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nafex - [NAFEX] Membership, focus, journals, etc...the face of NAFEX

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  • From: Scott Smith <scott@cs.jhu.edu>
  • To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [NAFEX] Membership, focus, journals, etc...the face of NAFEX
  • Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:57:43 -0500

Heres my take on the membership issues.

1) The board should be free. If you look at the "competition" in this arena you will find GardenWeb and Daves Garden. GardenWeb is far more popular because you don't have to pay to see posts or the archives. I post mainly there because it was the first fruit forum I found on the web, and it has the most readers. Their arrangement is paying members don't have to see all the annoying ads. Personally I was drawn to NAFEX membership by finding this list when searching on various topics brought up posts in the archives. Several other people have already stated the same thing. So if the archives were closed, what seems like the major source for new members is closed as well.

2) I like the idea of an electronic membership at a level cheaper by the cost saved for printing and mailing Pomonas. CRFG offers a similar arrangement. For people in real financial need I don't think it is worth making a membership level for them. One way some organizations do is to allow anyone to petition for a membership fee waiver based on financial need; I support that idea.

3) This mailing list needs to be upgraded to a more modern bboard. Bboards can be designed with low overhead so modem users don't get frustrated. One organization similar to NAFEX is seed savers. They just launched a forum and I think it is a good example of what NAFEX could do: http://seedsavers.forumco.com/ Notice that you need not be an SSE member to join, and you don't even need to create an account to search the archives. That board is new and has little traffic up to now, but I think a NAFEX board would start with lots of traffic due to all the people already on-board with this list.

4) There should be some recognition of members on a bboard. Some forums have members-only areas. I would say the best idea is to identify NAFEX members vs non-members beside their posts. There are several commercial bboards that make their money this way -- people become members because they want to become part of the club they notice other people have joined. One such site I frequent is pizzamaking.com (a great resource for making your own pizza by the way). You will see around one-fourth of the posts are by paying members; payment there gives you absolutely nothing extra besides some stars beside your posts that you are a paying member - no magazine, no annual meeting, no nothing. But even with that, one- fourth of the people are paying $25 per year. I expect a NAFEX bboard would do a lot better than half. Another idea is to have a scion exchange forum with access for members only, another reason to entice people to join. The BYFG group in Pennsylvania has an active scion exchange between members.

Scott






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