Marketing campaign sinks Cruise Critic
 

Yes, no arguement here Charles. They will never be sunk.
Cruise Critic is by far the largest forum and are the dominate player
in their field.

I had a falling out with them a few months ago (totally unrelated
issue), and I asked to cancel my membership. The response was "can't
do - just stop logging in and that will be fine". So it seems that I
am a member for life - and still one of the 424,694 members on the
site I will never return to.

Regardless of how many members are aggrieved by the Royal Champions
issue and decide not to come back to the site, their membership will
still increase with each new member - but I wonder how many less
ACTIVE members they have since the Champions issue reared its head?

Oz

On Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:41:08 -0400, Charles
wrote:

In article , Sue Mullen
wrote:

Maybe John should go and take a look at CruiseCritic and he will see
that it is alive and doing just fine. I don't know if the Royal Champion
threads are still there or not, but I have been on a couple of the
boards and they are busy as always.

The Cruise Critic forums had 424,694 members a few minutes ago. As a
comparison the cruise web forums regarded as number 2, Cruisemates had
37966 users.

Marketing campaign sinks Cruise Critic
 

In article , OZ
wrote:

Regardless of how many members are aggrieved by the Royal Champions
issue and decide not to come back to the site, their membership will
still increase with each new member - but I wonder how many less
ACTIVE members they have since the Champions issue reared its head?

Their membership is so massive I doubt that any who stop being active
will be noticed. If you refresh a page of a board of a popular cruise
like Royal Caribbean on their site say in a half hour, there can be
dozens of new posts and threads. On other boards that would take days.

I don't think many will drop their site in the long term. They will
come back. Because Cruise Critic is where the action is. Unfortunately
because it is where the action is, there is a lot of crap. The
repetition one has to weed through to find any nuggets there is mind
numbing. The best place to find good stuff there is the ports of call
boards and their roll calls.

--
Charles

Marketing campaign sinks Cruise Critic
 

I've run into:
"can't
do - just stop logging in and that will be fine"

Some sites figure at a future date you might want to come back, so they
keep your profile. The software is written to delete your profile and
membership information after xx number months, years of inactivity, It
is a butt saver. That way no member can complain that someone deleted
their account due to some real or imagined slight. So they can say, "I
didn't delete your membership. The system did due to inactivity..."

--
________
To email me, Edit "blog" from my email address.
Brian M. Kochera
"The poor dog is the firmest friend, the first to welcome the foremost to defend" - Lord Byron
View My Web Page: http://home.earthlink.net/~brian1951




On 3/21/2009 8:55 AM OZ "tweaked" on too much Starbucks said:
Yes, no arguement here Charles. They will never be sunk.
Cruise Critic is by far the largest forum and are the dominate player
in their field.

I had a falling out with them a few months ago (totally unrelated
issue), and I asked to cancel my membership. The response was "can't
do - just stop logging in and that will be fine". So it seems that I
am a member for life - and still one of the 424,694 members on the
site I will never return to.

Regardless of how many members are aggrieved by the Royal Champions
issue and decide not to come back to the site, their membership will
still increase with each new member - but I wonder how many less
ACTIVE members they have since the Champions issue reared its head?

Oz

On Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:41:08 -0400, Charles
wrote:


In article , Sue Mullen
wrote:


Maybe John should go and take a look at CruiseCritic and he will see
that it is alive and doing just fine. I don't know if the Royal Champion
threads are still there or not, but I have been on a couple of the
boards and they are busy as always.

The Cruise Critic forums had 424,694 members a few minutes ago. As a
comparison the cruise web forums regarded as number 2, Cruisemates had
37966 users.





--
________
To email me, Edit "blog" from my email address.
Brian M. Kochera
"The poor dog is the firmest friend, the first to welcome the foremost to defend" - Lord Byron
View My Web Page: http://home.earthlink.net/~brian1951

Marketing campaign sinks Cruise Critic
 

In article , Brian K
wrote:

Some sites figure at a future date you might want to come back, so they
keep your profile. The software is written to delete your profile and
membership information after xx number months, years of inactivity, It
is a butt saver. That way no member can complain that someone deleted
their account due to some real or imagined slight. So they can say, "I
didn't delete your membership. The system did due to inactivity..."

Members can be purged in various ways with the software they use but
with so many members they have it would probably be an administrative
headache to purge members due to inactivity. They would get too many
queries asking what happened to an account. Since they don't mention
deleting members for inactivity I think the only members deleted are
those that are banned.

I did a count on their Royal Caribbean message board, one of their many
boards, one which is one of their most active boards. In the 24 hour
period there were 152 different subject threads posted to, that means
at least one post to those threads, on that particular board that day.
They really do have a lot of active members.

Cruise Critic is so big now I think they only thing that will sink them
is when people in general abandon web site discussion boards for some
other form of networking. Like Facebook groups or Twitter.

--
Charles

Marketing campaign sinks Cruise Critic
 

On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:50:48 -0400, Charles wrote:

I did a count on their Royal Caribbean message board, one of their many
boards, one which is one of their most active boards. In the 24 hour
period there were 152 different subject threads posted to, that means
at least one post to those threads, on that particular board that day.

