Our year in review: Looking back, sprinting forward

PlayfulPhoenix

Founder of SFF.N
Original poster
SFFLAB
Chimera Industries
Gold Supporter
Feb 22, 2015
1,052
1,990
Hey everyone,

As we've arrived at the end of the year, I and all the other forum "staff" (for lack of a better term, but I mean @Aibohphobia and @confusis) have been spending a lot of time thinking about all that we've been able to do the last twelve months, and - more importantly - what we hope to do in 2016. I know that a post simply listing off accomplishments may come off a bit as grandstanding on our part, but I think it's a valuable exercise to look back and see all of the work and tangible progress that's been made in order to get us to where we're at now. So, just to highlight the biggest accomplishments of the year:

  • Launched SFF Forum on February 22.
  • Reached 1000 posts on June 2.
  • Reached 2000 posts on July 11.
  • Relaunch of SFF Forum (v2.0) on July 17: totally new UX and theme; mobile-ready, modern platform; new forum categories.
  • Launched SFF Network on July 17: original reporting, editorials, and interviews; content integrations with SFF Forum; direct feeds to Facebook and Twitter.
  • Reached 3000 posts on August 28.
  • Reached 4000 posts on October 23.
  • Reached 5000 posts on December 10.
  • Updated SFF Forum to v2.1 with Resources section on December 13.

...and, in fact, we've just now able to add one more, as we're welcoming Jay (@Tek Everything on SFF Forum) as a contributor to SFF Network! He's got an excellent YouTube channel already, and moving forward he'll be complementing that work by writing hardware reviews for SFFN as well. It's a partnership that we think will do a lot of good, both for his channel and followers, and our community.

---

Interspersed throughout this timeline, we have lots of smaller wins, too, from new community projects sprouting up (and promotion of some of these on SFF Network); to budding relationships with component manufacturers and our first original product reviews; to a litany of new features, from Imgur and Sketchfab integration, all the way to user-requested options such as full-width content justification.

All in all, we've been thrilled with what 2015 has become, and the generally positive (and constructive!) feedback from you all has easily been the best indicator of that fact. Certainly, to get there, confusis and Aibohphobia and I have invested quite a lot - in the form of time, money, energy and sheer passion - to see things through... But even more of the credit goes to you all, as community members, creators, readers, and enthusiasts, for acting as the building blocks that have established a firm foundation for SFF Forum and SFF Network. Our work, and our technology, has simply been the mortar.

Tonight, we can relish in these successes, and celebrate our progress. Starting tomorrow, however, we forgo looking back, and begin to look ahead. And for 2016, we want to go farther. Much farther.

For me, personally, a lot of our greatest successes have come hand-in-hand with challenges, and opportunities to do even more. For example, while we've seen traffic to SFF Network and SFF Forum alike grow at a steady clip through the summer and fall, we're at a relatively level flow today. Furthermore, even as we have traffic that quantifies in the hundreds or thousands of unique users (depending on how long you're watching), the number of people that actually have accounts on the forum has remained relatively small, only passing 150 a few days ago. We seem to have a huge audience of lurkers that haven't yet created accounts, and haven't interacted with the community.

Other opportunities complement the work we're already doing. Our news content is improving, but we could really use more authors (thanks Jay!) and more posts. We've started to do reviews, but there's a lot more we can do to greatly improve procedure, and try out a more diverse set of components. And, of course, our ambitions and individual passions have emboldened us to set ambitious goals for the next 365 days, from aiming for dramatic increases in user count and engagement, to the development of everything from design contests and giveaways to podcasts and video reviews.

Now, normally, these sorts of conversations surrounding organizational benchmarks stay within the meeting room (or chatroom, in our case), but since we've been trying to maintain a high level of transparency in our work, it occurred to us that our very own community would know better than anyone else what we should seek to achieve for SFF in 2016. So, we turn to you all to ask - what do you think? How can we encourage more people to visit SFF Forum, and create accounts? How can we expand content on SFF Network? And what should we as staff - and us all as community members - try to do in 2016, in order to provide the most good to the SFF community?

