We are becoming a joke...

[Pesho]

It's like nobody is actually looking at the front page. The commit messages are there, the fundraising counter and news is there, the newsletter is there... What's the problem exactly? Where is this misconception of there being no activity coming from exactly?

[EmuandCo]

From the fact that there are not enough newsletters....

[Pesho]

From the fact that there are not enough newsletters....

If there isn't anything exciting to write about at a given point in time, does that mean things will need to be embellished for the sake of having a newsletter more often? Or there are interesting stuff going on, but nobody has enough time to write about it?

[EmuandCo]

Believe me. Where there are news, then there's a newsletter!

[DOSGuy]

1. We already have a commit log on the front page.

I merely suggest relocating it under News so that it will be more likely to be seen, and so that it will be wide enough for the date of the commit to be listed. It's an incredibly small thing that I think will make it much more obvious that the project is incredibly active, as opposed to the risk of the visitor's only impression being that nothing has happened since the last news item. Sadly, Google Analytics bears out the adage that you only have 10 seconds to capture a new visitor's attention. My eyes didn't migrate to the commit log in the bottom right corner the first few times that I visited. I just happened to be excited enough about the prospect of a free Windows-like operating system that I kept coming back and eventually noticed it... one year later. I was only visiting every few months because a new release comes out about once a year. Once I found the commit log, I started visiting several times each day because I now know that there is always something new to download and test.

[Angelus]

Personally I think that all of this discussion is a paradigm of nowadays' cancer: People wants/ask/needs/requires/demands for news not every year, month or week but every day, hour, minute, second and millisecond.

The prove that this isn't a joke is that things are getting head. With patience. Remember that it's still on alpha stage looking forward to the beta stage step. It means that things are being done with patience to avoid basic mistakes that could jeopardize the stability in the future beta phase. So forget any roadmap or time to get something in the alpha stage. It's just a matter of patience and good practice.

Greetings, Peace and Love (GPL)

[DOSGuy]

Good advice I suppose, but I've been guilty of not taking these things seriously enough. I was shocked to find out how little time visitors were spending on my website and how few pages they were viewing per visit. Fully half of my visitors were leaving in the first 10 seconds. My navigation menu was horrible, and people just couldn't be bothered to search for what they wanted. I made a major change to the navigation menu and that has had a modest improvement on visit duration and page views, and I'll be completing the change this weekend. These metrics are important to me because they're important to advertisers.

In ROS's case, the difference in immediately being able to tell that there are several commits per day, compared to a new download being available only once a year, is the difference between someone who downloads at least one build per day and tests for regressions and watches for improvements (as I now do) and someone who only shows up long enough to see if the next version is out yet and leaves. While I haven't submitted much, I was thrilled when the RGB to BGR fix in one of the recent bitmap commits fixed the colors in The Adventures of MicroMan. The bitmaps are still upside-down and backwards, but that may have been fixed with one of the commits today, and I look forward to sharing my joy in the Epic Win thread if that happened. I'm just one person who hasn't contributed much, but there are thousands of other people who show up for 10 seconds and leave, who might otherwise download a daily build and contribute bug reports and maybe even submit code patches. I just think it's important for a project such as this to draw as many people's attention to the SVN section as possible, so I humbly ask that it be moved to a section in the center under News.

It's fair to ask us, the devoted forum posters, to avoid the Facebook/ADHD culture of "I want updates every second of every day", and we can be patient, but we can't ask everyone else on Earth to do the same. Catch their attention quick and make it look like this is a project that is active enough to actually achieve its goals or risk losing them forever.

[Aeneas]

Well, let me point out the fundamental conflict between "tolerance" and "duty" that can be observed here once more: "We have no time, we have real-life-duties" (requiring tolerance) vs. "this is a serious project with commitment, today we did this, this and this" (expressing duty).

For a project with this tiny size (and yet, obviously remarkably good results so far - where other projects failed), surely much flexibility is acceptable, but you DO have a donation bar at the top and one surely asks himself a few things about it that all have to do with commitment. (E.g., whom do you intend to hire? What exactly is he going to work on? Is this open for applications or is there a "closed circle" of, e.g., current developers? Who picks the person and can anyone "pick himself with others' money"? - What happens if you do not get the money together? - What happens if you get the money this year, but not the next?) You see, it is in the nature of commitment that computers and programs really have very, very little to do with it at all.

