I think the current defining issue for John and Xanga is that they are still collecting complaints from potentially money-spending Xangans on their horribly static portal Help page. It is their spider web for gathering complaints and raking in more money from daily stragglers who return surprised and then decide to pay the $48 to get their blog back. So though it is terrible and socially-constraining for us not to have an interactive portal page, it is good for Xanga’s bottom line.

I don’t believe they think they can draw potentially paying stragglers back through a simple link or box on an interactive front page. If returning stragglers got to see (interactively) how little of their social friendship base remains, they might not be enticeable to pay to return to blog. So Xanga has erected a cyber-curtain and teases non-payers that there is something great going on behind the curtain. And I don’t believe the xangagods have figured out how to have “xanga.com” interactive for current members but redirect to a static Help/Problem page for potential members. With some work, it could be designed. But we are talking about a commitment to hard work that’s little evident anymore.

It is hard for me to imagine community here any longer. There is no growth, no change. It feels as featureless and futureless as the government-imposed Indian reservations from the 1800's must have felt to the relocated tribes.

But maybe I am being too harsh. Some Indian reservations, after all, have survived into the 21st century featuring lucrative casinos and an endless count of satellite liquor stores. Seedy lifestyle. But maybe xanga's onto something...if it can survive and evolve over a couple of centuries.

Damn ("f") John CEO. And damn "f" edlives, the loudmouth mouthpiece for 2.0 migration before the migration but now nowhere to be responsibly found.

Promises, promises. And now they only give us this overly constrained WordPress coffin in a pauper's graveyard for us to bury ourselves in.

2.0 is sooooooo dysfunctional that it had less than 500 visits from the whole world yesterday. The fuckin' whole internet world!

Out of 1,260 current outstanding requests for Help, John answered only 2 in the last 24 hours. At that rate John, it will only take 3.5 years for you or the xangateam, John, to answer all the rest of the outstanding Help requests. And that, providing there are no new ones. But there well may not be since almost all are giving up hope for this fiasco.

When Xanga first emerged in the year 2000, I "discovered" John and all the other xangagods and put pressure on John and all the other xangagods to out themselves from their non-communicative, not-very-well-disguised hiddenness and take public administrative responsibility for this site. And they did. And the fuckin' site flourished. Of course, they never publicly thanked me. You're welcomed.

Now, there is no possible appeal to him/them. They have their 2.0 money. They are disappearing again, for good, fleeing this ill-conceived business fantasy they attempted to re-launch. Visits here are flatlining like a rock attached to a heart monitor in an ER. Flatter, more rock-like, everyday. There is no way they are going to bust their asses to serve the 250 daily visitors that will come here one month from now. Or the 125 daily funeral parlor visitors that come to pay their respects two months from now.

If I post no more, it is because Xanga 2.0 is crawling like extra-cosmic molasses in response time. I wonder if John et crew have not cut back on the inital 2.0 server resources to save money after realizing this is a total, dismal, unpopulated failure.

This place - xanga - it's just a dive anymore.

dive - a bar that is sleazy, poorly maintained and in overall bad shape.

"The "High Noon Saloon" is a real dive bar. Whenever it rains, you're bound to be ankle-deep in wastewater and so might just as well piss where you sit."

Here's something interesting: Ever wonder where you rank by profile creation date in Xanga's 13 year history? If you leave a complaint or a comment on the Xanga Help - Unresolved page, you can hover over your name's link and see the numbered rank attending to your initiation. John, for instance, is number 53. I came in at 4,812. Just prowling around, I found someone else at 38,453,350. To think that Xanga has had probably over 40,000,000 users through its history but now has only 300 visitors a day is plain divey!

General Xanga 2.0 stats:

331: the number of people who visited Xanga on 9/13/2013.

951: the number of paid subscriptions for the one year that xanga 2.0 will exist.

1207: the number of unresolved requests for Help to Xanga 2.0

23: the number of resolved requests for Help to Xanga 2.0

0: my estimate of the number of new members that Xanga 2.0 has enticed.

Personal Xanga stats:

13: the number of years I have blogged here (13 years in December).