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Looking beyond this conversation, though, my sincere thanks goes out to everyone for your contributions and productive discourse over the course of 2015. Even as I've been pressed for time between studies, work, and beyond, every minute I've invested in supporting this forum and the news site has been exciting and joyful. I hope you've all shared in that joy, too, at least a little bit.

A happy new year to you all,

-PlayfulPhoenix
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
5,827
4,902
I'm very happy to be part of this thriving community, although starting small, shows immense potential and progress. Let 2016 be the year SFFN is put on the map for everything SFF !

How can we encourage more people to visit SFF Forum, and create accounts? How can we expand content on SFF Network? And what should we as staff - and us all as community members - try to do in 2016, in order to provide the most good to the SFF community?
Firstly, the release of the Nova would be a good starting point, we've all seen what a popular and successful project like this does to an already busy forum, namely HardForum and Ncase M1. While I don't want this site to be the main and only point for case projects, the merit a discussion forum has to the development and support of these projects is nothing to dismiss. I hope SFFN can become a hub where people will look first when trying to find info about an SFF case or SFF builds.

To achieve this, we need community managers from established companies like Lian-Li, SilverStone, Noctua, Fractal, AsRock, Cooler Master, Scythe and Bitfenix, to name a few. Not only have these companies been important for mITX and SFF, but they often have products that could be nudged into a better design by community feedback. This could lead to potentially some designs scoring production wins, allowing them to go from a project to a commercial product. Or specific SFF-designed products that we couldn't otherwise feasibly obtain, like slimline PCIe connectors or modified motherboards.

Here's to 2016 and the world of SFF blowing up to epic proportions. While still being <10L !
 

iFreilicht

FlexATX Authority
Feb 28, 2015
3,243
2,361
freilite.com
As long as you do what you're doing now and expand slowly but steadily with more reviews and more exclusive information on the site, traffic will go up, and naturally, the number of forum users will grow as well. The problem of a high number of readers that don't contribute to the discussion isn't unique to SFF Network, a lot of news sites and forums experience this.

Phuncz is absolutely right that community reps from larger companies are an important aspect that could drive potential users to sign up. I'm very happy that @Kip and @KSliger are a part of the community already, and if we can get other companies to contribute as well, this will be great for the forum and the network itself and might allow us to influence the future of SFF-oriented products.
Something that I've been thinking about is what impact an active representative of the SFF committee might have. I feel like SFFN is more oriented towards the technical side of things with the resources feature and the complex discussions and feedback you can experience on this forum about manufacturing techniques, power management, heat dissipation or watercooling flow rates, which are something you can't find so densely on other networks, and I feel like a reliable source on decisions of the authority in SFF standardisation could be a great addition.

Either way, the community and staff here is already great, I feel like everything here is of higher quality than elsewhere. The Forum software is beautiful, the discussions are technical and the users are thought- and helpful. It just makes me want to read every single post here because I can get something out of every one of them. I hope for a great coming year that will let this network grow and strive!
 
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zillatron

Trash Compacter
Dec 5, 2015
43
26
Either way, the community and staff here is already great, I feel like everything here is of higher quality than elsewhere. The Forum software is beautiful, the discussions are technical and the users are thought- and helpful. It just makes me want to read every single post here because I can get something out of every one of them.

I was going to say something but this nails my feelings exactly..it's also why I have the forums open in a browser tab on every one of my devices :thumb:
 

jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
Silver Supporter
Feb 22, 2015
4,969
4,780
Thanks for the comments everyone!

To achieve this, we need community managers from established companies like Lian-Li, SilverStone, Noctua, Fractal, AsRock, Cooler Master, Scythe and Bitfenix, to name a few.

Phuncz is absolutely right that community reps from larger companies are an important aspect that could drive potential users to sign up. I'm very happy that @Kip and @KSliger are a part of the community already, and if we can get other companies to contribute as well, this will be great for the forum and the network itself and might allow us to influence the future of SFF-oriented products.

Yes, more reps would be helpful. Unfortunately though, Kip is no longer a rep for Lian Li.
 