It is criticised that the newsletter itself is gone. Not that it cannot be replaced by "something" but it was a form of commitment and it is noticeable that the project itself is unable to re-attribute, even temporarily, the task of writing a newsletter. Nor was there any official communication regarding its termination. No, total veil of darkness - "It is not there, come on, 'guess what happened'.". You do something covertly in the dark and expect people to ... do what? Read SVN? Your commit log? CIA.vc? - Give me a break. Do YOU daily read the law reforms of your country? You know, you actually theoretically "have to", because it is supposed that you know them all and abide by them.

Just as you read of technological advances not by reading technical papers by Monsanto, IBM or NASA, but - as with the laws - from "the press", there should be some type of "interaction with the public". Something that lets people feel "nice here", and let them know that this is a project with a future, because it cares about "you, their future user, please do come again". - If that is lacking, why should anyone try to persuade his rich uncle to donate to ReactOS?

I really believe the OP was asking not so much about the newsletter. But about when you intend to transform some parts of this project from a hobby (where you can expect all the tolerance in the world as it is all yours - and where you expect no more support whatsoever), into a duty, where you have "obligations to the public" (which, by the way, if they are followed through conscientously usually tend to rise that bar on the top of your page rather quickly). But so far - who can "invest" in you with a donation "securely", without having the risk of hearing again an excuse why something was not done? Why should he invest - "who are you"?

[Alahndro]

I agree to the idea to change the forntpage layout for a better and more direct layout:

- Move the svn logs under the newsletter in the middle area, with date and time and enough width to read content.

- use the gained space in the right coloumn to contain the direct links to all important build donwloads, release and trunk build, that one again with date and time. something like this:

I think you get the idea...

[Haos]

The only problem is that the middle section is not quite an empty space, you have stuff there...

[SomeGuy]

Since we are throwing out ideas for the main page, I would vote for updating the random thumbnails. I posted some new thumbnails in the 0.3.14 screen shots thread the other day, and I would be more than happy to get more screen shots if needed.

[Heis Spiter]

So incase you haven't noticed our forum is being spammed,

Spam is a very real problem for every open forum on the Internet. It is not in any way unique to ReactOS. The moderators here have been doing a damn good job of cleaning it up. I've seen forums with no active mods and they are filled with hundreds of pages of spam. I remember one that was so bad, that members had to bump a topic on a daily basis so visitors could see it on top of the spam pouring in.

For the record, we are actively fighting against spam on those boards. And I can even prove it if required.
You can see captcha for reg, invisible fields for reg, spam accounts ban/del, IP ban on our network. But unfortunately when a bot passes through this, we can only act after it spammed.
If you have better proposal, you can find my mail address on the wiki.

[Aeneas]

I actually think spam here is not above the levels usual in such venues. Surely, there is time and again one or the other person trying to sell you viagra-impregnated jeans that will increase your breasts while you are waiting for your Nigerian millions, but I'd say I have to compliment the administrators for the low spam.

[rosfanatic]

I'm curious what the visitor count is to the main website here?

The original comment about newsletters is an important one I've obwerved with other organizations, except that the best thing is to take a step further and encourage visitors to join an emailed newsletter. Social media is one thing, but having an actual email show up, perhaps monthly, with information you are interested in is hugely powerful.

A local organization in my city finally took my advice for sending out reminder newsletters for volunteer work parties... And now, instead of 1 or 2 people showing up and being grossly understaffed, they have a problem of too many people coming (20+).. all because the email keeps it in front of people, instead of them remembering 3 days later that they forgot to attend this month "yet again".. (as I used to always do myself).

Also keeping in mind also that facebook is now beginning to "limit" the reach of your page posts, with the goal of charging you money to reach a larger chunk of them. Make that social avenue even less enticing.

[rembrandt]

Rosfanatic, I disagree that a mailed newsletter will make much difference.
It's very much a web 1.0 marketing strategy.