I posted this on the QDMA forums tonight:
There is currently no forum on the web related to deer habitat management that has the credibility, visibility, set of knowledgeable core users, and critical mass that the QDMA forums have. Since they are ending, folks have to decide where to focus their support. It was not an easy choice for me.
I just wanted to pass on where I am headed and the criteria I used to get there.
First, let me say that I didn't have the luxury of taking the time I would have like to before making a choice. The fact that I wanted to preserve valuable information in form format meant that I had to make a choice now or risk losing the kind of access I need to these forums to easily extract the information I wanted to save.
My concern is that folks with our common passion will be distributed across so many different places that no place will achieve the critical mass and visibility to succeed. It is inexpensive to start a new forum on shared hosting but without a plan, both technical and financial, to move well beyond that and critical mass can be defeated by sluggish performance.
In order to achieve critical mass, the forum must draw nationally in my opinion. So, I eliminated forums with regional names. The names themselves will limit national level participation by many.
I'm also concerned about commercialism driving site content. So, the next thing I did was eliminate any forum that included advertising other than having a specific board for commercial ads.
I also wanted to see a significant group of core knowledgeable users dedicated to regular participation. I then wanted to see a path to critical mass.
I wanted to see some level of financial commitment or plan to ensure the platform could grow to support a growing user base presuming critical mass was eventually achieved.
It came down to two candidates for me:
deerhunterforum
and
Habitat-Talk
Deerhunterforum is new and started with a group of well respected core users here. It was started in the last few days.
Habitat-talk was started by another group of knowledgeable QDMA core forum users that became disenchanted with QDMAs position on an issue in their region. So, while it has been functionally regional, it has no regional information in the name and thus has the potential for national reach. It was started in early 2014.
I ended up choosing Habitat-talk. With over 900 members and a couple years under its belt, it is further along in hitting critical mass than Deerhunterforum. Both forums have a great group of core folks using them. John Walton who owns Habitat-talk has assured me he personally has the intent and financial wherewithal to upgrade form the current shared hosting environment the whole way to a dedicated server if and when that becomes necessary. Deerhunterforum is still too new to expect to have a long-term funding plan in place.
So why not just use many forums? The way I use forums is not to just post willy-nilly. I monitor every thread I post to and provide follow-up posts as needed to support folks using the thread. I can't do that across multiple forums. I do, as time permits, read a number of forums and I will be reading and watching Deerhunterforum as much as possible.
Others may have different criteria or analysis, but these are mine.
Thanks,
Jack
