Zoom Call 5.17.22 AR Updates with Ben Kinney
The much-anticipated Zoom call started with the members of the development team offering their updates as to what has been going on behind the scenes with ActiveRain.
Casey Sanders started the call offering how the site is starting to look more uniform.
The sign-up process has been cleaned up and now works more effectively.
They have worked on controlling spammers by placing limits on number per day.
Tagging is being worked on.
There will be a news section coming soon and was explained some by Josiah Ubben.
The new section on news will be limited at the beginning to just real estate related news articles as written by professional journalists. Many of these writers may be from existing news sites familiar to many.
The intent is to offer real estate related news and with that have people coming to ActiveRain to read the articles and maybe also read through some of the blogs as well.
News will have its own tab at the top of the AR screen and will be available to all. A suggestion was offered that the news section might include content from members as submitted through an interview with some of the journalists.
Designs for the new section is still being worked on by the team and will appear very similar to the blog format.
The Product section of AR is under review as to how to freshen up the section and also how, going forward, new products will be presented.
The tone of the call was very positive with the people from the development team and they appreciate the questions and suggestions that are offered. The back and forth is welcome and provides better insight as to what the AR members want out of the site.
A question was presented as to how the Localism resource will be worked upon to provide better SEO for those posts. There are thoughts on how that will be developed but not on front of list at this time.
When Ben Kinney joined the Zoom call, he reinforced much of what the development team had offered and also offered his thoughts on the new, NEWS section that is under development
Ben is pushing for the news feature as he believes it will be a big assist in bringing new readers to the site. He envisions down the road that members will have an opportunity to contribute qualified news articles on real estate in our areas which will give prominence to writers as the source for all things real estate in a given geography.
Ben believes the future of static blogs is not where the trend is going and is working to broaden the exposure by means of the news.
Going forward it will ultimately be required to provide a feature photo with each blog just to be able to post the blog, or at the very least a blog without a feature photo will not be featured. This is to provide uniformity to the view of the blog roll.
A question was offered as to when would it be feasible to properly invite new members and could some of the older tutorials and videos that demonstrated proper blogging be made available for new bloggers .
The team offered to consider an option to the site to report offensive or not-suitable content or even questionable behavior on the blogs or sub sections so as to clean up the wild and wooly parts.
A thought was offered as to the rankings of members that have not posted in years and what should be done with their points or standings. There was discussion as to what should be done with members that have passed and how should they be memorialized.
It was offered that it will be looked at to allow the Leaderboard to maintain the positions in geographic areas of contributing members especially when position on Leaderboard is for active members.
There have been bloggers that offered a great foundation of the platform and are no longer with us but retain a positive position among the membership.
Potentially there could be a possibility of a nationwide meet-up in September in Las Vegas, around 9/29,30. More on that later as it would be in conjunction with another conference that Ben will be attending.
Zoom Call 5.17.22 AR Updates with Ben Kinney
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