Progressive Ears News

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Purging Inactive Members
November 16, 2004

Sorry to hit you with two news flashes in two days, but we wanted this information to be available later when someone asks, "What happened?" If you haven't previously seen the next article below, please read that one too.

As of today, PE has 3,576 members in the database. Of course, we like seeing these big numbers, but surely most members know that this number isn't quite real. Many people join PE and then never log in. Some people forget their password and create a second ID (despite the fact that we will email your password to you if you forget it), and lots of members just go away, never to return.

Having this many inactive members creates certain problems for the site. For example, when you load up the Private Messages page, the page includes a drop-down list that contains all 3,576 members. This makes the page load slowly (particularly over dialup), and makes it a pain to find the member you are looking for. Many other problems and inconveniences are attributable to having so many members. The time has come to remedy this problem.

A couple of months ago, we began purging members from the site who have not logged in within six months of signing up. This helped a little bit, but didn't really have much impact. Today we will begin purging all members who have not logged in within the last two years. If someone hasn't logged in in two years, we figure they're probably not coming back. Of course, if they do want to come back, they can simply open a new account.

Purging these members today will remove 1,229 members from our ranks. If you look at the Site Stats page now, you will see that our membership has dropped to less than 2,350. Sad to see our membership number drop this way, but at least it's a more realistic number and helps clear up some of the site congestion.

We're Running Out of Disk Space
November 15, 2004

PE has finally reached its disk space limit. We are currently using more disk space than our web hosting agreement allows, which is leading to additional monthly charges. We need to get our files under control.

By far, the largest culprit in filling up our file system is image files. There are thousands of images stored on our server. These include site graphics (buttons, logos, etc.), member profile pics, CD review images, and photos in the Photos section. We spent several hours this weekend optimizing all of the site's images and freed up a lot of disk space. But at the rate we add new images, it won't be long before we use up all of that recovered space.

Our biggest opportunity to free up space is in the Photos section of the site. Up until now, we have been very liberal in allowing people to upload pretty much any images they want. We are now going to have to police this a little more.

We want to ask each of you who own photos in the Photos section to take some time to go through your photos and purge anything that doesn't really belong here. Photos on the site should relate to progressive music and the PE community. There are a lot of pictures of such things as dogs and cars in the Photos section that really don't belong here. Please delete these photos.

The Photo Albums have also become a little unwieldy. There are currently 172 Photo Albums on the site. Many of these contain photos that could have been posted in existing albums, rather than in their own album. Personal photos of yourself, for instance, should be posted in the Progressive Ears Family Album, rather than in your own personal album. There are many other examples. Please take some time to go through your Photo Albums and move any photos from your personal albums into larger community albums where appropriate.

At the beginning of December, we will go through our Photo Albums and clean them up. We will remove any remaining photos that don't belong on the site and further consolidate the albums.

Happy New Year to all Progressive Ears members
January 1, 2004

Sean:

Hello Progressive Ears readers!

It looks like another year has flown by us and Lee and I want to take a minute to stop and look back at the year 2003 with you.

Before we begin, though, we want to stop and thank each and every one of you for making Progressive Ears the most successful forum of its type on the Internet. Over the years I believe this forum has made some notable strides towards a certain evolution in the thought process of prog music fans, hopefully a step towards breaking down the barriers that have sometimes kept the prog music audience divided. Progressive music is a vast and diverse subject and I hope we have blurred the lines some when it comes to categories. Yet, prog represents a niche market made up of a reatively small number of fans who are all on the same "tiny raft." If anything, I hope this site has been a wake up call to love one another a little more and celebrate what we have in common, rather than what divides us. I am pleased that PE has contributed to building a true world-wide community of progressive music fans. I have heard many different stories from our readers about how Prog Ears has had a positive influence on their lives and that makes what we do here more than worth it. This is our gift to you every day with no strings attached.

