permaculture

[paul wheaton <paul@richsoil.com>]

uh-whelp ....

I have over 20 years of experience in managing on-line forums.  The
biggest ones being at javaranch.com with 2 million visitors per month.
 I throw this out there in the hopes that it might put a little more
weight behind my words.

I think adding new forums to the mix will water down all three.   So I
forsee you putting a lot of work into it and not only getting little
in return, but taking a bit away from the other two.  I would think
that your valuable time would be better invested in all sorts of other
things where the end value per time spent will be much larger.

That said, I will be glad to be wrong.  And if you are still
determined to move forward, I'll support your efforts.

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Lawrence F. London, Jr.
<venaurafarm@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> 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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