1. The LongeCity website could be redesigned to be easier to navigate and figure out what LongeCity is and why/how it is useful. This was mainly a point about navigation, not that the forums needed to be completely redesigned. The front page could be simplified a bit. Short explanatory videos such as Peter suggested could help guide new arrivals.
I think the site needs to be far more extensible. I touch on some of this below in #2.
2. The forums would be better if we developed a more distinct division between experts and non-experts. This has been mentioned several times in the past as well, and we do have a forum labeled "elite". A suggestion was that only members - with an invitation - could post in the expert (or elite) forum. Everyone could read these forums, but only the invited members could post (another member perk).
I think content needs to be more readily sortable and high quality posts easier to locate. I think the approach reddit takes with upvoting/downvoting posts is nice in highlighting valuable content. I think you could have user ratings where very knowledgeable people might have their postings start out with bonus points. For example a very highly rated contributor (Niner, Darryl, Scienceguy etc.) might automatically have a +20 to their postings based on their historical values, where as a newbie would start out at +1. Then allowing users to select what level posts they want to see (i.e., restrict viewing to +5 quality posts) would be helpful in sorting through riff raff. Posts could then be upvoted/downvoted further based on quality.
I also think the platform/system needs to be more extensible and sortable by content type. As I've mentioned before, it would be nice to see specific postings for every testimonial on C60, very brief, very succinct. It would also be nice to see content related to certain pathologies/topics (i.e. alzheimers or allotopic expression) sortable and expanded further by specific subtopics (i.e. hyper phosphorylation of tau centric vs. beta amyloid immunotherapy vs. specific supplements vs. specific drugs vs. exercise). Such that there is only 1 specific discussion area talking about exercise and how it interacts with alzheimer's.
We could write bots and screen for content on pubmed related to these subjects, such that as new published research appears ("Exercise + Alzheimer's"), it will auto update to this subtopic and alert all subscribed followers.
3. Another suggestion was that we should pay for an standard accounting software like Intuit (as long as it is only $250 per year or so, like before), or Zen.
I would look at www.freshbooks.com, although I'm sure quickbooks is fine.
I think charities typically spend ~20% on administrative costs and overhead. To spend $0 and run things out of excel worksheets is kind of madness.
Edited by prophets, 23 August 2015 - 02:23 AM.