Lee:

It felt as if I had little time to contribute to PE in 2003, but looking back I am surprised at the long list of technical and other accomplishments that we made last year. Following are some of these accomplishments:

Our list of reviews has grown to over 1000.
We added a feature to allow you to subscribe from within a thread. Previously you could only subscribe to threads from the main page. This new feature lets you subscribe while looking at the contents of a thread.
Added a Featured CDs page that lists all past featured CDs.
Made the Artist Directory load faster by taking out repeated code that wasn't really all that useful.
Added the ability to list more than one website per artist to the Artist Directory.
Added the ability to view trades/wants by artist/title across all traders.
Made the View All Trades/Wants option break into multiple pages so that it loads faster.
Removed the 8000 character limit on posts, reviews, etc.
Added DVD reviews.
Added an Authors index to Album and DVD Reviews so that you can see all reviews by any particular author.
Added the ability to automatically detect each member's time zone so that all times can be shown as your local time.
Changed the Site Stats page to show all statistics relative to each member's local time.
Vastly improved the forum search capability. Improvements include
- Search now returns much more relevant results
- Search thread titles, posts, or both
- Search the Main Forum, the OT Forum, or both
- Search by Member ID
- Search in Private Messages
- You can even search by Member ID in your Private Messages to see only PMs between you and another member.
Broke the Artist Directory into pages of 50 artists to make it load faster. This is particularly good when you are looking at all artists from a particular country or within a particular genre.
Improved the look of the Artist Directory, Samples, Reviews, and Tours pages.
Consolidated all site pages into a common look and feel with the same header on all pages.
Improved the Help pages to include suggested browser settings for all popular browsers, including illustrations for how to change the settings.
Added a Help Request page to the Help section that reports your browser and operating system settings and allows you to submit problems you are experiencing on the site. This makes it MUCH easier to diagnose problems.
Automatic Quote function that lets you highlight and click to quote someone else's message in your own. This is the best quote feature we have seen on any web site. Doesn't work in the Opera browser and won't until Opera improves the way it functions. Doesn't yet work in the Safari browser but we continue working on this and are confident it will be successful.
Added a site map to help people easily find features on the site.

Many ambitious new features and improvements are planned for 2004. We hope that these efforts continue to add to everyone's enjoyment of the site.

Sean & Lee:

Happy New Year to all the members of our community and thanks again for making Progressive Ears a special place to share and learn about this music we all love so much.

Announcement from Sean and Lee
March 16, 2003

Sean:
As we quickly approach the 2000 member mark, a few changes are in store for Progressive Ears.

Up to now we have never adopted a written charter or any written guidelines about etiquette or behavior at PE. What we hoped would be a member-driven, self regulating approach has now outgrown it's usefulness. At this point in time we feel the need to finally draft reasonable guidelines for a good message forum. These guidelines have been created to make every member's stay here a good one. The guidelines are designed to be as even-handed and fair as possible.

Lee:
We had open discussions about the future of PE a few months ago, and almost universally the membership agreed that we needed to establish a set of rules to govern behavior. This will be particularly good for new members who need to understand up-front that PE is a private web site with certain expectations of acceptable behavior.

We wanted to post this announcement at this time to prepare everyone for what is coming. We will be showing you the new rules automatically and asking you to agree to them. We didn't want people to be surprised when the rules pop up so we hope this announcement will help prevent any surprises.

Sean:
These rules will be unveiled in one week (next Sunday). It is very important that you read the membership agreement thoroughly. We must ask all members to acknowledge their agreement with the rules. When the rules are unveiled they will automatically be shown to you when you load the site. Simply click the Accept button to proceed to PE. If you choose not to accept the new rules, you will be offered two other options - you can choose to log out and view PE as a non-member while you think the rules over, or you can choose to quit the site.

Lee:
We will be closing the Off-Topic forum for a short period beginning in one week.

