permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

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