Why is the Forum dead

[Phil H]

Well, seeking an empirical answer to the question "why is the forum dead?" I created a survey and sent it out with one of my series of extremely popular emails.

I got 15 whole responses.

Perversely, the number one reason given for not using the forum is that people don't post on the forum. I'm not a trained logician but ...

The second most popular issue was that it doesn't work well on mobile devices. Well, I'm doing some research into fixing that. Whether it involved dumping phpBB or not to get a good, usable site is a question.

From a committee perspective, the forum is the best place for things. As I mentioned earlier, Facebook stuff is pretty ephemeral. I can send out all-club emails but that's only one-way communication. Plus I don't know how accurate my email list is.

I do suspect that people could use the forum features better. It's not the most intuitive. The read/unread marks can be useful but to start with you have to set everything to "read". There's a link above the forum list on the right that does this. From then on, any new posts will be highlighted for you. Also on the left there is a "View active topics" that shows recent activity.

I'm looking at the possibilities for a whole revamp of the ACC Web Stuff. If anyone out there has 1337 sk1llz they can contribute then phil@addiscombe.org