Local Forum

Hello!

I did a quick search but didn't come up with much, but I know this has to have been discussed before. Has it ever been considered creating a forum for locals to get together, i.e. southeast, mid-atlantic, west coast? Kinda similar to how a lot of automotive forums do it.

I think something like this could be beneficial for many reasons. For example, I'm pretty good at wiring up a Ranco and could help out Joe Blow around the corner or I'm having difficulty getting a good cool/hot spot range in my rack and this guy 30-minutes away could take a look at it. Not to mention, some of the best fun and friends I have had have come from G2G's (get togethers) where we all get together in a parking and share and discuss modifications we have done to our rides or just to get together and race go-karts or dine-out.

I'm not seeing many cons besides exploiting it for local sales, but then again I don't know the ins and outs of running a site.

Where do you stand on this? Any link to where it's been discussed before? Am I totally missing that this already exists, lol.

Thanks.

I can speak for experience from my own site. Members asked repeatedly for such local forums, and we finally decided to give it a shot.

First off, in order to be "local" you have to create a LOT of forums because folks are from all over the world. Even dividing the US up into a manageable number of chunks, you're not all that "local" with most of the folks in the same zone because the zones are still pretty big. To make smaller zones would increase the number of individual forums exponentially.

We still tried it out, however. And after an initial flurry of posts in a FEW of the zones...they died out into virtually zero traffic. A new post pops up in one of them every now and then...but they don't get much attention, unfortunately.

It's a nice idea...but from my personal experience, it's simply not an efficient or beneficial use of forum resources.

Yeah, I tend to agree with Judy about this. The general discussion forums on this site are STILL not used anywhere near what I would consider as being "healthy" considering the total number of registered members this site has. To add even more forums to further dilute the spread of what few discussion posts members are making here, just does not seem like a wise idea to me.

Maybe in the future, if I see traffic increasing to a level where something of that nature would have a reasonable chance of success, I would then reconsider it.

But thanks for the suggestion, anyway. Hopefully you see my (and apparently others') perspective in this.

Yep, I definitely understand. I didn't think about the traffic part. It seems like a majority of the members are browsers, which I see nothing wrong with since the focus is the classifieds. I see a ton of members on every morning and after hours of hitting "new posts," I'm lucky to see a handful of posts that aren't for sale ads lol. But I love this place and the way it operates! Definitely an asset to the reptile community the way it is.

Thanks Judy and Rich.

If there is a local reptile sale or convention you could always go, find a couple of like minded people and get their info and then start up a free yahoogroups type group. I'm thinking there is one local to Houston for instance and people do meet up from time to time.

Like this:
http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query...sort=relevance

What bout setting up local "USER GROUPS"? That doesn't take up any forum space per see? I know the usergroups probably dont get used much... but maybe user's dont understand them either

And remember, anyone can create a social group here. Here's a list of the ones that currently exist.
http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/forums/group.php

If you wanted to try it out you could create one for VA herpers for instance. You'd probably need to make a post in the General BS forum about it to make people aware it was there.
They're just a place for people interested in the topic to socialize informally in sort of an ad hoc forum setup.

there used to be a yearly gathering of some local folks in my area from another site and it was great fun! The trick is finding someone willing and able to host in a central location for all involved with a large enough house.. and as Judy mentioned, a lot of times interest quickly wanes. Still a great idea. Also try meeting up with people at your local reptile society meetings (if there's one in your area), you can find all sorts of people at those meetings in every age range, at least from my experiences.

Awesome! Thanks for the replies everyone. I'm actually in a "Mid-Atlantic" user group right now but who would have guessed it... it isn't used that much LOL.

There is a Mid-Atlantic member's group forum over on my CornSnakes.com forum site (http://www.cornsnakes.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=43), but honestly, it's not being used much.

I once tried the personal forums thing here on this site, but it didn't go ever well at all and I discontinued it. This site is just odd in the way people participate within it. I can post the same new thread in this site and a couple of others I run and get a half dozen replies on those other sites, but often not a single one here. I'm sure others get the same results, so of course they just stop trying to get conversations going.

I guess this is really just the land of the lurkers....