Seriously, rent a life.
--
Think first! Before you book a cruise from a two bit lying sleazeball
who uses Usenet as free SPAMADVERTISING ground and for purposeful
attempts at personal character assassination. Are you next? Think twice
before booking with Ray Goldenberg. http://tr.im/hlJv

Marketing campaign sinks Cruise Critic
 

Howdy Brian,
That is all fine - but I requested my account be deleted. I have
personal differences with the site, particularly around censorship
beyond their site rules, and the tolerance of multi ID users and
trolls on the only board that is of interest to me.

They have refused to delete the account. Their member list is pretty
much everyone that has registered with them. Other forums will have
available stats on how many have logged on in the 24hrs - where Cruise
Critics only stat is the total members (including dormant and
abondoned members). The near 1/2 million members is a crock if only a
fraction of them login every month.

I am not aware that they activate software to purge memberships. I
used to read heaps of old posts, and had read ID's that had not logged
on for years.

I guess it helps to count non-active members when raking in dollars
for advertising on the site.

OZ

On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:27:20 -0400, Brian K
wrote:

I've run into:
"can't
do - just stop logging in and that will be fine"

Some sites figure at a future date you might want to come back, so they
keep your profile. The software is written to delete your profile and
membership information after xx number months, years of inactivity, It
is a butt saver. That way no member can complain that someone deleted
their account due to some real or imagined slight. So they can say, "I
didn't delete your membership. The system did due to inactivity..."

--
________
To email me, Edit "blog" from my email address.
Brian M. Kochera
"The poor dog is the firmest friend, the first to welcome the foremost to defend" - Lord Byron
View My Web Page: http://home.earthlink.net/~brian1951




On 3/21/2009 8:55 AM OZ "tweaked" on too much Starbucks said:
Yes, no arguement here Charles. They will never be sunk.
Cruise Critic is by far the largest forum and are the dominate player
in their field.

I had a falling out with them a few months ago (totally unrelated
issue), and I asked to cancel my membership. The response was "can't
do - just stop logging in and that will be fine". So it seems that I
am a member for life - and still one of the 424,694 members on the
site I will never return to.

Regardless of how many members are aggrieved by the Royal Champions
issue and decide not to come back to the site, their membership will
still increase with each new member - but I wonder how many less
ACTIVE members they have since the Champions issue reared its head?

Oz

On Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:41:08 -0400, Charles
wrote:


In article , Sue Mullen
wrote:


Maybe John should go and take a look at CruiseCritic and he will see
that it is alive and doing just fine. I don't know if the Royal Champion
threads are still there or not, but I have been on a couple of the
boards and they are busy as always.

The Cruise Critic forums had 424,694 members a few minutes ago. As a
comparison the cruise web forums regarded as number 2, Cruisemates had
37966 users.

Marketing campaign sinks Cruise Critic
 

On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:13:16 +1100, OZ wrote:

I guess it helps to count non-active members when raking in dollars
for advertising on the site.

If you are advertising on a website, and don't know what the valid
statistics are, especially those statistics which provide you with
information that is relevant to your product (age, geolocation, sex,
etc), then you deserve what you don't get.
--
Think first! Before you book a cruise from a two bit lying sleazeball
who uses Usenet as free SPAMADVERTISING ground and for purposeful
attempts at personal character assassination. Are you next? Think twice
before booking with Ray Goldenberg. http://tr.im/hlJv

Marketing campaign sinks Cruise Critic
 

In article , OZ
wrote:

They have refused to delete the account. Their member list is pretty
much everyone that has registered with them. Other forums will have
available stats on how many have logged on in the 24hrs - where Cruise
Critics only stat is the total members (including dormant and
abondoned members). The near 1/2 million members is a crock if only a
fraction of them login every month.

While I don't see a way to get stats on the number who have logged in,
in 24 hours I am not sure what that would represent. The last time I
logged in was months ago because I never log out. I may have been
logged in a couple of years continuously. They do show the total number
of posts. Right now it shows 17,244,137. If I checked again in 24 hours
that would give an idea of the activity but it would only show those
who posted, not those who merely read the board. Plus you don't have to
be a member to read most of their boards. As far as deleting accounts
there is no reason for them to bother. The accounts are anonymous and
the screen names are fictitious. That is why Royal Caribbean could not
directly contact anyone on Cruise Critic.

I guess it helps to count non-active members when raking in dollars
for advertising on the site.

Does it really matter? Log in to any other cruise web site and you can
tell empirically that Cruise Critic is by far the most popular. There
are hundreds of new threads there every day. On other cruise web sites
it can be weeks before a new thread is started. You don't need a count
to tell that Cruise Critic is where action takes place.

--
Charles

Marketing campaign sinks Cruise Critic
 

In article , Charles
wrote:

They do show the total number of posts. Right now it shows 17,244,137.

And now 2 hours later the total number of posts is 17,246,804.

That is 2,667 new posts in two hours. That indicates a lot of active
members. I don't think hey are sinking....

--
Charles

Marketing campaign sinks Cruise Critic