Holy crap! Getting a response here is like a Beaver trying to build a dam in the Sahara!
There was a discussion in another thread about people trying to mimic big name communities like Facebook, My Space, etc. One of the main features of those sites is the ability to allow or disallow access to your profile, ie "making friends" It's a cool concept and the idea works well when you have very large communities. A lot of their ideas can be successfully copied but some of the stuff they do is done because they are trying to deal with massive amounts of traffic!
Even the mods that are being written for Dolphin are starting to look like facebook extensions. The friends mod is one such mod. It is almost exactly like Facebook's and on smaller sites, it makes the site look DEAD! Most people join Facebook because they have friends that are on it and those friends explain how to find them once they join. This interaction leads the new member down a path of understanding on just how the site works. In fact, I would even say that there are very few people that join facebook "just because they found it cruising the net".
Most sites, especially brand new ones, rely on some form of internet advertising and click through's to gain new members. When they show up, they are not there to search out a friend that has given them instructions on how to 'befirend" them, they are there because they performed a search for a topic, or ran across an add and decided to check it out.
They come to the site, go through the process to join and there's really no one to interact with and the site looks dead, and they leave, many of which will never return. In my humble opinion as a backyard site builder with over 100 sites under my belt, if the site appears inactive, (even if it's not), the cruiser will just "click out" in search of greener pastures. Dolphin needs to expand the 'usability quotient" of the script. The best way to do that right out of the box is to make finding and adding friends easy and intuitive.
A couple ideas: (you all feel free to add your own to this list)
- Allow existing members to check a box that will send a friend invitation "automatically" to each new member that joins.
- Present all these friend invitations to each user that joins on a page they have to address and cannot bypass once their membership has been approved. They can either accept or reject the friendship requests.
- Limit how many "auto" friend requests are sent (say, 25). After they are forced to deal with 25 of them, they should fully understand the entire concept of friends and can then go out and find more.
- If more than 25 members have selected "befirend each new member that joins", have the script randomly choose 25 to present to each new member.
It's a basic idea but I think it's a very good one. Even Facebook makes use of the same concept. This idea is the same, the only difference is, it forces the new member to participate. Maybe another good idea would be to add a small "suggested new friends" box on the account page for existing members to further the process of making friends.
I think if someone were to create this mod, it would be a huge success. I cannot write it but I am willing to pay a very fair price for it because I think it will make my sites much more successful from the first day I bring them online.
PS, Y'all need to respond to this because I ain't gonna let it go! It'll just keep coming back over and over and over .... until I get some sort of resolution to it.
