From: Steve Grammont (islander@midmaine.com)
Date: Fri Jul 09 2004 - 08:27:37 PDT
>Seriously, when you go to an MV event do you just talk about MVs? As
>lists grow and the members become more familiar, they tend to speak
>in more familiar terms about off topic items. Invariably, the topic
>will wander right back to the main subject in due time (as it has
>with British tea boiling vessels in their AFVs).
I moderate and host a forum discussion about military simulations. There
are over 15,000 subscribers from dozens of countries, with a few thousand
active at any one time. The forum has been around for 7 years now and
more than a handful from the beginning are still active today.
We had a lot of problems with people straying from the topic of sims and
eventually got sick of trying to squash them. So we created a "General"
section for the community to discuss everything else. This kept most of
the off topic stuff out of the other areas, and as a result the General
section became freakin HUGE (IIRC 100,000 + last year).
From this experience and others I have concluded that a healthy list or
forum can not exist without at least periodic doses of off topic chatter.
The lists and forums that stay on topic the most are the ones which have
no community, such as tech support forums that are specific to one
program. No community means few long term members, little bonding, and
in general a very short memory.
If you want a list about a passionate hobby, such as MVs, you will get
passionate people. And to think they will be ONLY passionate about
MVs... it won't happen. Therefore, when someone makes a strong
statement, there will be (and should be) a response. Such discussions
tend to burn themselves out after a day or two, but there will always be
another one (for fun or not) looming around the corner. That is just the
way it has got to be.
Short of it is... you got to take the good with the bad.
Steve
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