permaculture

[paul wheaton <paul@richsoil.com>]

I guess the reason I bring this up is that it seems odd to re-create
what already exists.

I guess that each site might have its own flavor.  Which is good.
Some folks wanna hang out at a pub, while other folks wanna hang out
at their church, and others favor the park.

On the other hand, I think it would be great to see one really big
permaculture forum site than to see five sites that are so small that
they don't have much traffic.

There is currently one big mailing list.  This one.  I think there is
not (usually) enough traffic to warrant creating another mailing list.

There are gobs and gobs of wikis and static pages and blogs:  and
that's good.  They all link to each other willy nilly.

But for a forum to be of value, it needs regular visitors to keep the
discussion flow rolling.  So if you divide it, then it is possible to
dip below the threshold and peter out into oblivion.

The australian forums are the primary forums right now.  I would much
rather see energy put to them than to start up yet more forums and get
more fragmentation.

My forums (permies.com) started before I knew about the australian
forums.  And I created them mostly to reduce the number of emails I
was getting from people asking me about all sorts of horticultural and
homesteading stuff.   As the forums grew, I separated "the community"
from my personal rant space.

It is an accident that there are two large forum sites now.  Frankly,
I cannot think of any great philosophical differences between the two
other than one is heavy on aussies and the other is heavy on yanks.

I guess what I'm trying to do is to dissuade you from introducing
another forum.

I suppose that if there are things that you don't like about the other
two (too much fluff; too much hostility; too stupid; too hard to use
...), then, well, yeah, intentionally creating a new forum makes good
sense.

> Well,
>
> The simple machines forum software you are suggesting is exactly what
> I use at permies.com.
>
> While this list has 923 members, the forums at permies.com currently
> has 5012 members.  For the month of october, the forums at permies.com
> had 29,150 unique visitors - the difference being that there are a lot
> of people that read and don't post.
>
> (we've actually had over 25,000 member accounts, but I've deleted most
> of the accounts under suspicion of them being spam accounts)
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 9:03 PM, Lawrence F. London, Jr.
> <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>
>> I was reading yet another fascinating, absorbing machinist forum tonight 
>> and
>> thought to myself that gardeners, market farmers, small farmers and
>> permaculturists lack the kind of nice resources that machinists, pro or
>> home, use 24/7/365 and this is much needed. Now that out list is up to 
>> about
>> 923 members now might be a good time to add to this list a different kind 
>> of
>> forum, one where everything is organized by Subject, then thread. 
>> Individual
>> messages can have embedded urls which display graphics and multimedia in
>> real time as you read, without having to go to another browser windor ot
>> tab.
>>
>> A quote from my post to Michael tonight about this, with links and 
>> examples:
>> \|/
>> /|\
>> I have a new idea for a permaculture and gardening/farming forum system
>> for us that I will pursue - see this URL to see what it is like and is good
>> for. This is a machinist site - they are an exceptionally nice, 
>> considerate,
>> polite and helpful community of self help folks - impressive to say the
>> lease - when I saw this I realized that there isn't anything really like
>> this for serious permaculture practitioners and gardeners/smal & family
>> farmers/market farmers:
>> http://www.homemodelenginemachinist.com/index.php
>> and a topic thread:
>> http://www.homemodelenginemachinist.com/index.php?topic=7364.0
>>
>> What do you think about this for those of us in the permaculture list? It
>> would exist at ibiblio side by side with the Wiki and the permaculture list
>> as an alternative and companion. Its ability to create discrete pages for
>> each thread, with embedded graphics seems like a not-to-be-without 
>> resource.
>>
>> The software appears to be free and I could get it installed on ibiblio
>> without too much trouble. This is their website:
>>
>> Simple Machines Forum
>> http://www.simplemachines.org/
>>
>> Is this worth doing and will enough of us use it to make it worthwhile?
>>
>> Just think, create a new thread and that generates its own group of pages.
>> Each post in each thread can contain embedded graphics or other media, i.e.
>> videos, sound, etc. Login t your user account there, go to the subject area
>> of your choice, browse the topics being discussed, read the ones that
>> interest you and leave the rest; download and archive any of this you want,
>> complete with graphics.
>>
>> Ex. a thread originates on pond building, lots of input from many users 
>> with
>> pics of their own work, followups, etc etc ad infinitum. A thread
>> can generate dozens of pages and can go on for years. Q&A on plants, i.e.
>> "what is this plant I found out back?'. What do varieties of lupines look
>> like. What is a typical root system for clover growing in soil with a high
>> rock powder component - pics ensue, discussion unfolds. I think this would
>> be much fun. Scans of drawings and blueprints, scans of select pages of
>> books and mags, legal of course.
>>
>> I think this is a must have for us. What do you all think?
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>