Sean:
The Off-Topic forum will be closed for 30 days. We feel the OT forum has grown into something much larger than it was ever intended to be. A variety of subjects have cropped up there, many of which have proven to be volatile in nature. At this time we are looking to redirect our member's posting habits to refocus on music. This is a music forum and was never intended to be anything other than that. We need all of our members to make an effort to post on-topic material that will enlighten our readers with info about the artists and music that make up this multi-faceted thing known as progressive music.

The main forum is for directly sharing info about progressive music and its artists. The OT forum is intended to be used only for other musical and community-related postings.

Lee:
Over the next week we will be moving all OT messages that are music and community-related to the main forum. All other OT messages will be deleted. If there is information in these messages you want to keep, please be sure to save them over the next week.

Sean:
Besides the posting rules, we will also be introducing a number of other new features that we believe will make PE a better experience for all members. For one thing, we will be asking all members to help moderate the forum. The forum has gotten too big for us to moderate it alone. We can't read every post and we definitely can't read them as soon as they are posted. Often someone will post something inappropriate and it will turn into a big problem before Lee or I even see it. To help prevent this we need everyone's help. We will be adding a link on every post that says "Moderate." Clicking this link will allow any member to notify us of any post that potentially breaks the posting rules or might otherwise be objectionable. We may not agree that the post is objectionable, but at least this will call our attention to it. By the way, the moderate function will operate anonymously. It will send a message to me and Lee from the "System Administrator" account. It won't identify who sent the message unless you put specifically identify yourself in the message. We hope this will help us get to troublesome posts a little sooner and will also help us to understand what is on our members' minds.

Lee:
Another feature we will implement is the ability for Sean and I to close threads. This will allow no further messages to be posted to a closed thread. There have been a lot of cases where a thread started out as a great thread but later degenerated into a morass of arguing. This feature will allow us to preserve good threads while cutting off further arguments.

Sean:
Another new feature will let us combine two or more threads into one. A lot of times people will start multiple threads that are about essentially the same thing. This feature will allow us to combine those threads to focus the discussion and clean up the forum a little.

Lee:
A lot of times people will start threads that are really targeted at one or two specific members. These threads would be better as private messages. We will be implementing a new feature that allows us to convert public threads to private messages.

Sean:
We will be imposing a posting limit of 70 posts within the last week. Members who exceed the limit will not be able to post until their total posts in the last week drop below 70.

Lee:
This is only intended to curtail those members who try to treat the message forum like the chat room and this does not include private messages. We have carefully studied the number of weekly posts by all members and determined that 70 is about the right number. From what we have seen, this will impact VERY few people.

Sean:
We are not convinced that 70 is the right number, so we may adjust it up or down as time goes on. We will carefully watch the effects of this new policy in the early days of its implementation and gauge whether or not it needs to be adjusted.

Lee:
Also, we are considering making exceptions for members who consistently post on-topic, informative messages. Philosophically, we believe that members who post in that manner should be able to post as much as they like.

Sean:
We truly believe these new policies and functions will lead to a much better web site in the long run. I know people don't like to see changes around here, but I think everyone will get used to this in times. Both Lee and I firmly believe these changes are necessary as the membership grows beyond 2000.

Two New Features
September 29, 2002

We are pleased to announce two new features at Progressive Ears..

Subscribed Threads -

Ever go looking for that particular thread you wanted to follow, but have a hard time finding it? Now you can easily follow any thread with the click of the mouse using the new Subscribed Threads feature.

On the main page, you will see a new column labeled "Sub." In this column you will see a checkbox for each thread. When you see threads that interest you, all you have to do is click the checkbox to subscribe to those threads (be sure to wait for the page to reload after you click). When you want to see your subscribed threads, simply click the "Subscribed Threads" link on the Main Menu and the main page will reload with only your subscribed threads visible.

Ignore List -

This new feature will allow you to block posts by members you choose. You can create a list of members you wish to ignore, and those members' posts will not be visible to you in the forum. For threads that were started by members in your ignore list, the whole thread will not be visible to you.

To create your ignore list, click the "Ignore Members" link located under the "Member Functions" sub-menu.