PlayfulPhoenix

Founder of SFF.N
Original poster
SFFLAB
Chimera Industries
Gold Supporter
Feb 22, 2015
1,052
1,990
Firstly, the release of the Nova would be a good starting point, we've all seen what a popular and successful project like this does to an already busy forum, namely HardForum and Ncase M1. While I don't want this site to be the main and only point for case projects, the merit a discussion forum has to the development and support of these projects is nothing to dismiss. I hope SFFN can become a hub where people will look first when trying to find info about an SFF case or SFF builds.

We certainly hope that we see some cross-pollination of interest between people following Kimera Industries, and people who engage with SFF Forum, but we're not having one lean on the other from a strategic perspective. In part because that's a questionable thing to do, but also in part because they are very distinct projects.

That said, one of the reasons Aiboh and I were so happy to be able to build SFF Forum was the fact that, as creators of a project to be sold, we found ourselves stymied by a lot of rules/limitations/roadblocks when publishing on other communities - as well as almost no support for our endeavor. Here, we've eliminated almost all of these, and provided resources that we think will be a big help to some, particularly creators who are working on their very first project.

As long as you do what you're doing now and expand slowly but steadily with more reviews and more exclusive information on the site, traffic will go up, and naturally, the number of forum users will grow as well. The problem of a high number of readers that don't contribute to the discussion isn't unique to SFF Network, a lot of news sites and forums experience this.

Yes, the disparity of readers and actual users is something practically every online resource bumps into. I won't go into numbers, but I will just note that the difference for us is noticeably larger than we (or at least I) had suspected, and I have reason to believe that it exceeds whatever the industry average might be.

I can't really explain why that is, other than to suggest that most people tend to have accounts on only a few forums, while electing to be passive elsewhere.

Either way, the community and staff here is already great, I feel like everything here is of higher quality than elsewhere. The Forum software is beautiful, the discussions are technical and the users are thought- and helpful. It just makes me want to read every single post here because I can get something out of every one of them. I hope for a great coming year that will let this network grow and strive!

This has been very, very deliberate. It's our competitive advantage and "reason for being" when compared to other communities. We will never compromise on this.

Our footprint in terms of user share is diminutive, but the quality of our user base is easily the best. We have some of the avant-garde of creators, and some of the most knowledgable and practiced enthusiasts, on SFF Forum. And basically no sackers, trolls, or other bad actors. That degree of purity is a rare thing to find anywhere online nowadays.

To achieve this, we need community managers from established companies like Lian-Li, SilverStone, Noctua, Fractal, AsRock, Cooler Master, Scythe and Bitfenix, to name a few. Not only have these companies been important for mITX and SFF, but they often have products that could be nudged into a better design by community feedback.

Phuncz is absolutely right that community reps from larger companies are an important aspect that could drive potential users to sign up. I'm very happy that @Kip and @KSliger are a part of the community already, and if we can get other companies to contribute as well, this will be great for the forum and the network itself and might allow us to influence the future of SFF-oriented products.

The struggle with something like this is the fact that our user base is still quite small. We very much want a lot of reps on the forum - I think companies and enthusiasts alike would benefit a lot from having that channel of communication and discourse - but companies aren't going to be interested if our population is so small. And this extends to almost everything I mentioned earlier, too: we can't do contests without lots of users, we can't do high-production things like podcasts or videos without many listeners/viewers, we aren't going to be able to secure review units for higher-end components without lots of readers, and so forth.

A lot of the stuff we want to be able to do has a prerequisite that we have enough users to make such work sustainable (even when ignoring the economics of everything, as we've paid all costs out of pocket so far). Furthermore, growth patterns for communities (and online ones in particular) don't follow traditionally linear - or even exponential - growth patterns, either: they tend to have a tipping point where growth is steady before, and rapid after (a consequence of the network effect/as predicted by the traditional Bass model). So there's this sort-of ingrained uphill battle that has to be fought as you try to reach the point where the scale of the installed user base begins to overcome the inertia that keeps passive readers from joining.

I personally for 2016 want to get us past that hump, and to the point where we start shooting towards the thousands of users, rather than just our second hundred. Not for the sake of having more users, but so that we have the firepower to begin to do a lot of the "next level" things, that we know the community wants, but that we're unable to provide at present.

