Great, lots of good suggestions.
Apologises for the delay in replying, I've been away for a few
Grey1 : Good suggestions, let me respond to each in turn.
(1) The chat room has unfortunately become increasingly less used which is a shame because I think there are significant advantages to having a realtime chatroom - conducting realtime interviews and lectures, something we used to do, but stopped organising a long time ago. Certainly an alternative voice and image based solution like paltalk might help to kick start the room again, I'll need to look at the technical implications but I certainly aim to redevelop the chatroom section of the site in the new year, hopefully coinciding with the new version of the website.
(2) Something like trade ideas would make an excellent addition to the site. My only concern would be whether generating signals for UK stocks would constitute advice under the FSA, and therefore being an unregulated site we would run into difficulties. This is something I intend to investigate both from a procedural and technical viewpoint.
(3) and (4) An article section of the site has been one of the few additions to the site that hasn't yet been implemented, but I do intend to add this at some point in the future. This would be available for both well known personalities and members alike. It's certainly on the top of my to-do list for the beginning of next year.
(5) Again data mining has been another addition that hasn't yet been implemented but has for some time been on the to-do list. days, and spent the last couple trying to catch up.
twiggytwo : I'm going to fix the dow competition later this afternoon, and fix all the scoring too. So the comp should be back to normal by the end of the day. Thanks for reporting this.
The problem has been recently that a lot of my time is taken up with managing and maintaining the site, the forums have unfortunately been a drain of my time too, particularly having to deal with disputes between members, and then there's running the store, maintaining new parts of the site like email etc and the day to day stuff like keeping accounts and replying to email etc, its all time consuming. I appreciate that this is inevitable as the site grows, so obviously we need to look at taking on more resource at some point - but there are obvious common sense considerations that need to be resolved before doing so (not least financial ones).
I certainly only see the site currently fulfilling about 25% of it's potential, there are a lot of improvements on the way I can assure you.
Rognvald : Once again plenty of good suggestions. Let me take them one at a time..
(1) "site must constantly change and develop or will start to fall back-congestion period just now?" - I totally agree. We've managed to achieve a lot in the past 12 months not least establishing ourselves as one of the leading community website in the uk for active traders. This is no small feat, as anyone who starts up a community site (forum based) will tell you. Getting bums on seats is the single most difficult feat to achieve, it took us years! - when you consider the first year we were active back in 2001, the site was largely static. For example in a typical week in 2001 we'd be lucky to attract more than 10 new members, last week we attracted well over a 100. The same goes for posts, we'd be lucky to get over a 100 in a week, last week we got nearer 2000. It's only through constant evolution that the site has got where it is today - we went through 3 versions of the site in less than a year, and since the existing version was launched back in Feb of last year there's been a whole host of new features bolted on: store, email, reviews, gallery, interviews, member choice awards etc. I have no intention of letting the store end there, by this time next year I fully expect every element of the site to have changed and whole new sections added.
(2) "elite trader type sponsorship" - I take it you're referring to the sponsorship of the forums (those great big banners above threads) - to an extent we already do this. We sponsor the forums through the forum home page, but in terms of offering added value to a sponsor, yes we should probably extend this further to the forums themselves. However unlike elite trader, we carry banner advertising in the header of every page - so to put additional advertising on the forums might make commercial sense, but I'm acutely aware of the risks of over-advertising and like most people when I visit a site I don't want to be bamboozled by a ton of advertising, that's the same reason we ban pop-up ads from the site.
(3) "form some strategic partnerships" - We've always been interested in working with new companies and people - and no doubt this will continue more than ever next year as the site becomes increasingly established.
(4) "good range of links etc" - I admit the existing links directory leaves a lot to be desired, and I've already drawn up plans for a much better system of cataloging all the excellent sites that traders would be interested. And at all times I'm thinking of ways that members can participate in this process.
(5) "a place where members can get everything they need without having to rely on a few posters for pointers - need not compromise independence and discussion - encourage promotion of members real knowledge bases" - The forum as it stands today is a goldmine of information, but although we've done our best in the past to create all the forums needed to cover the major topics of trading - I think we need to go further. I believe that this has been mentioned in another thread, but there is a need to draw out of the forums all the best it offers and present it in a concise and manageable way. One idea that we'll be working on next year, is a knowledge base as you suggested that will attempt to draw together from within the site and externally all the information on a given topic, this is no small undertaking, but having laid the framework, it could prove to be one of the most valuable resources on the net.
(6) "articles- publish (and be damned)" - see (3) and (4) above in response to Grey1.
(7) involve some "names" - yes definitely, we already have some interviews with leading names, further involvement on the site would be very welcomed. There are a number of ways this could be achieved and I'll need to give this some more thought.
Please keep those suggestions for improvements coming in -they're never ignored and although you might not see them straight away I keep a record of them all and work through them as best I can.
Thanks.