My $.02 on forums

[Dave]

(I wrote this for the SMOT folks, but figured it would apply here too)

First, a little background.

I joined my first mailing list (SabMag, believe it or not) back in 1995.  Later that year, I started my first mailing list, with the help of a generous SabMag member.  That little list, for the Nissan 240SX, grew into a major national car club, that at its peak had over a thousand members.  During the years, forums were brought up and much debate ensued about their effectiveness, privacy, etc.  Personally, I was pretty opposed to them initially myself.

For the last 10 years, we've continued to run the list, and have now seen the membership drop to around 200-300 members.  Most of the defection has been to online forums.

Arguments (and rebuttals) against forums:

They're impersonal
I've never quite understood this one.  It's the same people (and probably more) participating.

They're public and less secure
So are mailing lists, unless you restrict membership.  As of today, SMOT is a public mailing list that anyone can join.  Forums actually have more control over the content, since you can make certain sections off-limits or private - you can't do that with a list.  It's all or nothing.

I'll get more spam
Anything that can get scanned and indexed on a webpage can (and does) get indexed out of a mailing list.  Well behaved search engines (like Google) can be told to stay out of individual postings, or forums altogether.  Poorly behaved search engines are the same ones that auto-subscribe to mailing lists to watch their content, too.

Forums are harder to keep up with
I suppose those one comes down to personal preference.  I find that forums are actually easier to keep up with, since I can focus on just the content I want to see.

How many times have we seen list members frustrated because of off-topic conversations?  Because of the instant delivery characteristic of an e-mail list, you get to see every message as it comes through - including the off-topic stuff you don't want to see.  Digest isn't much better, since you still have to wade through all the stuff you don't want to see (and all the replies that weren't snipped).


My experience has shown that mailing lists are becomming a hinderance to the growth of groups and clubs such as SMOT.  The off-topic banter, while agreeable to some, keeps a lot of the "newbies" quiet and out of the loop.  By providing a way for that communication to continue, as publicly as a mailing list, but lets those who aren't interested bypass it altogether, I've found that there's actually *more* socialization that occurs, not less.  Those who might have hesitated to bring up an off-topic conversation, or perhaps a controversial topic (which oil is best?) are a lot more likely to do so - since they know that anyone who isn't interested in it will just skip that topic.  On a mailing list, those topics are much more likely to cause frustration and (sometimes) struggles as someone (official or otherwise) tries to reign in the topic.

Forums also offer a great way to search for past topics, which helps (though doesn't eliminate) keep the same topics from getting rehashed every 2-3 months.  FAQs can be posted and kept "sticky" at the top of forum, so new members have a place to refer for information.

Forums aren't a new thing, by any stretch of the imagination.  I've seen groups die from holding on too tightly to the "way we've always done it".  It happened to the 240SX mailing list (it's gone from a peak of 150-200 messages per day to 10-15), and I'm seeing it happen on other mailing lists.  The forum that the 240SX traffic migrated to is well over a thousand members (again), has tons of great content, and lots of good social interaction.  It's the people that make the atmosphere, not the technology.

My offer to host these forums for SMOT was simply a way to try to keep the group vibrant and growing.   I'd hate to see new members and potential contributors kept away by now outdated technology.

Mailing lists, to me, still serve a purpose in announcement-type settings.  For fostering communication on a wide range of topics (like SMOT - it's more than tech, it's rides, and social aspects, and computers, and... etc) without unnecessarily burdening those who perfer one topic over another, forums are the way to go.

For what it's worth, I'm not turning off the mailing list.  I'm just trying to offer up another method that might benefit the group.

I guess that was a little more than $.02, huh?

- Dave

[Curtis_Valk]

Dave, I like your views on off topic banter.  It's one thing to build comraderie, but on some forums EVERY SINGLE TOPIC gets littered with it.  That makes it difficult to search for answers in old topics among other things.

Thanks for your hard work and good luck with the forum.

Curtis