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Wow. It seems like the only activity this forum sees anymore are people posting things like Lindy Hop events and competitions. Justin, you killed the forums!!?!
He did. But don't say it so loud, or people might believe it.
I doubt there's that many people really worried about the format change. It has more to do with people moving on in life, and not enough new people getting involved in the forum.
I think it was somewhat prescient to get something up on facebook. There's more and more traffic headed that direciton.
Yeah, facebook's been up for a while.
If only BYUSA regulations didn't prohibit it as an advertising medium. [Emoticon not found]
James is quietly pushing to change that. I haven't brought the issue up actively, and I've only used facebook for events on occasion.
SK's right, though, I don't think it was the format change. Just the demographic change. Look at everybody with 1000+ posts on the forum. Okay, so you can't pull up the list of them any more, but think back a bit, and remember what the list was.
They've basically all moved on. The first generation has left, and the second generation was never really that into it. (Except, apparently, me).
Once upon a time, the DJ at BYU dances (especially when that DJ was Tommy) would make a few shout outs for swingutah.com . He even would do call and response so people would actually have to process it rather than having it go in one ear and out the other.
I think there initially was a psychological benefit to the post count, because people were rewarded for their efforts to get involved and talk about events online. It also had the downside of giving the regulars astronomical post counts and scaring newbies away from the forum. There are advantages to rebooting forums from scratch, not that I'd recommend killing the history of the past few years. It would be better to archive dead posts (over a year since updates) and store post counts in a char that rolls over after 255.
There are other possible rewards though. You could randomly give out a free admittance to a dance to one person active on the forums each week. You could set the bar for a quality post to prevent random spam. Or find other cheap ways to bribe people into participation. You could post polls about ways to improve the club and get more people involved. Getting other people involved should get more ideas and jump start the forum.
Meh, if it dies, it dies. The forum was created for the dancers, and not the dancers for the forum. It was a handy way of getting out information though. It will be interesting to see what fills it's place.
It's true. If we conceive of a better form for delivering both decentralized and official communication, the forum doesn't need to be saved. There may be advantages to maintaining control over our own stuff (speed, availability of content), but there are advantages to not requiring a webmaster, etc.
Ultimately, we need to decide what's important for helping the club grow in numbers and develop as dancers.
You can always cross link "official announcements" posted to swingkids on facebook, digg, etc. such that you are following the policy of not using facebook for official club business, but reaping the benefits of facebook's publicity.
Sounds like a nice loophole to me.
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