Ideas on where to recruit new users

Gilthanis

[H]ard|DCer of the Year - 2014
Joined
Jan 29, 2006
Messages
8,718
So, in the past I had tried posting in forums of various Cancer related sites to try and convince those already interested in the science to join in. However, I found rather quickly that this sort of thing is pretty much looked upon as "spamming". Unless of course someone deliberately asked for such information to begin with. I know Skillz has done a pretty good job soliciting in the GenMay sub forums. I figured we should put our heads together and come up with ideas of more areas to scrape them up.

Some ideas:
1. We could always do a team recruitment thread at the projects (traditionally in the CAFE section), but someone would have to check it regularly for new posts. With a 100 or so projects, that can get pretty tedious if we have very many projects to maintain like that.
2. I'm currently talking to an individual over at slickdeals.net that had mentioned being a DC'er and luckily has no team affiliation. I am awaiting the reply.
3. Social media may be fine, but I've not had much luck with that.
4. Customers - I used to do a lot of repairs out of the home and never got anyone interested in doing it themselves. Some would agree to allow me to borg their systems as long as they didn't have to do anything. That is only a temporary gain as that hardware eventually gets cycled.
5. I'm personally highly against deliberate poaching from other teams. I think it is disrespectful in all ways. I have actually turned a few people away for a few reasons but typically am pretty open to their offers. The reason I mention this is because I not only browse but partake in some threads. Typically it is threads where the team or an individual is needing guidance/assistance. In doing so, it gets our personality out there. I also use the H logo as my avatar so that it is out in the open that I am the competition. You will find that we have had many members come to us from other teams due to our knowledge, activity level, and capabilities. So, by showing these characteristics we are both being helpful while still advertising as a good alternative in the event the users aren't happy where they are.
6. Better guides and content. Due to photobucket recently changing how they host images, I have to go back and re-do all of my guides from the past. Also, since H changed forums software, the posts have much shorter restrictions and thus just editing the old one doesn't always work out so well. When doing guides, I suggest having a photo of every step even if it is minimal as it makes the setup processes much less intimidating. Even just 10 simple steps listed can look like it is really a ton of work when in actuality it is as simple as describing how to cut and paste.
7. Hard-dc.com - This to me is a potential awesome recruitment opportunity. If we can truly get challenges hosted as well as a user friendly navigation to all the pertinent content, it could really draw people to us.
 
I also post on my companies intranet each October in our Personal Announcements section either asking for others to consider joining WCG on their devices or donating those devices. I've actually had a few people dig out old phones in the past. However, nobody seems active in setting up an account that I know of.
 
I'm not a good recruiter but I agree with Gilthanis comments in his first post.

I've been wondering to ask this if the [H]ardOCP management (is Kyle the only one?) do periodically support Distributed Computing in general other than providing a space for forum discussions and a incentives/privileges (e.g. genmay subscription via folding contribution, sticky FS/FT, etc)? Don't get me wrong, these are all great and cost money to operate. More like a general rallying his troop? The [H] forums have many readers and members, so somehow if we can "advertise" DC, that would certainly be a big help. I recalled seeing a banner on overclock.net main webpage during the Pentathlon this year where they put a banner about asking folks to visit overclock.net distributed computing website to join the team for Pentathlon. I think they posted this during the event. Maybe something to consider in the next year 2018 Pentathlon? I think we have many readers and forum members with the latest and greatest hardware and most are not aware of DC or just not interested or too difficult to setup, so during the big event such as Pentathlon, this may be a good opportunity to introduce them to the world of DC. I understand that such posting on the main web page does cost advertisement money but again I'm not sure what the [H]ardOCP management thinks about DC in general.

BTW, I believe our team suddenly awaken and getting more active in DC during and after this year Pentathlon. Prior to this, I think we are a "sleepy" team, IIRC? I'm using us as an example of how this event leads to interest in DC. It should coincide with some notable events for it to be meaningful and then maintain interest throught the year. FB event does help but I think for Pentathlon the teams have to register so we are dealing with teams that have at least some level of interest in DC.
 
Up until Steve "left" as a reviewer, he would do a weekly quip about joining FAH for H. However, I rarely look at their front page and do not know if anyone else has taken up that mantle. I also don't know how many actually took the time to consider it based on that. I think the most news items that are read, are topics that are already of interest. A "banner" might actually work a lot better. And other than that, there really isn't a whole lot of activity from "management" unless it is us asking permission to do something with the name or is asking for something like a password protected forum for strategy. Yes they offer GenMay, but is that really costing them subs? If anything, it is probably bringing more in as the DC'ers talk about a post that happened there. But hey... at least it IS something right?

EVGA get EVGA Bucks for FAH contributions.
 
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Right now there is a big discussion in the FSFT forum where members who are not contributing to the community will be banned. I've mentioned joining the folding team to contribute to the community to prevent such an event, but it didn't get any responses.

Will continue to try though.
 
