Hi TSMFers! A big time welcome to you all and thanks for being apart of this brand new community! As we're coming up on our very first full week online with this site I thought I would take this quick time out to put out a state of the forum thread. (actually I need to thank @tbw875 for this thread idea! ) I'll just make this post short and sweet as I want to collect some ideas from you folks as far as how you all use these forums. What you would like to see and how you think the forums are looking as of right now. So we've got just short of a dozen registered members on the forums in our first week online. Mostly those who have followed me from the other community. We don't have much of a search presence on the major search engines as of yet so as you might image we're not getting very many eyeballs to this site. So for the time being, we're most likely not going to get many if any new member sign-ups to the forums. I know that sounds kind of depressing lol, but if no one knows this site exists then how do we expect people to join up? With that being said I do plan to use social media like Twitter to occasionally get the link out there. But, I say this and I'll have to tell you all that I have actually attempted this in past years w/o much luck at all. So, it will be quite challenging getting new members to join solely from tweeting the link. In other words - I'm not putting all of my eggs on the Twitter basket. Going to need some other ideas to get the word out there. Perhaps by reaching out with other communities and seeing if they are at all interested in coming over here. It's going to be a long process to be sure. Not an overnight thing. And I realize that and I am fully prepared to give this thing as much time as needed. Anyway, enough of me, I mostly wanted to just get some input from you good folks and see what you all think we could do here to get the ball rolling so-to-speak. Looking forward to hearing some good feedback in here it's much appreciated. Thanks again everyone and it's so good having you guys here!
Just in case you guys did not notice I've added a few new things to the front page today to make it look and feel more like a stock site! First the live real-time market data widget underneath the who is currently online now box (yes this really does update in real-time w/o a page refresh)- Second (and I'm not too sure how many of you guys will be using this but I added it anyway) a live discord chat room dedicated for TSMF. And last but not least a MarketWatch news widget (this one updates on a page refresh)- I also added a few new links to the header of the pages ... a link to tradingview.com (live charts), the live discord chat, and cnbc- Hopefully things will begin feeling a little more like home again for some of you. Let me know what y'alls think!
Awesome job, really appreciate what your doing. Just a matter of time before you get a ton of members, I'm still swamped at work and working at my place, about 16 hours a day both places.
It is always challenging at the beginning, but I am confident that more and more people will get to know this great place later on You have done a great job Cy
Added one other thing tonight ... for those of you who were with us when we were on old HSM will remember this one Hopefully these added widgets aren't slowing things down too much with the page loads! If you guys don't like this one too much let me know and I'll remove it pronto. Just trying to make this look a lot more like a stock as we are.
It all looks great! Thanks! I didn't know those links on the top bar were customizable. Can we get a link to the current Weekly contest up there? I generally use the forums for the competitions, and like to hear and give viewpoints on the daily threads. The individual stock threads are really helpful, but in terms of conversation, they don't really provide daily commentary. I think we're on our way. I want to explore ways of marketing the site.
I like what @tbw875 suggested. Having a way to link to the leaders of the stock challenges at the top would be very cool indeed, and I think could draw in some people ultimately. Marketing and getting this place's name out would probably be the next step to grow this place. IDK how some of you guys feel about Stocktwits or Twitter but having a handle on there to show off a few times a week could be cool. Maybe we could link to the weekly picks for instance to show how our members feel about certain stocks upcoming performance. Just kind of spitballing here.
Yeah! Maybe just a twitter bot that tweets out the weekly winner, and sends it @stocktwits? I actually never use twitter, but at least POTUS will see it!
all great ideas in here thx for sharing those you guys! @tbw875 - in regards to your idea there, what i've done is added the link to the stock picking challenge "forum" instead of the thread since it is actually a bit of a hassle to edit out the template every time ... so it's essentially just an extra click for you guys ... hope this okay with y'alls? i also added the link to finviz as well since that is really essentially imo for a site like ours ... that's mainly for newcomers who are not very familiar with the site, etc. and i've made it so they open up in a new tab/window rather than the same window so people don't have to click "back" or close out their browser and re-enter the site on a new browser window.
@tbw875 @twerpner i'm gonna try to play around with this a bit and see if i can just add the spreadsheet link for the current week's picking contest at the top there along with the link to the stock picks board ... albeit it would be a little tedious to go into the templates and change that every week but i'm all good with it if that means making things easier for everyone to access the spreadsheet link maybe i can even place it on a custom page within the forums here using the iframe function so you're not needing to open another tab/window to access the google sheet ... that would be ideal imo i'll see what i can do!
i think i've got it! check this out and let me know what y'alls think- you're simply clicking on "this week's contest" in that list of links at the top there and it should pull up this week's spreadsheet ... let me know if that works for you guys thx
Can't try it out on mobile so I'll try again at home (also I just have to request analysis of the site from Sophos for me to be more nonproductive at work). I think it's good either way. Just remove the friction point. The alternative I was thinking was just add a new sheet for each week.
couple more things added to the main front portal index page here ... hopefully these aren't make things too cluttery and/or slowing down the page loads for you guys ... but if they are please let me know! i've added an economic calendar and an earnings calendar (courtesy of investing.com) right on the front page- and lastly the "live charts" link at the top no longer opens a new tab/window ... i've set it so it opens a custom page within the forums and i just wrapped that in an iframe so it sorta looks like it's integrated into the forums if you will i did the same for the "chat" link a well- only the finviz link opens a new tab/window ... everything else opens within the forums hope you guys like these few new additions to the site
so i'm gonna try focusing my efforts and reaching out with a few different communities this week and see what kind of results we can net. my first order of business is reaching out with this community here: http://onlinetradersforum.com/ looks like they run the same forum platform as we run here. the community there seems kind of dead though, but has over 14,000 registered members. they've been around since 2005. if you scroll down toward the bottom of their forum home page you'll see that they have a section for stock picking competitions just as we have here ... however theirs looks to be inactive! would be cool if those folks could join us over here on our challenges. any of you guys have any ideas how we could do this w/o looking like a spammer?
I would recommend starting by contacting the Admin team. Always better to be up front! I'd be happy to reach out to them and set up a conversation.
awesome @tbw875! thx for all your help with this! it's greatly appreciated btw guys, i modified the front page one final time today ... you guys might tell that i really like the stuff from tradingview.com so i went ahead and used their econ. calendar, market movers, and forex widgets as well as the futures ticker at the top ... hope none of these things are slowing down the pages or anything for anyone, but if they are please do let me know asap! i'm running this on google fiber so obviously i can't notice any difference ... i'll stop adding new things for now though as to not overwhelm anyone lol ... some bells and whistles are okay but i try not to go too overboard with it
Hey FYI, When i type the high level domain, chrome says its unavailable before redirecting to the myvnc client. There might be a slight issue there... It's only like a second before it loads though.
hmm ... haven't seen that one myself ... but do you know if it is only happening with www.TheStockMarketForums.com ? or are the other 2 affected as well? the other 2 being- www.StockMarketForums.net www.StockMarketBoards.com is anyone else experiencing @tbw875's issue?
