Friends,

It is good to see you are getting curious about CD and its origin. TK is right on most accounts. He is one of the most consistent and enthusiastic member of this board.

In terms of making money, AdSense during most month is enough to cover the cost of hosting, domain registrations and other related expenses. Some occasional adds from banks and telcom companies help a little bit. But nothing is substantial. The primary focus on this site was helping Immigrants and it is still the same. And so we never chased sponsors and marketed out site to generate revenue. With some dedicated efforts it can be done, but the focus is not that. All of us are having good job for living and CD does remain our passion and hobby.

Charcha is the most prominent, used, searched and visited section of the site, followed by Classifieds, Business Listings and Jobs. We tried to have live news from IANs with paid subscription for almost two years, I think 2011-2012, but it didn't worked.

Other than moderating the Charcha section approving, removing and editing ads in various sections is another task that requires daily maintenance.

As most of the code on the site was written 15 years back, I agree there are so many places we need big fixes. I would say big overhaul. Last year I tried to contact a developer from India to look at the code, simplify and enhance. He even failed to understand the code! The current code is in PHP, using MySQL, and the pages are generated based on the templates defined in database. If anyone of you can recommend a good and reasonable developer that would be helpful.

Recently - last 4-5 years - CD's ranking has gone down. There could be many reasons. 1) Emergence of Social Media sites 2) Google's search and rank algorithm impacted our ranking a lot 3) The content itself - the wealth of information is there but it is not presented in an easy way. Also some of the content is dated and we should flag it and achieve if that is not relevant today. All that requires time (even if we hire a developer, still need to spend time in planning and designing) and money.

We are definitely interested in having some ideas on how to make this site wonderful.

Thanks to Chandresh, BJ, Jake3d, Biomed, Pramod Chopra and Massod for great help during early years!

Thanks everyone who contributed to this site. Special thanks to our dedicated and non-paid Moderators.

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A Proud Indian Canadian

One thing that I have noticed as a downward lacking is the search feature ... It used to work better before ... these days I don't get something through the 'charcha search' whereas when I google the same through google and using 'canadian desi ' and the same keywords I get it .

Also earlier , by clicking on someone's profile , it could be seen which posts had he started OR participated in , but now that is not working as well ...

Another factor that is being used less these days is making important threads sticky - like the one started by AT on scams in Canada as well where he has listed prices of groceries , living etc. are good candidates for being made sticky.

For quite a lot of us CD has become an inseparable part of life

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Fido.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Fido

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Another factor that is being used less these days is making important threads sticky - like the one started by AT on scams in Canada as well where he has listed prices of groceries , living etc. are good candidates for being made sticky.

For quite a lot of us CD has become an inseparable part of life

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Give free food http://www.thehungersite.com ||

How about the scam thread ..Do you think it deserves to be made a sticky ??

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Fido.

Fido, scam thread has been made a sticky based on your suggestion. Thanks.

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Give free food http://www.thehungersite.com ||

Some interesting facts about the earlier years:

On my suggestion, the first meeting was held at my place in which GG, BL, Pramod Chopra and I think Biomed participated. This was based on my post "The next step" where I had suggesting a physical meeting of cyber members and then forming of some specialist groups like finance and accounting, computers, real estate etc. One might want to read that post and its sequel.

This gave rise to a formal meeting of members which was organized by me at my condo with prior registration (thru phone calls and form filling). It was great to see about 70 persons attending the meeting in a minus thirty temperature day. the highlight of the meeting was that Jake3D drove from Montreal and Masood flew in from Vancouver.

Later we formed groups as described above and met a few times to try and help each other. The second meeting was held at Biomed's backyard and one of the guests, if I remember correctly, was an MPP or MP. The third one, a much smaller one was at Sanjiv Manocha's place as pot luck dinner which started a trend of such pot lucks. Another person who actively joined such meetings was Sudesingh.

Sometime during the next 1-2 years, we also had three sessions of classroom teaching for basics of foreign exchange trading, conducted by me which was attending by about 15 persons each time. The place and projector was organised by Mr Gill. However, a few years later, something broke somewhere and things started fizzling out. The site turned from helping each other to silly advises, to personal fights etc. and that is when many of us started staying away from it. Two major losses were Jake3D and Biomed - both extremely intelligent and fun loving and helpful persons. And ofcourse Sanjiv and Mr Gill. I myself have come back after a long time.

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Chandresh

Advice is free – lessons I charge for!!

Chandresh for the brief history. I joined around the time you stopped the FX training.

We have had some interesting characters enter and leave at various times.

Hiren