CiaoZone.com

Some people consider Ciao to be a community site, but I don't, despite the "Consumer Community" tag on the home page. That's not to say that I don't think that an element of community is beneficial to the site, but more that I believe the so-called community reduces the effectiveness of Ciao as a consumer-orientated tool. I feel that socialising can be done on Ciao-related satellite sites and CiaoZone is one of these.

CiaoZone ...
...in January 2004 by Ciao member jfredrickson, I suppose as a companion to Ciao, much in the same way as the old Opinionated Community was for Dooyoo or more recently, Chatterweb was for both major European opinion sites.

Back in those early days, I did stick my nose in I must admit, but I was never enticed to join the site. At the time, I was a member of ChatterWeb (CWeb), and it was a much livelier, friendlier place offering the same ... more

Some people consider Ciao to be a community site, but I don't, despite the "Consumer Community" tag on the home page. That's not to say that I don't think that an element of community is beneficial to the site, but more that I believe the so-called community reduces the effectiveness of Ciao as a consumer-orientated tool. I feel that socialising can be done on Ciao-related satellite sites and CiaoZone is one of these.

CiaoZone (CZ from here on in) was originally set up back in January 2004 by Ciao member jfredrickson, I suppose as a companion to Ciao, much in the same way as the old Opinionated Community was for Dooyoo or more recently, Chatterweb was for both major European opinion sites.

Back in those early days, I did stick my nose in I must admit, but I was never enticed to join the site. At the time, I was a member of ChatterWeb (CWeb), and it was a much livelier, friendlier place offering the same discussions as CZ. So, I quickly browsed the site back then, offered up one suggestion and the response by the site owner was enough to make me return to CWeb and ignore CZ totally.

Sadly, at the end of May, CWeb closed its doors for good. This meant that I no longer had anywhere to go to discuss the relative merits of the Premium Fund, how much over-rating takes place on Ciao or any number of other Ciao-related topics you care to imagine. Suddenly, I remembered CZ and popped back for a look.

Bloody hell! It was dead! Despite having somewhere in the region of 250 members, hardly any posts had been made, news items were months out of date and from what I could see, the site owner hadn't shown his face since March.

What could I do but sign up, post and shout at people until the site became busy? Actually, that's not too far removed from the truth. A small group of people, including myself, have managed to turn things around and within the space of a week, there's never less that about ten members signed in at one time and a few guests lurking in the background.

So you now know the brief history of CZ according to Dukey.

Signing up was quite easy – provide a username, email address and password (if you wish – CZ can auto-generate password for you) and that's enough information to join. You have to wait for an activation email before you can log in properly and this can take anywhere between ten minutes and twenty four hours to arrive. Once you have your email, click on the link within and you're ready to go. I must point out that if you don't wish to interact and you're only interested in reading the forums, then you can do this, but to access other parts of the site e.g. the chatroom, you need to sign up. Once you have signed up, you can provide more information on yourself if you wish as well as choose a "signature" and select or provide an avatar (a small picture which reflects your personality). While you're in your profile, it would be advantageous to change the default time zone to GMT as the site is hosted on an American server and times displayed are from American time zones. Strangely, all times displayed on the front page are American, irrespective of your slected time zone preference.

Upon encountering the front page, you can see that it's all rather cluttered and complicated looking. While the centre stage of CiaoZone is undoubtedly the forums, there seems to be more to it than a simple forum system. To be honest, I am not particularly interested in the toys that come along with the system; I only want to use the forum. For those of you who are interested, CZ is powered by a content management system called phpNuke and CZ contains features available to that system.

In theory, this means the site should be jam packed with features such as polls, news items, upcoming events, news about virus warnings etc. In reality, it's not. The virus warning feature is automated to take its news from somewhere else, but that's about it. Nothing else, apart from the forum, has really been updated since the end of March. I'm not sure if the site died previously because the site owner stopped caring or if it happened the other way around, but the fact is that the front page of the site looks terribly outdated.

Speaking of how the site looks, in theory, I believe the phpNuke system should come with several 'themes' which means you can get a choice of how the site looks. There's only one available on CZ and it is a horrible grey colour scheme which isn't particularly inviting. Bleurgh.

Looking at the extremely complicated looking main page, there are only really two things which are going to interest you – the forum and the chatroom. There are other aspects to the site, but as I've said above, they have limited use and can only really be updated by the site owner who's gone AWOL.

Getting into the forums themselves, I was quite confused to being with. Despite being a supposed Ciao related message board, there are many different forums covering many different topics. Philosophy Zone, anyone? I believe there are five main forums which encompass around eighteen sub-forums (and then each forum will have many threads or topics). Only two of these sub-forums, surprisingly, relate directly to Ciao itself.

Perhaps it was just me coming from the relatively uncluttered CWeb, but at first glance it looked as if there was simply far too much on offer. Many of the forums had barely been posted to and, to be honest, it looked as if there wasn't much thought given to what forums had been added to the site. This was compounded by the fact that these forums had hardly been used.

So, it was hardly the greatest second impression in the world, was it?

Well, to be fair, the entire system seems to be fairly quick (although I am on broadband), and the site is displayed consistently over different browsers (I use Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera 7.5). I know of others who use Apple Macs, and I've not heard any complaints from them regarding normal use of the site. More on this later, though.

