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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] permaculture site variety

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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] permaculture site variety
  • Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:57:31 -0500

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

What I plan to put online will be a perfect companion to this list and offer much needed features that this list does. Read my previous post about this. This will be mostly limited to people in this list and will be on topic about permaculture only.

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.

Case in point, your creating a second forum and me a third. I don't think any of the three will dilute or detract in any way from the others.

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.

If that's what you want to I suggest you follow your instincts. I prefer to use a forum hosted in the USA by Americans for Americans, and anyone else who wants to use it. There are advantages to having the web resources you use frequently located in your country or better yet hosted by local organizations, in our case, at ibiblio. I like knowing who is doing the hosting and who does administrative tasks and how secure that situation is for the long haul.

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.

That is a perfect case for your creating permies.com. It serves a useful purpose.

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 plan to go ahead with this, an install of SMF at ibiblio. Read again my reasons for doing this, a small highly focused forum with graphics
and multimedia where you know your community (the people already in this list) and you know where to find the information you need and follow thteads your are interested in making the best use of your time spent there.

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.

Those are all important issues; I would prevent all those negatives from
happening from the start. As I said it will be managed and focused just like this list. I can also have multiple administrators, each managing one or more forum groups that he is especially interested in or has expertise in. This would keep things on track. I have seen it work on other forums.

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)

To me that would be an untenable situation but then, at least there is some place for that many folks to go to share resources.

We need all these forums. Take my word for it.

LL




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