We hope these new features will enhance your experience at Progressive Ears.

New Private Threads...
September 2, 2002

We are pleased to announce another new and improved feature at Progressive Ears - Private Threads. Private threads will replace our current system of private messages in the near future.

Private threads work just like regular threads in the message forum, except that only those members you specify will be able to participate in the thread. The advantages of private threads over private messages are:

You can have up to 25 people in on the same thread, which is the same as sending a private message to 25 people - with no need to send it 25 times.
You get to see the complete thread - you don't have to go digging around in your old private messages to figure out what someone is referring to.
You get to preview your messages before you post them.
No need to clean out your Inbox - private threads will be purged after 30 days of inactivity, just like regular threads.

For the time being, both private threads and private messages will be available, although you will no longer be able to send private messages. If you need to reply to a private message, you will have to do so via a private thread. The reason we are keeping private messages available is to allow members to save any old messages they may want to keep. Private messages will be gone October 1, 2002.

We believe this will be a big improvement over our current system. We hope you agree.

New Forum... Other News...
Important Stuff - Please Read
August 16, 2002

We are pleased announce the availability of a second message forum at Progressive Ears - the Off-Topic forum. The purpose of this second forum is to help us segregate off-topic messages from the main forum. This will allow those members who are more interested in music-related posts to filter out other, less-pertinent messages. This will help make Progressive Ears more relevant and provide a more customized experience for all members.

We would like to ask for everyone's participation in this new effort to improve our forum. It is up to individual members to determine, before they post a new thread, whether it belongs in the main forum or the off-topic forum. Please give this some thought before you post and help others to filter the content they want to see.

To access the new forum, we have added an item to the Main Menu - OT Forum. Just click this link to access the off-topic forum. When you want to access the main forum, just click the Home link.

So you like the way things used to work? Don't like the idea of having to look in two places to read all the posts? No problem - you can choose to view both forums combined. If you would rather see the forum the way it used to be, just click Edit Account on the Main Menu. You will see a new option on your account information page (actually you will see a lot of changes to this page - more on this later). Check the Combine Forums checkbox and you will now see the two forums combined on the main page - just like it's always been.

Well, almost - there are a few minor changes. When you view the forums combined, you will now see a small symbol -

- beside all threads that were posted in the off-topic forum. It will look like this:

This will further help members sort out off-topic threads, even if they choose to view the forums combined.

Another change you will see (if you view the forums combined) is that you must now choose which forum to post your thread to. Check boxes are provided for this. They look like this:

We hope you like the new forum and new features. We are trying to establish the best way to provide content in the way that all members want to see it. We believe the new features will help us do this.

In other news...

The Account Information page has been completely redone. We have split the page into two separate pages - one for your account information, and another for editing your profile. The new pages should be much more intuitive (particularly for new members).

Polls are back - Rob (Britdude) has offered to help keep the polls up to date. The polls have been a lot of fun for us in the past and we hope that they will be again now that we have someone to devote his attention to them. Let's all thank Rob for his efforts.

New improved sponsorship program - Many of you have made financial contributions to help support this web site. Your contributions are greatly appreciated. As we move forward the site is becoming more and more expensive to maintain. We are now using in excess of 19 GB (that's right, gigabytes) of bandwidth per month. We are charged additional charges for any bandwidth usage above 12 GB. This has become rather expensive. In the past we have never made any official appeals for contributions (these have always been initiated by members). In the future we will have to raise the profile on fundraising.

One of the most frequently asked questions about contributions is how much to give. We plan to implement a new sponsorship program that will answer this question. There will be differing levels of sponsorship (noted in your profile) based on how much you contribute. This program is not yet in place but will be in the very near future. We'll keep you posted.

Privacy Policy Change - Please read the addendum at the bottom of the Privacy Policy (on the main menu). This contains important information for all members.

That's about it for this edition. We hope you like the changes and we hope that Progressive Ears will continue to be the kind of community you want to be a part of. Thanks to everyone for their contributions.