If you think about it, the forum is nice only for people who sit in front of a computer all day, but what about the rest of us? When we log on to the AHA Forum and want to see what we missed over the past several hours, we need to wade through a lot of +1 on your mortgage and way to go majorvices and never get to the denny level before we find a recent topic of interest. Or even if we do find majorvices new brewery interesting it feels like we're on the outide looking in. Like we are not worthy because we don't have 500 posts.
It's not welcoming. It's not easy. It's harder to use, no matter how old I am. It doesn't fit my lifestyle (not that there's anything wrong with that). It's just that I can't stay connected all day.The people complaining would probably prefer to be reading brewing news via UseNet over a 1200 baud modem connection to their local BBS. Some people can't deal with change...
I think I can deal with change if it's a change for the good.
I never could follow TechTalk so I never tried. It is an annoying format for me.
Why? Because it only comes once a day? Because posters actually have to write a thoughtful post instead of adding a comment? I understand the immediacy of the Forum, but for some of us a polite email format is easier.
I hope I don't get ostricized for this post. I just want to understand.
Ostracized? That's really counter to what we're trying to do here. As a matter of fact, let me be the first to welcome you and say that we all look forward to your contributions!
There are a couple of things, though, that I don't understand about the complaints about moving from TT to the forum, and if you could help explain them to me I'd be most grateful. As you mentioned, you and others say you have to wade through posts to find what something if value. For the life of me, I can't see how this is different than TT, except that usually the volume of posts on TT is so low that there's less to go through. My experience with TT is that only about 10% of the posts were anything I was interested in, so I can't see how much difference there really is. And what I do like about the forum in that regard is the categorization makes it easy to see what's there and ignore what I'm not interested in. If you feel that the posts here aren't thoughtful or polite, may I suggest you haven't looked around enough? And sure there are "+1" posts because a forum is more like a conversation than a lecture....is that really such a drawback, though? Is it really that different than a post to TT that in essence says "I too have found that my problem is like Dave described".?
As to feeling like you're not "worthy" because you're new, I think that's just a normal social interaction thing. We're all homebrewers here, we all have something in common...jump right in, ask your questions, make your contributions. That's how you get to know people. And again, to me it's really no different than TT. For years, I hesitated to post on TT because I was afraid of looking like a fool in front of all the posters there whose names were iconic. But ya know what? Once I did, I found that they're friendly, normal people who loved talking about homebrewing just like I did.
jeffy, I hope I'm not coming across as challenging your points...believe me, I take all the criticisms very seriously and want to help do whatever I can to make any new forum users feel at home and enhance their experience. And I realize that there are some irreconcilable issues. One person on TT mentioned being on a 1200 baud dialup for instance. Yeah, for him the forum experience is going to be difficult and unfulfilling unfortunately. But even he could subscribe to the RSS fed and have some level of participation.
I hope you give the forum a chance and give yourself a chance to become familiar with the format and the people who post here. I hope you'll find, as I did, that this is a treasure trove of brewing info and expertise, and that the people who post here are the people you'd love to sit down and have a beer with. And I hope you'll keep coming back and asking and answering questions. It's you and the other users who give value to this forum.