2586: the number of posts during those 13 years.

202: the average number of yearly posts over those 13 years (most early on, fewer as the years grew tall).

42,224: the number of comments left by you over those 13 years.

16: the average number of comments left on my posts over those 13 years.

I think that less than 150 peeps have blogged a new blog so far on the new Xanga 2.0.  Hard to tell because our access here is so horribly insular and disconnected from others.  But it's my best guest as a past graduate school college professor of quantitative analysis (statistics).

In other words, if you went to a large high school, about 1/3 of your graduating class--scattered all around the world--is now investing in expressing itself here.  Hope you were popular in high school.

September 11th's near-mortem stats from Quantcast, Xanga's official stat keeper:

Every day...fewer and fewer and fewer.  Even the number of complainers who were registering their complaints with xanga's Help (http://help.xanga.com/) that they lost legitimate Premium/Subscribed access is diminishing.  Not because they got the Help they sought.  But because an overwhelming numbers of their complaints have not been addressed by John and his minimal remaining xanga staff.  And those so disenfranchised by xanga are prevalently just giving up.

Xanga is no longer even a little town with one stop light.  Or a township with one stop sign at an intersection.  It's a short stretch of country road with no lights or intersections.

But you know what?  For those of us left, meeting by chance or divine design alongside this country road in a country cornfield with little traffic and no lights but starlight could prove extremely intimate.

Unfortunately, Xanga 2.0 went from a daily "high" of 1894 users on Sep 4th to just 476 on Sep 10th. There is a definite downward trend, less now every day. (The daily high on the "old" Xanga over the past year was about 160,000.)

Many of the 476 are users who can't access their blogs and go to the Help page to complain.

Of 800 registered requests for help, 15 have been marked resolved. There are numerous genuine-sounding complaints where people claim they are Premium or have contributed to the Fundraiser but still can't get back on their blog.

Woe is Xanga.

In other news, my wife learned yesterday, after a full body Pet (positron emission tomography ) scan, that she is now free of cancer after many, many years of chemo and having just undergone two lung surgeries. And my grandson, Artie, has started preschool.

Rusty, my Boston Terrier pup, demonstrates his musical acumen.

Just playing with fonts and colors.
Xanga's new limitations
are refereshing my html
skills.

There are over 1000 requests for help logged already. Only one has been marked resolved. I don't think they will ever catch up.

According to Xanga's official Quantcast subscription, daily people visiting on Friday, Sep 6th, dropped from 80,000 to 1,039 – a little more than just 1% of who was here just prior to relaunch.

More disturbingly, the 1,039 on Friday is a drop from 1,894 on Wednesday – the new site is already trending downwards, though a few days may be too short to discern a true trend.

Hey, there is something horribly funny going on in the comment area...

The official Xanga Quantcast histogram

Xanga subscribes to Quantcast - here's the public visitor results.

Daily people visiting on Friday the 6th dropped from 80,000 to 1,039 - a little more than just 1% of who was here just prior to relaunch.

More disturbingly, the 1,039 on Friday is a drop from 1,894 on Wednesday - the new site is already trending downwards, though a few days may be too short to discern a true trend.

Where's everybody? This place feels like a desert island - no longer the thriving metropolis it was of old.

Where's the portal page drawing us altogether? Where's the compass to old stomping grounds?

Xanga Hong Kong was Xanga's hotbed. But it appears that little thought was given to migrating its users (from http://help.xanga.com/topic/premium-account-that-was-not-migrated):

Hi John,

I found that you are answering the question here. I have paid $48 and I would like to have my blog back at cat_newlife@xanga.com. I desperately need you to help.

I really have no idea about xanga closing now as I am in the Hong Kong xanga which there are actually no notices shown at the front page until last Sunday. However, it was already too late for me to do anything.

The blog is really important to me as I have written letters to someone I love on the blog for 3 years. The "letters" are never seen by the person but I plan to show him in a right time.

I hope you could help to save them. Thank you so much.

Best regards,
Carmen

cat_newlife 0 points
2 days ago