How To Tell If Seniorsonly.club Is The Best Forum

While I enjoy and appreciate being favorably compared to other forums, this is a separate forum, and I would hope that other forums wouldn't have to lose members in order for us to gain them. I'm not really competing with any other forums, other than in the search engine results where similar sites are automatically competing with one another. As members here, you are surely free to participate in other similar forums as well, but as the administrator here, I'll limit my efforts to this one. If I have something to say that might interest anyone here, I'll say it here, and I don't visit any of the other senior forums.

I'd like this forum to be focused on conversation, so we are unlikely to have all of the bells and whistles here. I do want to add some stuff but it seems that one thing after another takes up either my time or my money, mostly the time. Adding sub-forums doesn't require a lot of time, or any money, so that's something I can easily do once I'm persuaded that there's a need of it. I don't, however, want to add something simply because another senior forum has it. On the contrary, I built this forum without referring to any of the other senior forums on purpose, because I didn't want it to be a copy of any other senior forum. In this way, if this forum included areas that you guys find to be enjoyable, they were there because I thought of it, or one of you thought of it, not because I copied it from another forum.

A lot of our forum topics are fairly standard, I would expect, and other forums probably have something similar, but I hope that is not true of the bulk of them. More importantly, since I am involved in the forum discussions myself, I have added things that I am interested in or which I felt others in the fifty plus age range might be interested in, as well as a few topics that serve as spider food, enhancing our position in the search engine results.

As a result, some things are different than you may be used to elsewhere. Real names, or names that appear to be real names, for example. After years of trying to have a discussion with people with names like "vdemon," "GreenSkye," or "BlueDog99," I thought it might be more relaxing to talk to people with real names, even if they aren't the ones they were born with. I don't know how anyone else feels about it, but I like it and I have to believe that someone else might be able to appreciate it as well.

I added an "Introductions" thread because so many of you asked for it, but I didn't really want one and am not convinced that it was the right thing to do. You asked for it because you're used to seeing an "Introductions" thread in other forums that you have been involved in and you'd like me to move it to a more prominent place because other forums have it in a more prominent place.

Many forum administrators require that a new member post in the "Introductions" thread before posting anywhere else, and I've always disliked that, particularly when I wanted to jump right into whatever discussion brought me there to begin with. Too often, in other forums, I'm left not knowing the person any better than I did before they introduced themselves.

My preference was for people to feel free to jump into whatever conversation they were interested in and, as you might do if you were about to join in on any other conversation where you didn't know the participants, you might feel more comfortable introducing yourself on your first post, wherever that might be. Or not, as we would come to know something about you from what you say here anyhow.

Because of the requests, I added an "Introductions" thread, but no one is required to use it. It's not that hard to find, as it's the only sub-topic to the first forum in the first category of the site, so I think I'm going to leave it there.

Please don't feel as if I am not being responsive. I have added some very well used sub-forums here at the request of other members and there are some other good ideas in the hopper that I'll be creating before long. What I would ask you to do before requesting a topic, however, is make sure that you want it because it is something that the membership wants to talk about, and not because some other forum has that topic.

As for rules, we don't have a lot of rules here, and I don't really want a lot of rules. That doesn't mean that anything goes, of course, but I don't want to carry difficulties from other forums over to here. We all have opinions, including some that we feel strongly about, and when someone questions or discounts my opinion in a forum discussion, I might get snippy about it. I try not to, but I will sometimes. That's human nature, and if I recognize it in myself, I am apt to excuse it in others, but only so long as it doesn't develop into something more than a one-time reaction to an opinion.

There is room here for all sorts of opinions, and these opinions won't always agree. However, we need to try to respect one another enough to allow a difference in opinion, and to understand that others may react to opinions that we express here in ways that are not necessarily agreeable. That's where the rules come into play: 1: Try not to be too offensive; and 2) Try not to be too easily offended. I really believe that these rules ought to be enough for civil people to have civil discourse.

Not everyone enjoys disagreement or conflict. I understand that, and this is why I added the "Hot Button Issues" category. Within the forums in this category, there will be a greater tolerance for disagreement, and even an occasional reaction, as long as it's reasonably civil and not sustained. Please don't test the limits of that. There will be much less tolerance for incivility in other parts of the forum, and I am even less interested in moderating disputes that were brought here from another forum.

That said, I truly do love that you are enjoying yourselves here and want that to continue as long as you're interested. From time to time, I might do things with the hope of bringing others here to join us, because we need to have new members to replace those who leave for one reason or another, but I am not particularly interested in adding a whole lot of people in a short amount of time. Administrators who do that are usually interested in monetizing their forum, often by selling it. My interest is in providing a place where you can discuss things that matter to you, and where you can enjoy yourselves, and where I can do the same.

I don't enjoy handling disputes, and I rarely ban members from the forum, except for spammers, trolls and obvious troublemakers. I don't have any moderators because I haven't seen a great need for them and because, in other forums that I have run, I have found that moderators tend to want long lists of rules that they can enforce with an iron hand, and they end up getting angry with me anyhow because I won't ban half the forum because the other half is demanding it.

If I were to have anything approaching a moderator, I would be looking for something more along the lines of a concierge rather than a sheriff.