Oh NO!! Not another forum!!!

I am not at all certain about adding this forum, but in some respects I think it is justified. The BOI is SUPPOSED to be specifically about people and businesses in the trade. In particular their business practices, interaction with buyers and sellers, and generally the way they conduct business. But there have been several posts placed in the BOI where someone is seeking information about a product, or about the quality of animals being sold. Although an argument can certainly be made that the quality of a product and the person or business selling them is so closely bound as to be inseparable, I don't believe that is the case in all instances. Particularly in the case of hard goods, especially when they may be available from multiple sources. Live animals, where the care and maintenance could be an influencing factor of the quality, may be more of a gray area.

So, I would like to hear arguments pro and con about the birth of this forum. Is it feasible to draw a line between the product and the producer? Can you say "So and So REALLY sucks as a business person, but he sells a good product" about someone? If so, which forum would be most appropriate for this sort of posting if you were inquiring about the PRODUCT?

Rich,
I think it's a great idea. After all, if a person is going to drop a lot of money on something, like cages, they are going to want to weigh the pros and cons of Vision vs Neodesha vs Rubbermaid vs anything else. Having this forum makes it easy to find this kind of discussion instead of having to go through the General Business Discussion or the BOI. I hope you decide to keep it.

Heather

I agree completely!

Good idea Rich. Keep em coming.

While one maybe able to make a distinction between a business/person and their product, I just can't see that this forum will get much use. There is a limited number of things that can be discussed, and, unless the search function is never used, I think they would run out pretty quick. I could be wrong about this, only time will tell, but I think this is a bit too specialized.

Richard,

I certainly do have to agree with you about the specialization, but that is my strategy with this site. Look at all of the specialized forums I have set up, and you will see I am trying to be consistent with that strategy.

Yes, it is too specialized for today, but I am looking 2 to 5 years down the road when people (I believe) will likely recognize that there is no alternative to specialization with the total amount of information being thrown at them.

Generalized catch-all forums will soon become as obsolete as the slide rule once people learn to utilize the better tool. I just believe it is the next logical step, and I'm just getting there before the rush.

IMHO, of course.

I'm wondering a bit if too much specialization just confuses things. Take two questions that I know that I'll have in the near future:

1) What cages with specifications X, Y, and Z would people recommend?

2) Which breeders of X type of animal would people recommend?

The first can be asked (I believe) in the Discussion... General... Caging... Forum and the second can be asked in the Discussion... Snakes... "Type X"... Forums. Now, granted, I'd place the questions there in part because of "best fit" and not "perfect fit". But, not to bring up that *other* site, but I can't count the number of times on ks.com I see caging questions in places other than the caging forum or species-specific questions in the general forums, etc. I'm not really weighing in against the more specific forums, just wondering where the line gets drawn. I understand that there has to be some balance between specificity and generality, and I appreciate not having to read through posts not applicable to me and my pets, but I also don't have to read through dozens of forums to get what little information I may want...

I won't really object to another forum, just voicing the opinion that I'd rather have the product questions welcomed in the forums they were most applicable to rather than in their own separate forum.

This sort of problem can arise no matter how you slice the bread. For instance, if someone were interested in the best cage styling and manufacturer for a cage specifically for an emerald tree boa, which forum would be most appropriate? There is no defense against information that may cross lines and cannot be easily categorized in a single most appropriate forum.

Yes, there most certainly can be TOO many forums as easily as there can be not nearly enough. I would rather err on the side of too many, as with time and the increase in people coming onto the net every day, this will be a self resolving problem. How many of you remember when basically the ONLY forum format we had available was rec.pets.herp? Look at how far it has progressed from those days and then extrapolate into the future. Even what I have done here will not cover all the bases in the future. I foresee in the future that there will be message boards dedicated to what are now just separate forums here. Can you really doubt that there will be a message board dedicated to the genetics of the ball python or corn snake in the future?

The biggest problem, to me, would be to have too broad of a category, which later on becomes obviously in need of being broken up further into two or more specific forums. To be able to keep the information within the appropriate forum afterwards, someone would have to go in and manually move those threads into the correct forum. Quite frankly, that is a chore I would rather avoid as much as possible. Not that I think there is any chance that I am psychic enough to predict what may be needed 8 years from now, but I'm trying to do a best guess estimate based on the types of messages I have seen posted in multiple other sites as well as my own. The target is 2 to 5 years for my plans.

And maybe this will all fail just because it is more complex than most people will want to deal with. That definitely could be the case. But this is no different than many other decisions someone has to make when trying to gauge the public's movements, and plan accordingly. A lot of guesswork is involved, to be sure.

And I guess one of my failings would have to be that I try to shoot for the upper end of the cerebral spectrum. Certainly there are some people out there that have never even registered with this system simply because it was too complicated for them to figure out. Well, I am sorry about that, but there is nothing I am going to do about it at all. I certainly could have picked a much simpler message board, but I didn't, and I had reasons for this decision. I knew this from the start and was prepared to have this site fail because of it. The fact that it did not, genuinely encourages me to try raising the bar a little bit more.

Fortunately, this is not what I rely on for my income. So I really have no need to lose sleep over it either way. So if this doesn't work, I can laugh at it later on and try something else.

The only real way to find out is by trying it. So that's what I am doing.

Rich,

I think it's a great idea. I know there are a limited number of products per se, but the product industry is growing as well, and new "models" of everything from hooks to tanks to lighting will be out regularly.

Go for it.

Terese

Speaking as a retailer I think this a a good forum to have. there are an ever increasing number of new products on the market. Hagen for example has just added quite a few new products to its ExoTera line of reptile products, and is planning on even more. I see this more a forum for beginers and dabblers in the hobby. You long time and dedicated keepers already know what works for you and may not really be interested in most of the new products available, but the newcomers that are being sold some of this stuff should have a place to come to get suggestions and ideas. Suggestions other than "don't buy anything a pet shop sells because all they do is sell crap that doesn't work and all they want to do is get you to spend more money"

Steve Schindler
Tropical Oasis

Steve, even us old dogs can learn new tricks, though.

For instance, after using discreet mouse cages for years now, I am thinking seriously about something along the line of Freedom Breeder rodent cages to replace my entire setup. Actually, that was the reason I put up this forum. I want a place where I can ask about such things and felt certain that other people were likely in the same boat with me.

Of course, there is going to be overlap with other forums, but I don't see any way to avoid that.

Thanks.