6. What is your general experience with castings?

I have never had a job as a result of applying to a casting call. I have pretty much stopped paying attention to them. People who post casting calls are mainly hitchhikers wasting your time. Others post the very typical:

"I want 30 images retouched, budget is $2 per image and I will send you an image for a free test"

A person who considers $2 or $50 a business risk and expects a free test because of it has no capacity to evaluate the result of any test whatsoever. Such a person is simply far away from any real professional measures and the people responding to anything like that are at the same level. That's why the whole site is full of amateurs talking endlessly about "why the model flaked", "what to do when the photographer won't send photos", "should i bring an escort", "why retouchers destroy our images" etc.

Also: Right now it is impossible users to measure the effect of a casting/notice. Even the number of views is useless - refresh the casting page N times and it will add N views to it. Also it is very bad practice to tolerate castings where someone has specified they look for many or all possible artist types when they actually need only one.

What do you hope to see in the future for castings?

Ideally the workflow would be:

1. Member A post a casting call (or availability notice) which is targeted only at specific member types, e.g. models. This means only models will be able to see the casting call. No need to spam everyone else with irrelevant info.

2. Members X, Y, Z... view the casting

3. Members X and Y respond to the casting (in PM, remove those comments)
3.1: If member A modifies the casting, this should send notification to all who applied showing the change. Based on that X and Y should be able to withdraw their interest. A public note like "member A changed the casting call conditions N times" should be visible to everyone who sees the casting. Full history of the edits should be visible only to people who applied before the edits.

4. Member A has *anonymous* analytics in "my stuff" where he can see:

- how many people viewed the casting call
- what are their parameters (location, type, age etc)
- how many of them interacted (sent a PM, hired)
- if the casting was edited: how did this change the above
- how many visit the profile of member A and where the visits come from: from casting, from forum message, from search...

5. Members who can see the casting call should be able to see:

- how many people viewed the casting call
- has anyone already been hired
- what is the response rate of member A (for the casting and as a whole)
- what is the hire rate of member A (for the casting and as a whole)

6. Member Y gets hired by A. This should display as "1 person hired, casting closed".

7. Members A and Y should show as "worked together" and be encouraged to leave feedback for each other after completion of their collaboration. This should become part of the user rating.

In general there should be different types of rating:

- response rate to PM (% and time for response)
- response rate to casting calls (and to each casting individually)
- rating given by other users (can be incorporated with current verified credits)
- rating for helpful forum posts
- people should be able to rate a particular casting as "poorly defined", "too demanding", "excellent description" etc. This will stimulate better casting calls to be published. People should be able to see that the rating was given for a particular version of the casting (e.g. before it was edited).

8. Members with better rating should be presented better on the site. Members with negative/low rating should be limited.

9. To avoid abuse/fake rating a proper system should be implemented. It may be a good idea for mods to review castings and request changes before being published. At least until the member gets a sufficient good rating.

And of course all that should be made very easy to use.

Also to make people more comfortable with interacting and working with each other - it is high time to improve the security of the site. Please don't just add disclaimers and warnings. Many months ago it was suggested to have HTTPS (something which takes 15 minutes to implement) and to current date there is not even a hint for it. No HTTP security headers are implemented either. The whole site needs a refresh. Everyone knows that.

anchev wrote:
The "how often" and "how many" questions can be answered objectively by looking at the web stats/analytics of your site. The 5 or 500 people who would answer in a forum can not be a basis for any serious decision, especially if the questions are handed down by a completely anonymous entity.

Thanks for the detailed feedback that followed this first part. However, do you really think we don't know this or are not including analytics in our research and decision making process?

Model Mayhem Edu wrote:
Thanks for the detailed feedback that followed this first part. However, do you really think we don't know this or are not including analytics in our research and decision making process?

I don't know who knows what. I was just pointing out that quantitative questions simply won't give you info which you may already have. So considering that people normally prefer to answer short surveys, reducing the list to just the questions for which you don't have the answers may be more efficient. Just like posting a casting call targeted only at the proper audience

I hope that clarifies.

Model Mayhem Edu wrote:
However, do you really think we don't know this or are not including analytics in our research and decision making process?

Goodness me. Considering the time anchev took to give you a detailed response to your colleagues request for "insight", I would have said this reply is unnecessarily disrespectful and combative.

I wonder how many members whose help you are requesting are less inclined to respond having seen that?

goneferal wrote:
Goodness me. Considering the time anchev took to give you a detailed response to your colleagues request for "insight", I would have said this reply is unnecessarily disrespectful and combative.

I wonder how many members whose help you are requesting are less inclined to respond having seen that?

wow ...just wow ...

goneferal wrote:
Goodness me. Considering the time anchev took to give you a detailed response to your colleagues request for "insight", I would have said this reply is unnecessarily disrespectful and combative.

I wonder how many members whose help you are requesting are less inclined to respond having seen that?

I agree as well, would have made more sense to respond with the customary "Thank you for your detailed response, we will take your feedback into consideration"