One of those ideas that has been lurking in the background for a long while, but now with In Praise of Shadows imminent it feels like time for a proper talk about a TYFTH forum. I’m grateful to a couple of Horsers for recently bringing up the topic, giving me a kick to look into how possible it would be with all the time restrictions I seem to be battling lately.
Seems like a bare bones WordPress forum would be doable with very little trouble (famous last words), which would at least be a start. Making it even slightly attractive might be beyond me, mind, so any advice from those who know would be welcome.
Interest around the compilation might mean a few new arrivals to the site, and potentially a new group of recruits to the TYFTH community. Even if dreams of the forum being a long-awaited replacement for the FINRG site turn out to be too optimistic, it’d be nice if the current TYFTH crew had a proper place for discussion and I wouldn’t be too bothered if it remained as niche as that.
Let me know if you think this is something worth pursuing – I’m confident that a release date for the compilation will be announced in a couple of days, and a simple forum could be the next project after that.
If you get the time to, gopher it! This corner of the community deserves a centralized spot for discussion. Not sure what to offer in the way of advice, but I’d imagine those responsible for the Freeform Forum might be able to help.
Something like a Discord group or a Slack could be useful as a web-based, persistent IRC replacement, with logging and different channels for different topics, although less formal and more spontaneous than asynchronous communication over a forum.
For announcements and stuff like compiling lists and advice, it is easier to keep track to that with a forum.
Thanks for the thoughts! Thats’s another vote for Discord or Slack – although I’m definitely more on the side of the permanence of a forum, there’s something to be said for both and I’ll be looking into that too.
Having used both of those discussion platforms, I would by far prefer a forum. I think a community as unique as this one deserves a more formal base for communication where messages won’t disappear. (On a side note, both my laptop and myself hate leaving an extra window open. 😛 )
longtime lurker here,
A while back there was a freeform forum (freeformforum.net), but activity there gradually died down, until it disappeared.
I think a TYFTH forum would suffer from the same activity issues…
Seeing as how setting up a forum is time consuming (and you seem to be short enough on time as is 🙂 ), you could simply create a “Random chat” blogpost where people can have discussions in the reply section, as an alternative to a forum. I’ve seen it before on wordpress sites with small communities, and those pages always seem to be lively enough.
If a forum will be created, I probably won’t post much on it, as I like lurking more than participating (with the exception of IRC channels).
Nonetheless, my vote would go to the Discourse forum software. No idea how difficult that is to set up / maintain though.
It would be nice to have a place that like minded free-form fans can gather again
Just yes 🙂