are 5 (?) who are generally wanting to discuss and grow in their writing. Even if they are pretty defensive in the process!
I appreciate the attempts to get it right that you are making. I don’t think that you are far off the mark…if you can return to the usability of the old forum and include a more direct involvement from UKSF tutors.
Hikersong wrote:
“having posted more than anyone…on the previous forum”
Hmm, well, not quite, some of us were there both at the beginning and at the end.
Anyway, I share the annoyance at all the old posts being autocratically trashed, given the support that some of us lent the old forum in the last four and a half years.
No forewarning, acknowledgment or understanding of the point either.
Presumably, all of these posts will soon be trashed as well?
“Hmm, well, not quite, some of us were there both at the beginning and at the end.”
Sorry Murray. Wasn’t trying to get any glory…just making a point. But you did write “King of the Forum” about me;-)
Hi,
This is Andy Pearce. I attended SWF’07. I wish I’d had a couple of days notice before the old site was closed, just to take copies of my own lyrics and comments posted. This site, is also good, and there are some interesting things I’ve read here.
Hey Andy – old site is now back – see the ‘forum’ tab above.
Thank you, mr admin, for doing this – I appreciate. I don’t suppose there’s a way to change the userid on the forum now? Its not really important, I just thought I’d change mine to the same as this user id; Andy117
Done.
http://www.uksongwritingfestival.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=196
Thank you!