Need your input!!!
 

Well, part of my duties as Gecko Forum Moderator is to help get this forum moving with information, photos, and plain old socialization and fun. I find it puzzling that with as many Rhacodactylus and Knobtail breeders/keepers there are out there that his forum isn't more "happening". I would really like to hear everyone's thoughts and ideas... for example; do we need a separate Rhacodactylus Forum so we can draw a crowd like the Repashy and Pangea Forums? How can we attract some of the Leopard Gecko Forum's 'multi-gecko species' folks to post here more frequently? Do we need contests and/or other incentives?

Come on and let's brain-storm!!!

I think a separate forum for the rhacs would be great. My sister and I have just started to breed cresteds. We need helpful info about that. We love posting pics of our lovelies, but we also would like to branch out into other rhacs eventually, so a forum with that kinda specific discussion would be really helpful.

Let's just post pictures of our Picta Geckos!!

I don't see a seperate forum for rhacodactylus working, for a few reasons. First, if you create a seperate rhac forum that does get some traffic, the regular gecko forum will still be inactive (if not more so) than it is now. You'd be trading one small-traffic forum for another and a little-to-no-traffic forum. Now you might consider renaming this forum to something like "Rhacodactylus and Other Gecko Species" in order to put the Rhacodactylus name out there and more visible, but it still covers the other species.

I do agree with you that the best course of action is to hit up the Leo forum since many of these people are your multi-gecko species crowd. You need something that will help increase awareness that this forum exists and give people a reason to post here; maybe something as simple as a photo contest where people have some incentive to come here and post. Photo contests get pretty old pretty quickly, so maybe not, but you still need to give people a reason to post. At the moment the people aren't coming, and we need to examine why.

My guesses as to why people don't post here:
- Not enough traffic (they think they won't get a response or that people just don't care)
- They can already (get the info faster / are signed up) somewhere else. There's so many forums already set up for geckos (geckosunlimited, Repashy, pangea, KS, etc) that getting people here and involved is kind of tricky.
- Not enough meaningful discussion (my main reason). I don't mind looking at picture posts but in all honesty, they don't encourage me to get involved. If you look at the front page of the forum there is very little discussion of sales, care, genetics, species descriptions, ect. This might tie into number two (get the info somewhere else faster- eg. Repashy forums), but it's not like the leo forum where the majority of posts encourage active participation and debate. Photo posts just don't tie people emotionally to the forum. Because of this, people tend to avoid real discussion because it will be covered by photo posts which, in all honesty, I don't think many people really care about.

All this info is merely speculation and my opinion, but I hope it helps a little bit.

Probably renaming it so that it's clear there's a focus on rhacs would work out all right.
It may very well be true that you'd just have two low traffic forums. Photo contests are a good idea to attract attention, but again that doesn't really encourage very long threads or deep conversation. One guy posts pic, three more guys say cute gecko, the end. I agree that what is needed is a few dedicated people to spend some time checking the posts regularly, replying quickly, and posting new threads. I haven't been coming here much because the conversation doesn't seem to move very fast. If we change that it will all pick up. I will certainly try to be more dilligent about posting here. It would be great to be able to come to fauna and have the same kinda conversations about other gecks that we have about leos.

I agree with a lot of what Brian said. There just isn't many stimulating threads, so I just check in every couple days or so to see what's happening.

Unfortunately, I am one of those people that if I have a question about my Rhacs, I go to the Pangea Rhac Forum. I am fairly new to Rhacs and want my questions answered by experienced Rhac breeders. And, maybe I am wrong, but I don't know of many "experienced" Rhac breeders that visit this forum. I would love to stay here and get my questions answered though.

If we could find a way to get more rhac breeders to post here, that would be awseome!

Good input, folks! Keep 'em coming!!! Once we have enough good suggestions I'll make up a POLL and we can be able to easily see where the majority of people would like to see happen. Participation is the best way everyone can be heard and make an impact.

I also don't see any reason that we can't recruit people to come over here from the 'other' forums, too. For example, Kelli sent me an email inviting me over to Fauna's Leopard Gecko Forum back when there really wasn't much traffic here and I was one of the "Power-Posters" and Sponsors at KS. Once I started getting more involved with Fauna, I began to spread the word as well.

Personally, I would like to see the discussion forums go back to having photo sub-forums so we don't have to wade through so many posts to get to the informative subject matter. I'll bet that would skew the traffic numbers more realistically.

I totally agree! Maybe we can have Webslave change it back.

Definitely need to seperate it. I was against combining them in the past, and I'm still against it. It's one of the main reasons I've been holding back from participating as much in the Leo forum. I've always been more interested in actual discussion (sure photo posts are fine, but they get a little old after 90% of the posts are photos).

I think haveing a few seperate geckos forums would not be bad. ALso we could have a photo contest? People like pictures.