Feedback on Guitar Player Web Site (Including Forums)

[Barry Cleveland]

Hello All,

 

We are working on updates and improvements to guitarplayer.com, including this forum, and would REALLY like to have your comments. You may either post them here, or email me directly at bcleveland@musicplayer.com. I invite you to be totally honesteven ruthlessin your criticism if you like, but more importantly I would like you to suggest SOLUTIONS to any perceived problems, because the goal is make the site a place you will return to regularly and enjoy visiting. Thanks!

 

Barry Cleveland

Associate Editor

 

[picker]

Make the ads simpler or somehow make them take less time to load, and get rid of the one that pops up every time I come to the site. I don't mind you making a living, but I hate being spammed just to get into the site.

[d halfnote]

The main thing I'd mention is that I'm regularly reminded that this is a great site generally.

One thing I have noticed elsewhere is a function that automatically moves one to a different on-site forum one selects in the "Hop to:" box w/out having to then click that but that's sounds really lazy, doesn't it ?

 

Is it possible to give longer advance notice on the upcoming interviews to which we're sometimes given opportunity to submit qeustions ?

 

I mentioned the following before in one of MM's quries here (& it's really working from the other direction) but I almost grab my USPS hat every time I read, in the magazine, that we should discuss a topic similar to one already in print.

Worse tail-chasing I can't imagine. I'd love never to read that again.

 

As for the ads, personally, I think they're fine.

They help MPlayer & sometimes they help me. At worst they're a quick click from removal...of course, as seen above, we all have our pet peeves.

[Caevan O’Shite]

For years, I've wanted to see some kind of means of easily posting music as tab and/or standard notation (preferably BOTH!), as well as chord diagrams; some sort of click-and-drag or like template in a window or 'page to work it out in, and then post the finished content to a thread by copy-&-paste or some utilization of UBB code.

 

I believe that it would MAJORLY accelerate the the quality and quantity of posters and posting here. And you might even gain some good contributed material to publish in the magazine and 'site.

 

 

And the forums' archived threads from over the years hold a goldmine of ideas and information pertaining to guitars, gear, technique, and music... a lot of great stuff posted by some great people! It would be WONDERFUL if the search engine were a bit nimbler. (That being said, it's great that you can now view ALL of a given member's previous posts, including your own; it can be a fruitful, if tedious, way to find something if you have a good idea who posted what to begin with.)

 

 

Perhaps the Editors could work up monthly tie-in thread-topics related to the issue of the magazine that is current at that time, and post and (as time allows!) reply here?

 

 

I understand that a digital archive of the magazine's back-issues, either on removable media, downloadable files, or posting on its official 'sites, has run into a brick wall concerning the vast number of photo, advertisement, etc. credits and rights to be sorted out and negotiated...

 

...I'd personally volunteer to be an official archive librarian for the forums and the 'site, searching manually through back-issues, to answer requests for information and content, SANS CONTESTED MATERIALS, if provided with those back-issues. (I had nearly every issue from August 1983 to April or May 2006, but lost almost all of them due to a house-fire and the ensuing smoke, heat, fireman's boots, and the elements...) Seriously, I would love to do that- or, perhaps someone on the GP Staff might perform a similar duty, to make use of that vast goldmine of past GP publication...

[desertbluesman]

I don't see the ads myself, they are there, but I never look at anything on the pages except the posts. All the flashing in the world cannot take my attention away from the content. Not only on this site but every web page. I am immune to solicitation.

 

Other than that I like it the way it is.

[BydoEmpire]

All the flashing in the world cannot take my attention away from the content

Unless the ads actually block the content! The first time I visited guitarplayer.com, I was trying to read an article, and there was a big popup ad that covered part of the text. Since it was tied to the location of the page, it scrolled along with the text making the article impossible to read. Yuo could close the ad, but not completely - it just slid "mostly" off the screen, and still ended up covering part of the text. Ads are fine, but if they make the content inaccessible, that's not acceptable. I rarely visited the site after htat.

 

The forums are also kind of buried on guitarplayer.com - I always had to look around to fnd a link to them. I just put a link to forums.musicplayer.com in my browser and never visit guitarplayer.com anymore. Seems like a lot of the content was scattered around in random places. It needs something like an "articles" tab, a "reviews" tab, a "forums" tab... something like that.

[rw2003]

I completely agree with the above post from BydoEmpire...