Both on the front page, and in the actual forum section (which you can reach via the long list of various sections and features on the left hand side), the five most recently active threads are displayed. I'm not sure I like this idea as it doesn't encourage people to take a look at what else has been said on other topics and if you post something at a busy time, it can quickly be forgotten.

The topics posted by most people are, by and large, interesting and fun. I tend to prefer the Ciao related topics or the fun ones and will spend my time reading these threads or debating these topics. However, there are forums available for you to talk about books, film and music as well.

The debating aspect brings me onto the subject of the membership. At the current time of writing, the member ship stands at just short of 300 people, although the majority of those haven't made a single post. A rough guess would suggest that around fifty different people have been active over the last week.

Some of the active members have been on message boards before, but some people are new to the complete idea. This has led to a fair amount of frustration when newer members have been treating the forums as an extension of their Ciao guestbooks and having conversations within them, rather than paying attention to Netiquette.

Netiquette (NETwork etIQUETTE) is a simple set of guidelines about how to behave on the Internet and covers practically all aspects of Internet use. Many message board systems have their own versions of forum netiquette posted for people to use (for example, keep all threads on topic and if you wish to discuss something else, start a new thread), but CZ doesn't seem to have this with the exception of one rule which asks members not to make one word posts ("Please avoid spamming, and in particular making one word posts. If you don’t have anything worthwhile to say, don’t post at all.").

CZ has rules though and lots of 'em. Keeping in line with the nature of the site, most of them are uncalled for and plain stupid, and as with the rest of the site, some streamlining could improve matters a lot. At the moment, there are too many rules, some of which contradict the purpose of the site, leaving the members confused as to what to do.

Getting back to the members, as I see it, there's a lot to be desired regarding the debating of various topics. Most of the active members have been on forum sites before, and so debates can happen and are very interesting. Sadly though, some people are not good debaters, and this may be simply a lack of experience in such matters or a lack of ability, but it is frustrating to see your posts being dissected by people who disagree with you, but not offer up any reasons why. It's not unusual to see people post something like "I think <situation> is good/bad because I like it/don't like it" and don't actually give reasons why they've come to that point of view. When the topics are debated properly, it can be tremendous fun though.

Whilst there is a rule of no naming and shaming, the site isn't without some friction. I can think of at least one member whose every post seems to contain at least one snidey dig an another member, and at times this does mean that, just like Ciao, there is a bit of an atmosphere.

There is a chatroom too, although it's never really used until the evening time. It's available through your web browser. There are problems with it (I bet you never saw that coming, did you?) which are mostly technical. I primarily use Mozilla Firefox as my browser, but when I attempt to open the chat room, it doesn't work. Changing to Internet Explorer however and everything works first time, although every now and again the chatroom itself will experience technical difficulties. Referring back to my comments about Apple Mac users earlier, one of the board members claims that they cannot access the chatroom on their Apple Mac using three different browsers.

If you manage to get into the chatroom however, then you'll find it's quite fun, if a bit on the slow side. People talk about all sorts of things, just like on the forums, only this time it's all done in real time. It can get quite busy, and even with relatively small amounts of people (i.e. around eight or so), you'll find that there's plenty to talk about.

I've briefly spoken about the site owner before, or rather his lack of presence. What concerns me is that in the top left hand corner of the screen is an omnipresent Paypal link to "help keep the site running". While I have no problems with helping to keep any forum I'm a member of up and running, I am highly suspicious when the site owner is active on the site for two and a half months and makes 142 posts. In comparison, in my two weeks on this site, I have made 196 posts at the time of writing. It hardly points towards someone who's committed.

There are, I believe, three current moderators. Two of them are reasonably active and one has been seen once in the last few months. Their main duties are to make sure people obey the rules and to ensure the smooth running of the site, but I can't help feeling that the two that I've seen recently are feeling quite frustrated at the disappearance of jfredrickson.

And that's about it really. CZ is only really used for the forum and the chatroom and they both operate well enough to do their jobs, although there are issues with the chatroom. The main negative point is the membership, for the reasons stated above, but that's only a matter of experience and education. Once that's sorted, CZ could become a fun place to visit and post. The obvious comparison here would be CWeb – it was a basic forum with no bells and whistles. The site always ticked over with the bare minimum of rules and moderators who were always around. The site was fun and interesting and populated by interesting people. CZ falls short of CWeb, but it's only the early days of the reborn CZ.

Overall though, the future as I see it is bleak. Irrespective of the negative points mentioned above, the site is not going to be able to evolve along with the membership if the site owner, jfredrickson, does not return. If the few remaining moderators decide at some point that it's not for them (and I wouldn't blame them under the circumstances), I do not feel that there is a way that they can be replaced or that the currently unused features can be removed to make the site more streamlined or make room for features which could be utilised. The domain and hosting package will eventually lapse, probably before the end of the year and CiaoZone will be no more.

I am currently enjoying my time at CZ, despite the negative points mentioned above, but the lack of a long, or even medium, term future for CZ leaves me with no option but to give the site 2 stars.

** Update **
The site owner made a miraculous and extremely brief appearance today in the CZ chatroom. He was informed of the state of the site, but as he is going to be spending the summer on holiday, he can't/won't do anything until August. As CZ now only has one semi-active moderator, I don't think jfredrickson will have a site to come back to as the initial excitement of CZ becoming busy again is rapidly wearing off the current active members.. 

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