Actually, I wish there were a way to merge both the CornSnakes.com and the Corn Snakes forums on this site so that they would be mirror images. Two sites sharing the same database. I have talked to the vBulletin people and my programmer, and it just doesn't seem like this can be done. One problem would be registration names. There are going to be many that are used in both systems, but are different people. Perhaps if I had seen the future when I set them both up, things could have been done differently. But remember, a lot of this was done in panic mode when James Thornton pulled the plug on the server a couple of years ago, so elegance in design was NOT top on my priority list back then.
But in reality, the CornSnakes.com forums is only a small subset of all of the forums here on this site. I have to admit that I am somewhat discouraged that they are not being used more, but I did figure on it taking a while for people to frequent them. But still, it is discouraging to think maybe I wasted my time setting them up. Fortunately the design of this message board is such that the number of forums seems to have very little impact on most functionality of the site. So I could have thousands of forums here and they would just be there whenever people wanted to use them. Everyone else would not suffer because of their existence.
I specifically set up a tree layout so that someone walking in the front door would not be just overwhelmed by the number of forums facing them right off the bat. I think I was fairly logical about the layout. I do think some rearrangement is needed for the forums in the "Admin and Other Irrelevancies" section as well as the several discussion forums that have sprung up around the BOI area, but for now that is on the back burner waiting for inspiration on how best to tackle that.
The real problem is that I shouldn't have waited so long to set the discussion forums up, I guess, and should have done it from the beginning. But to be honest, until JeffB stepped on my toes, I really had no intention of doing all of the discussion forums and was perfectly happy leaving that to his site. Matter of fact, I actively pointed people to his site for such things.
When push comes to shove, I guess the real reason people don't use a forum is because no one else is. Kind of a catch-22. And I am guilty of it myself, since I certainly could be putting up caresheets in the Corn Snakes forums here and plugging in little tidbits here and there. Because that is really what is needed. Traffic follows existing traffic patterns. I guess you just can't tell people "Hey go to my forums and discuss things there!" You have to say "Hey, why don't you join me there for a discussion? There are some interesting things being talked about..."
And for the record, my intention is NOT to go head to head with kingsnake.com over anything. My intention is to give people an alternative, particularly in a business sense. It actually disturbed me greatly to see how many people have hinged their entire future in this industry on JeffB's whims. There are people afraid to speak up against him for fear of his getting pissed and cutting off their sole source of income by banning them from his site. This is foolish on the part of those people to be locked in like that. And there have been several instances related on this site alone that tend to drive home that point. JeffB's treatment of me alone in relation to his demand to delete Adam Block's thread was quite enough for me to read the writing on the wall. I believe I have made this quite clear in other writings.
I've had 10,000 flyers printed up promoting this site and have sent out bundles to several people whom are willing to distribute them for me at shows they attend and to stick in with shipments they have going out. I welcome anyone else whom is willing to give a hand at this effort as well.
Oh, and as far as my SerpenCo.com site is concerned, I actually did believe I would take a substantial hit in traffic after pulling out from having my links on kingsnake.com. But guess what? It hasn't taken a dip at all. I've been monitoring the hits on my FaunaTopSites.com site as well as the CPanel traffic stats and it hasn't changed at all.
So anyway, in a nutshell, I guess it is up to us to spend some time in the discussion forums to give people things to read there. That will encourage contributing discussions and hopefully lay out the welcome mat for new people to join on in. Waiting for the other guy to make the first step just isn't going to work, it seems.
Oh yeah, and there are a lot of new registrations coming in! I have the system send me an email each time there is a new registration, and I had to automatically dump them to their own folder to keep from getting my inbox so cluttered up.
This is a good thing.....