We already have a collection of very influential people, and we'll work tirelessly to maintain that caliber of user base as the community grows. But the need of a larger install base to do more of what we want is an inevitability that we have to manage, and we can do awesome things sooner if we can solve that problem sooner :p
 

BirdofPrey

Standards Guru
Sep 3, 2015
797
493
As far as the size of the community is, I do kind of like the smaller communities a bit. It's nice to be able to actually READ all the posts or at least filter out stuff you might want to read. I came over from OCN, and there's just so much stuff there, and there's tons of trash talk about x manufacturer sucks and y is the best, etc. That said, a bit more size would be great, sometimes, this forum is rather quiet, and having the audience to o better features, like youtube stuff, and attracting reps and review samples would be very beneficial.

I do want to praise the website design. I rarely see it's like. It's well designed using recent HTML standards, works well, is easy to navigate, and is beautiful. I'm actually browsing on a Surface right now, and was pleasantly surprised, when I switched to portrait mode, I got the sort of mobile layout where the top bar turned into the slide out menus. Most other sites have a minimum width so I only get stuff like that on the specific mobile version, and drop down menus are hard to use since they are generally exclusively mouseover with a click (or tap) taking you to some sort of root page. Props for the work.
 

jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
Silver Supporter
Feb 22, 2015
4,969
4,780
I agree, I like being able to keep up with all the threads but we need more members and views to get the attention of manufacturers. My goal is to able to send part, if not the whole team, to CES next year because it's super frustrating how little detailed coverage SFF gets. For example, I would have asked specifics about the fan controller implementation on their new SFX units.

We've put quite a bit of work customizing the theme but we can't take all the credit, the base theme by Audentio Design is great :)
 

BirdofPrey

Standards Guru
Sep 3, 2015
797
493
I agree, I like being able to keep up with all the threads but we need more members and views to get the attention of manufacturers. My goal is to able to send part, if not the whole team, to CES next year because it's super frustrating how little detailed coverage SFF gets. For example, I would have asked specifics about the fan controller implementation on their new SFX units.
Yeah that would be nice. I know contests were mentioned as a reason to have more members, but personally, it's coverage I care about (though maybe because I never win contests, and half of them require you to sell your soul to social media anyways).
How large a community might be required for that anyways?

Gotta poach some more of OCN and [ H ]'s SFF community members.
We've put quite a bit of work customizing the theme but we can't take all the credit, the base theme by Audentio Design is great :)
Well thanks for at least finding a good base to work with.
 
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jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
Silver Supporter
Feb 22, 2015
4,969
4,780
Haha, I did the same thing in one of my posts. If you write [ H ] without spaces it autocompletes it as a Heading BB code. Some quote-ception going on too.

I'm not sure what the minimum membership count is to enable that kind of coverage. Only thing to do is continue growing the site, forum, and other soon to launch projects and see where that takes us :)
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
5,827
4,902
For example, I would have asked specifics about the fan controller implementation on their new SFX units.
While I wouldn't stand in the way of the staff going to CES, often times these events don't have engineers or even people-in-the-know present and just barely know which quarter something might release. Stuff like the fan controller is just going to result in "I don't know about that specifically, you should contact our headquarters for that question" most of the time. Been there, done that :) I had a good relationship with Cooler Master Europe back in the day, when I was hacking up every case I touched.

I'm still very eagerly awaiting the time when a company like Silverstone or Lian-Li realizes how much knowledge a good community can give and how valuable a good back-and-forth could be. Reddit's AMA is already a step in the right direction, as is community managers. But I feel it's not being considered in the least, most likely due to job protection.

I do agree that these events need be:
a) PHOTOgraphed, not potato-cammed. Use a polarizer*, a large aperture portret lens and if possible a 70-200mm.
b) properly documented. I've been there and dreaded I didn't take enough notes.
c) have small interviews with companies with knowledgeable people present to ask the real questions to.

* a lot of nice stuff is displayed behind plexiglass, screwing up flash photography and focus misfires happening all over the place.
 
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jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
Silver Supporter
Feb 22, 2015
4,969
4,780
I don't know if Tony was there, I haven't seen him in any of the CES videos so far but he would probably know. The other product managers could be like you said.

That's why I'd like a team there next year. Many of the other sites cover SFF but only in passing. Their focus is on the ATX boards and cases