I also tried on our company internal yammer, in a techie forum but no success. Also respond to public posting on Facebook, mainly when WCG is doing their periodical stuff. But none of my Facebook contacts normally respond.

As for content on hard-dc: Gilthanis do you have any preferred sample and content I could use to build a template around. As I, for security reason, don't want to use a real CMS (they always got spammed and hacked; even not published one; some punks really scanning the net for everything and try to break in).
For formatting I suggest simple markup language as in github or Reddit. Simple and easy and sufficient. And for sharing the pain maybe even github (hidden or public repo) as content creation place and transfer from there to hard-dc
 
At CV, what kind of bandwidth do you have? What if you created some sort of signature/image hosting for members to use on various forums showing their production? This would get people interested in hard-dc and you could use the forums here for "troubleshooting" purposes which would force members to sign up here and interact with us.
 
Could you somehow make a script that would auto post texts on say a users signature with what they've accomplished and what-not? Is that even possible?
 
As for the [H]osted challenge I still struggle to agree with myself on what objective the challenge should have:
Just highest point as every challenge else or something "different" (e.g. Hitting a defined target).

The other thread outside made me thin about the theme like
[H]eater@home And schedule the challenge times in colder periods of the year. Also away from seti wow and pentathlon
 
ChristianVirtual , I really don't have any examples as web page building, coding, and such are not really in my scope of skills right now. If I can get a suggestive example, I will certainly pass it along though.
 
Could you somehow make a script that would auto post texts on say a users signature with what they've accomplished and what-not? Is that even possible?
Cross-site scripting get difficult these days and often enough seems hostile ...

A static text generator is possible, where a member copy from ...
 
ChristianVirtual , I really don't have any examples as web page building, coding, and such are not really in my scope of skills right now. If I can get a suggestive example, I will certainly pass it along though.
No no, I mean just content itself. Any guide posted here in the past plus pictures lost from invalid URL. The website and patch together I'm happy to do. The "naked" content /knowledge creation is the pain to be shared.
 
Another tool I was contemplating is a config file generator for project-specific settings. More user friendly: get all options on the screen, choose from and drag a Textfiles/copy-paste to your system,
 
At CV, what kind of bandwidth do you have? What if you created some sort of signature/image hosting for members to use on various forums showing their production? This would get people interested in hard-dc and you could use the forums here for "troubleshooting" purposes which would force members to sign up here and interact with us.
Bandwidth/transfer should not be a problem. It says: unlimited .... but let me check the find print once more
 
Also content /tips&Tricks as video might be attractive. I tired to make one in the last DCer voting thread but not sure if a good way forward. But can be part of the mix.

If someone has a good voice and video skillz maybe real videos are even better.
 
ChristianVirtual , I will try and pull my photos that were used in the past. Last time I attempted, Photobucket wasn't working properly and wouldn't let me do it easily. Very time consuming to pull one at a time if I went that route. And If I had to do that, would be easier to just remake them...lol. I will try again this weekend being a holiday and all.
 
I've made three threads on the forums so far asking for people to join us in this challenge.

One in General Mayhem which has 100% of the recruits I've got so far (around 10)
One in multi processing forum. Don't think anyone in there has joined and it's got 0 posts.
Just made another one in AMD forum. Got some posts, but not sure anyone has joined from that thread as no one has posted they have yet. Just made it less than an hour ago though.

Will make another post in Intel forum sometime later today. Don't want to spam the forums too much with this.
 
Thanks Chief Recruiting Officer.

Our next big recruiting event should include the Pentathlon scheduled on May 5th of every year unless someone hacks into SG site as happened in 2016.
 
Gilthanis, did you send this out? I had wanted us to do this sometime ago but this is a great start. If we can do something like this (by project or by event?), that would certainly help.


upload_2017-11-18_8-20-12.png
 
Yes Gil's been busy. When I first received this I skimmed it and thought it said 'you're not participating so get your shit together you slacker', lol.
 
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Yep, it is dangerous giving him that much power...
 
Oh. Then that might be why. Haha.

Another thing I've been doing is re-recruiting people I've recruited before.

I will tag them in posts and/or send them a PM getting them to fire some stuff back up. Got a couple people to return that way so far as well.
 
FYI, here is a list that you can get from WCG website on new members joining our team. We had 10 new members joining us over the past two days. Not sure if they need any help or maybe a welcoming post in our forum?

upload_2017-11-18_9-6-0.png
 
Feel free to welcome them to the team. I'm already spamming this thing enough I don't want to get in trouble for overdoing it.

NixZIZ and jagaer were recruited in the hardfolding IRC channel.

recruits.jpg
 
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I did send that message. I didn't realize that WCG was shit tons easier to send out a mass message to the team. All other projects you have to send PM's one at a time which takes forever due to the anti-spamming features or you have to copy and paste all of the emails into an email and then make sure not to have their addresses where everyone else can see it. And yes, people have to elect whether or not the team captain can contact them.

Also, for what it is worth RFGuy_KCCO is our other team captain and should also still have access to the HardOCPtest account.
 
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