Uncensored discussion of the Chowhound makeover

rworange left Chowhound in a huff some years back (no idea why)

I remember she got pissed because she thought the moderators were keeping her on too short of a chain. She held forth on Yelp for a while but hasn’t been there for several years now.

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Because I am incurably nosy, what did she want to post that she was discouraged from posting? If you remember. And want to encourage my nosiness.

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No, sorry I don’t. Long time ago. She was on Yelp last in 2012.

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Wow. That is a long time ago. Thanks anyway!

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I can’t remember one off the top of my head but typically the search criteria are something like this:

site:chowhound.com intitle:ciccia shrimp garlic lauriston

So if there’s no result, I know the topic is either gone or CBS somehow made it unfindable.

I found that one right away, in case it’s an actual example. Did not use intitle, just the search terms. Have you tried searching within Chowhound and limiting results to your user name (which you can do now)? Like this.

I can’t remember any of the missing threads. That’s just an example of my typical search string.

I haven’t used the site’s search since they added that. I eat in SF so seldom these days that I may never again encounter the problem.

She left because CH dumped the restaurant database, something she’d put hundreds - if not thousands - of hours working on by inputting restaurant info (as a volunteer); TPTB decided to remove it from the site and that was that.

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I think that the amount of posting she does (especially new posts) may make it easy to assume that she’s more than just an average user. I have no idea if she’s compensated in any way. From what’s just been posted it seems that rworange put in tons of effort too, and wasn’t thought to be ‘in house’. Maybe it seems more possible because Melanie has continued, and maybe increased activity, over the past couple of years.

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May we all have a lifetime of fruitful searches.

I’ve had nothing but positive interactions with Melanie (CH, Twitter, email, etc.); she’s been knowledgeable, helpful, and resourceful. I appreciate her directness in communicating. In fact, she’s the person who pointed me to HO and FTC without realizing I was included in some of the emails about the latter.

I don’t think she has (or had) financial connection with the various iterations of CH, more that it’s a community she cares about.

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Speaking of rworange, she was my favorite poster from CH — a real ambassador to the (regrettably gone) SF board. If she left due to CH dumping the restaurant database, I don’t blame her, because out of all the stupid things that management did, that was one of the worst.

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I agree: that database was excellent and made the site competitive.

I miss rworange’s posts - she made me think and I liked how she’d delve into and explore a topic in depth. The stuff she wrote about Central America (or was it South?) was wonderfully detailed, as I recall.

The restaurant database was a good idea but it was designed and implemented poorly and their attempts to improve it had the opposite effect. I can’t remember the details but I know I realized right away that spending time adding content to it was pointless, and I think I tried to persuade rworange not to waste her time.

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I feel that way about pretty much everything on Chowhound that isn’t a discussion board. Their latest bell/whistle is a mapping function, which slaps a place marker onto a map whenever a restaurant is mentioned in a thread. Clicking on the place marker gets you the restaurant’s address. That’s it. Nothing else. If you’re curious about the food, prices, business hours, phone number, web address…well, you can do your own damn search. And that’s when the feature works as advertised, which it often does not.

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I think they are trying to turn Chowhound into Food 52, or Kitchn, or FoodTalkNetwork. There are so many recipes and articles about entertaining. And the recipes are very basic and lowest-common-denominator.

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Does anyone know how the site is doing?

http://www.trafficestimate.com/chowhound.com says it dropped from 3.3 million to 2.4 million in the past year.

http://www.mustat.com says:

Each day, chowhound.com generates 3,475 pageviews from 695 visitors. The website receives an average of 21,545 visits and 107,725 pageviews per month. It is given a rating of D, due to its low performance.

On the other hand, http://www.statchest.com/chowhound.com.html says it’s worth $9.7 milllion.

But chowhound.com estimated website worth $ 84,589 says only $500K.

Thanks, Robert. Not that it matters but I, for one, don’t find it appealing.

I don’t know if mustat.com is authoritative at all, but about this site it says:

Each day, foodtalkcentral.com generates 3,480 pageviews from 696 visitors. The website receives an average of 21,576 visits and 107,880 pageviews per month. It is given a rating of D, due to its low performance.

Even better, http://www.statchest.com/foodtalkcentral.com.html says the site is worth $2.5 million! For you, half that, if you buy today.

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