Re: New European GA forum

[Andy Hawkins]

Hi,

["Followup-To:" header set to rec.aviation.piloting.]
In article <38kd8896ujdu4cq7k...@4ax.com>,
nob...@nowhere.com<nob...@nowhere.com> wrote:
> www.euroga.org
>
> The existing two UK forums are almost useless now, with one being
> mostly a "pub" full of one-liners and the other having been taken over
> by self appointed private detectives and bizzare moderation practices,
> and neither keeping a lid on personal attacks etc.

I can think of 3 UK forums. I'm guessing the private detectives site is
PPRUNE. Which other one are you thinking of?

The two I frequency are UKGA and the Flyer forums.

Andy

[Andy Hawkins]

Hi,

["Followup-To:" header set to rec.aviation.piloting.]

In article <643e88djj1152uvrm...@4ax.com>,
nob...@nowhere.com<nob...@nowhere.com> wrote:
> Not sure I would rank UKGA as an "active" forum. It is only marginally
> more active than this newsgroup :) :) Along with the half a dozen
> other forums still kicking about the UK e.g. LAA, AOPA, etc. on which
> there is almost zero activity.

Agreed, UKGA's activity has dropped off an awful lot.

Are the Flyer forums the other one you discount then? Why's that? I find them
worth reading.

Andy

[Mxsmanic]

nob...@nowhere.com writes:

> www.euroga.org
>
> The existing two UK forums are almost useless now, with one being
> mostly a "pub" full of one-liners and the other having been taken over
> by self appointed private detectives and bizzare moderation practices,
> and neither keeping a lid on personal attacks etc.
>

> EuroGA is for serious aviation discussion, and will be moderated
> appropriately.

Famous last words. All public discussion forums evolve in the same way.

[Dylan Smith]

On 2013-06-05, Peter <nos...@nospam9876.com> wrote:
>>>> EuroGA is for serious aviation discussion, and will be moderated
>>>> appropriately.
>>>
>>>Famous last words. All public discussion forums evolve in the same way.
>

> Well... 6 months later, 11k posts, nobody being rude to anybody, no
> trolling.

While not wishing to be full of negativity, 6 months isn't long enough,
generally forums degenerate after a period of 2 to 5 years in my experience.

[Dylan Smith]

On 2013-06-11, Peter <nos...@nospam9876.com> wrote:
>
> Dylan Smith <dy...@alioth.net> wrote

>>While not wishing to be full of negativity, 6 months isn't long enough,
>>generally forums degenerate after a period of 2 to 5 years in my experience.
>

> There are probably reasons for that.
>
> All non-closed-group forums I know of have gone for advertising
> banners.
>
> That changes the model in several ways:
>
> 1) To stop trivial advert blockers, you need to serve the adverts as a
> part of the base site, not as external links. So the load on your
> server goes up 10x to 100x and starts to cost real money. So a lot of
> clicks becomes important. <snip>

No, it's nothing to do with that - honestly. I've seen it happen
to forums that carry no advertising whatsoever, including one I used
to run.

The usual pattern goes like this. The forum starts with a good
signal to noise ratio and carries on like this for some time, with
very minimal moderation required. However, after some period of time
(possibly quite long) the personality faults of some of the regular
contributors start manifesting themselves.

After that the shitstorm starts. Attempts at moderation are usually
futile because enough people disagree with moderation decisions and
begin to leave or argue with moderators. Regular contributors who a
re not involved in the shitstorm drift away because they just can't
be bothered to deal with it.

I've seen it happen several times. You MAY avoid it, you may even go
years before it happens (great!) but be warned -- it's very difficult
to buck human nature and sooner or later (hopefully later) it'll
happen.