How do we retain more people (Theme Week)

[rjfryman 1,120]

There have been many interesting takes this theme week and honestly some are good and some not so much. My thoughts on the matter are not how to bring more people in but how to keep them here when we finally get them. 

 

• Automate more things:
  • I know there are some push back with some things, (not really the ideas just how things would be done), but I personally think we can have more things automated in this league that will free up peoples time and get them more engaged with the things other than data collection. I'm not saying everything would be easy and some things would take time and energy from some of our most busy people because at the end of the day doing something then automating it while doing it is hard work. I struggle with this often and it caused burn out writing code and doing the things by hand in the interim. I'm not even saying everything needs to be automated right away but more things to be automated would help the community as a whole.
    • One example that I have talked to some people a couple of seasons ago about automating the Victory Hockey Fantasy League, where you would be given access to a portal that you pick your team in and then once the team is fully done the portal would give up to date fantasy points for every player, which would be useable for anyone to write articles about and have fun with. Once we get a portal going where fantasy is automated then we can do other cool things like, trades or free-agency or any other true "Fantasy Sports" 
    • We could automate VHL/M Fantasy Zone in a similar way. Where they are done in a portal and just done. If you are right you get your points if you are wrong you don't worry about anything else. The cool things if we do the automation correctly then we can also make it so that they are system updates for TPE like we do with practice facility. 
    • Trivia could be automated in the questions but this would require more time to think about because there are more harder issues in play. like do you know if you are right or wrong right away. do you get paid this week or next? there are a lot of ways to handle these questions and would require more than a single person just thinking about the idea in a Media spot but the idea has been talked about and automating as much of the busy work would allow more people to engage with the community more.
    • Ok this last one just came to me but I don't know how hard it would be but could be very interesting. If we had some natural language learning engage with the index and show the last x-games for each player and ask them questions in a pm. like hey I saw you got a hat-trick how did it feel to get it. Or tracking rivals and saying it looks like you will be playing Seattle again this week how do you feel like playing with them steps up your game. etc. these could be sent to each players PM and then they can answer them in their Pressers. Could be cool. Could not be. Also other people can add questions to the program so that if your new to the index it will still give you enough questions. 
• More ways to make tasks easy to pick up and look into.
  • I for one love making tools that will help others create cool and interesting things. I am working with some people to make my tools more user friendly at the moment with the hopes that later we can have them easily accessible to anyone who would like to use them. To me more data is better for everyone and group working is better at making more people feel engaged.
  • I think users who are engaged and doing media spots or graphics in their first weeks are going to be more active the rest of their careers. So with that one thought I have had is a tool that will give more people info and give them more interesting things all in one place without having to jump through all the hoops and learn how the whole site works right away. Almost like a give me a topic to write about button that will spit out a couple different options and then it will give them a bunch of data on the topic and it is up to the user to write an article that will tie it all together and help them understand the league its players and how points tasks work very quickly.
    • This one will probably be hard to make but it could help others have an easier time understand what we like to see in media spots or other articles.
  • Another idea would be to open up https://vhlforum.com/topic/60319-season-66-rookie-profiles/ to anyone to create profiles. I loved the idea of this when it came through. If all the data was easily accessible we could give newer players and easy thing to do and show love for other players at the same time. I loved the idea when it first came out and honestly was hoping it continued but to expect 1 person to do all the work is unrealistic and hard to do. Building tools that gave users the ability to see all the info quickly and be able to write the profiles in 20-30 mins would allow easy tasks and show what we expect with new users and give some people maybe more reason to come back if they see a profile about them pop-up.

 

Personally I am willing to write more things and get more work done for the VHL. I don't know if people care about any of these tools but if there is enough support I don't mind spending time working on them.

 

1005 Words

Theme Week

[Fire Tortorella 2,653]

I'm assuming (but do not know for certain) that fantasy, trivia, etc... will be automated eventually, but I don't think they're a priority to do so. Outside of fantasy, there isn't a ton of manual work involved in the others.