User Experiences

[Little Lou]

Sneaking in a last one under the wire...

Just to say I do think the forum's been better lately, which does suggest that a lot of the problems are down to us rather than anything to do with the structure of the forum itself. It's what we make it, isn't it?

But briefly on the main things:

I'm another supporter of the Thanks button. It was really valuable to me as an encouragement to post, because every time I received a 'thanks' it made me feel that posting was worthwhile. Something I'd hesitated over, and thought 'yeah, but everyone knows that, why bother' was actually of use to someone, and that made all the difference.

It was also good to be able to give Thanks. Not as a 'tit for tat', but as at least a way of acknowledging something when I didn't have a single useful thing to add to the discussion. I know we have 'Reputation', but that should be a big thing, a useful way to identify the posters others have found most helpful, and I suspect I've had undeserved Reputation lately when all people meant to say was 'good post'. (You can always take them back, guys. Just give me a negative on this one, and I promise not to really break your legs).

It was also good just to see them. Those lists of 'thanks' were a reminder that this still is a vibrant community, even if not all of us have the time to post that we'd like. It was a way of seeing 'hey, Grumpy Grandpa's still here' and feeling good about the whole experience.

The mod issue is also a good one. Scythe and others are right, and there's been a real problem of discussions moving away from the original post, so that many times I've thought I had something to contribute, but then seen the debate run on for two pages about something else so there was no longer any point. The usual way of dealing with this is for a mod to 'split threads' - ie cut out the off-topic posts and use them to start a new thread - but this is very hard when there's only SD and we're so rubbish at policing ourselves. If we can't have another mod, then maybe SD just needs to read us the riot act so we can tell each other off instead.

News/politics - I too would like to see more of this. Of course it needs to be relevant to prepping, but a good prepper has always got their eye out for where the danger may be coming from or any hints as to how to deal with it. Even if it doesn't affect us directly, I think we can often learn from how other people have dealt with things. We just need to be sufficiently sensible to notice when we're veering right away from the original point to discuss how much we hate America/Russia/Iran/NR/BP instead.*

Articles - I see SD has asked for more of these for the main site, but I'm not actually sure how we contribute them. Do we just PM SD or what? Could it be clearly shown somewhere for Super-Dense Posters like me?

Otherwise, I think it's down to us. I've got a real cheek saying that when I contribute so little, but Scythe and Midnitemo in particular have made a big difference lately, and the rest of us could do so much more.

So thanks for bearing with us, SD, and we await with patience your verdict on our efforts.

Lou

* It's a joke, guys. A JOKE. You know I love you really.