Shiny forum things

/me sends Chris a plate of warm toll house cookies.

Oryx's latest sig: "All bedbugs mate via a process termed traumatic insemination. Instead of inserting their genitalia into the female's reproductive tract as is typical in copulation, males instead pierce females with hypodermic genitalia and ejaculate into the body cavity."

/me shudders and makes note to change Question Number One from "Do you Match?" to "Are there any Bedbugs in your family?"

Logical and orderly as always, Mr. Spock.

As for forums scaling, I think that they do...to a certain extent. There is some point at which using a forum to ask questions and get answers becomes unwieldy at best, and unhelpful at worst. Some of the very large corporations have forums...Honda comes to mind. There must be millions of registered users. The problem is that, for many of the larger forums, there's no consistent "community" of regulars. So you tend to get answers from a large pool of infrequent visitors who may or may not know what they're talking about.

As long as a forum has that core community, some sense of purpose and continuity, then it can thrive, and provide good service. Lose that, either through attrition and lack of interest, or by too much dilution, and the forum becomes slow to respond, and/or less reliable.

That's my take on it.

I'll add one other thing: Products that do have active forums with a sense of community SELL ME PRODUCTS. Several times, I've decided to make major purchases simply because that product or service had a group of enthusiastic users, in the form of a lively discussion forum.

I am so tired of hearing the term "Does not scale". Can someone think of another one, please?

I want to thank everyone who contributed (so far!) on this thread, and let you know that your postings ... in some cases direct quotes ... have been used to good purpose. Qie and I have been bopping around Lindenland, evangelizing and trying to get them enthused about supporting us.

THEIR ONLY REAL-TIME INTERACTIVE SUPPORT ORGANIZATION!!!

No tickets, no phones, no queues. Ask a question, get an answer. poof. that's us.

Lol! and sometimes you get a laugh too.

and ... sometimes maybe you get dumped on. Variety is the spice of life.

Anyway, we have no promises as yet from the Lindens that they'll actually do anything. But ... again ... it is not unpromising. They are still talking. In fact, they're actively asking for proposals, they want to hear more. So life is good.

Stay tuned.

p.s. Qie is the best guy to work with you could ever find. Just so you know.'

I didn't see this thread the first time around, so I'm glad it got brought up again. I'm really surprised that nobody mentioned the New Resident Kit. I still haven't read what's in there, but I've given away a ton of them. I've got one sitting next to each of my money trees and it's common to see a few get picked up every day. Off the top of my head, I can't remember who it was that started that (my apologies), but it was a great collaboritive forum effort that has helped countless people.