 

I've been off the main GP website for a while now. I can say that it was due to annoying flashing or pop-up adds and those "rollover" ads that expand when you (inadvertently) move your mouse over them.

 

I now see that the site has changed somewhat and those types of ads do not exist. I'll start spending some more time there.

 

 

[Larryz]

Can't spell worth a crap...I would like to see a spell and grammer checker (ie. like email) on this comment section, so I can correct my stupidity before hitting the "submit" button...and MEGA THANKS FOR ASKING...even if it can't be done...

 

[BillWelcome Home Studios]

my compiuter has slowed to a crawl with the last addition of ads, and when I switch pages I have to wait for these ads to load before I regain control of my computer. Needless to say I am pretty damned irritated at that.

 

The other thing that is making me crazy....

 

when we all abandoned our newsgroup pages like compuserve, etc, the BIG SELLING POINT was that we were going to be working in a WYSIWYG environment. Yet, here almost 15 years later I'm typing this message in a format that does not look ANYTHING AT ALL like it will look when posted... from the type face through the formatting, and lets not even get into image display or manipulation.

[BillWelcome Home Studios]

Can't spell worth a crap...I would like to see a spell and grammer checker (ie. like email) on this comment section, so I can correct my stupidity before hitting the "submit" button...and MEGA THANKS FOR ASKING...even if it can't be done...

 

Larry,

 

I'm using the -very- fast free browser from Germany, "Iron", which uses the same base code as google chrome without any of the 'phone home' features... in fact, it has an 'incognito' feature if you want to stay completely invisible; on this computer. My other laptop has Firefox, again free, nowhere near as fast and not quite as nice in some respects, nicer in others. Both are tabbed browsers, to which I am addicted. Both provide free spell checkers that underline questionable words as you go so you don't even have to -run- the spell check, it is just always happening for you. Easy solution to your problem which will also bring the joys of tabbed browsing to you.

[BydoEmpire]

I now see that the site has changed somewhat and those types of ads do not exist. I'll start spending some more time there.

After I posted, I went back and looked at guitarplayer.com for the first time in a while. It did seem a little better.

[G. A. Donis]

As far as guitarplayer.com I'd really like to have a searchable listing of articles from previous issues. For instance if I wanted to find articles that have been done about slide guitar I could use it to find out which issues have slide articles. I have GP's dating back to the 80's and I don't have the time to look through them individually to find something I may now be interested in that I wasn't back then.

[Larryz]

Thanks for the info Bill...

[d halfnote]

Another & better, IMO, option to the spelling question (since I've never met a really good spell checker) is to visit a good online dictionary such as merriam-webster [m-w.com].

I keep it open but w/ the window minimized.

[d halfnote]

Actually I've got another suggestion, one that I keep forgetting.

Can the number of characters in a thread title line be increased ?

Currently that's limited to 60 units, counting spaces & punctuation, which sometimes makes it hard to adequately describe the point of a thread.

[Larryz]

Another & better, IMO, option to the spelling question (since I've never met a really good spell checker) is to visit a good online dictionary such as merriam-webster [m-w.com].

I keep it open but w/ the window minimized.

 

Yes you are correct, I used to do this very thing until computers came out with automatic spell checking as used on all email and word processing systems...would it be hard to have the same thing on this or anyother forum? or is it too much to ask? I find the same thing is true on other forums so I'm wondering how big of a problem this would be...I used to keep a list of words that I always spell incorrectly to save a lot of time, until spell checker came out...I know someone's going to say "just learn to spell and end it" but I was just answering a question and/or making a suggestion...Bill may have the right answer...but we'll see if anything can be done???

[d halfnote]

Here's one that's starting to bug me:

Using the smilie tool leaves the selection box as an engaged window, even though it no longer allows any selction, i.e., another use of the tool must be initiated.

It also drops away before it can be closed, so that it must be reopened to eliminate it.

Must we engage an efficiency expert to demonstrate the drag on forward momentum of this ?

Can it be reprogrammed to eliminate itself or to remain as a re-usable tool once engaged ?

[Caevan O’Shite]

More beer! Ales, stouts, porters, brown ales!

 

And pizza.

[Barry Cleveland]

Thanks to everyone for your feedback and suggestions. We have put together a plan and will be making a significant number of changes in the coming weeks and months. Again thanks for the feedback!

[d halfnote]

Gee, Caev, good ya got that pizza thing in under the wire !