Forums Involvement

Okay, I don't know what's going on here, near the end, so I am going to have to ban everyone in this thread. In fact, I might even ban everyone who has read this thread, considered reading this thread, or who knows anyone who has read this thread.

On-topic, I was involved with forums since the mid-1980s, when I was a Sysop of a BBS that carried several forum networks, and have run a few forums since getting on the Internet, a couple of which are still going on, albeit without me. Today, while I do participate in Facebook, I far prefer forum participation, and probably always will.

 

I was joking, @Gloria Mitchell.

 

Since that fits the topic suggested in the thread title, I'll try to answer that here. It may be no surprise that there were a lot of reasons, and maybe some others that I haven't really thought through.

It'll be long, though, because I like long.

On top of them all might be that it's in my personality. I have never done well as the hired help. By that, I mean that, while I have never been on top of the food chain in my work experiences, the jobs that I found enjoyable were those in which I was given a goal, but not constant supervision, with someone telling me how to go about achieving this goal.

Among the jobs that I hated was working as a drill press operator. The material came to me with markings as to where I was to drill the hole, the drill press was preset (by someone else) to drill the hole to a specific depth, and if I broke a drill bit, I had to press a button to summon someone who was qualified to change the drill bit. If caught changing the drill bit myself, as occurred on a couple of occasions, that was a reprimand. It was a job that was the perfect candidate for automation but, since automation hadn't been developed yet, the company did its best to make robots of its employees.

I like being able to decide how to accomplish something, and then to go about seeing if that works, making changes as necessary. If my job consists solely of pressing down on the handle of a drill press until it comes to a stop, they couldn't pay me enough to enjoy that job.

In other entry-level jobs, there would be a supervisor telling me how to do something and when to do it, not because of any vast experience that taught him that this was the one best way to do something, but because that was what he was taught, and he never thought it through. Not all supervisors were like that, of course, but it was difficult working for those who were. Taking instruction from people who are dumber than I am is difficult for me.

Once I became a supervisor myself, the job got better. While I still answered to people above me, they weren't micromanaging what I was doing, so long as I accomplished whatever goals had been set, and I did my very best to make sure that I wasn't micromanaging the people who I was responsible for supervising. For example, as long as his own job is being done, it makes sense to encourage someone to learn a little about the next job in the chain of progression, rather than making them start from scratch once they got the promotion, and it makes everyone's job more interesting.

In most of the jobs that I have held, I fairly quickly reached a level where no one was looking over my shoulders all the time, or I quit. It wasn't that I was all that ambitious, or that I was seeking success, but that I didn't want to have to shut my brain off when I reported for work. I wasn't looking for an office job.

You will eventually see the connection with managing forums, I think.

While I was working as a paramedic in Los Fresnos, Texas, our EMS region was mostly rural and, while we had some very busy times, we also had periods in which we might go a week or two without a call, yet I was on duty twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week, as the EMS director and only paid person with the otherwise volunteer ambulance company.

I had bought a Coleco Adam, one of the first home computers, before I left California, and had since bought a TRS-80 computer, so I set up a BBS. I won't go into all the details of a Bulletin Board Service, but they were one of the precursors to the Internet. Only four people could log into my BBS at one time, five including me. They could play games (the graphics game, Doom, began as a BBS game, and there was also LORD, based on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as several other multi-player games, which included people who weren't logged in at the time), or they could chat with one another.

BBS's also included forums, which were my favorites. There was a regional network, which included BBS's within our local calling area. Some high schools had BBS systems, a large children's home ran a BBS, there was a Catholic BBS run by a priest, and several individuals, like me, had their own BBS. My BBS was a hub for the regional network. Other BBS's were set to automatically call into my BBS every hour, or however often the Sysops (system operators) wanted to. New posts to the regional network were transferred to my hub system, and the hub system passed them along to the BBS systems, as they called in. New messages were visible immediately only to members who called into the local BBS, but most systems were no more than an hour behind. Within this network, there were forums, much like this one. Any Sysop could set up a forum on the network as long as it didn't violate the network's policies, which usually prohibited illegal or sexually oriented forums.

There were also national and international networks. I was a regional hub for two of the international networks. At least once a day, my BBS had to transfer data to the state hub in Dallas, which was a long-distance call from me. As you may recall, long distance charges were high, so the BBS was set to call in at 2:00 am, when the rates were lower. I could also force calls at anytime in between, so if I was involved in an interesting discussion on one of the forums on the network, I would force calls at different times in order to get new posts. Other hub Sysops did the same thing, I know, because I would occasionally receive data transfer calls from England and Australia, as well as a BBS somewhere in Africa. My phone rates were from $300 to $500 a month, some of which was recouped through member charges and hub fees. But it was a hobby, not a business.

Shortly after public Internet access came to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, I became involved with the Open Directory Project, a worldwide volunteer-operated web directory which closed only a couple of years ago. My wife and I met while working for the ODP. The ODP had an internal forum.

Moving from the BBS to the ODP to Internet forums was a natural progression, I guess. Directory software and forum software are very similar on the back-end. In fact, several of the directory software companies also produce forum software. Directories have categories, a tree-like set of subcategories, and site listings, while forums have categories, forums, sub-forums, threads, and posts. So I learned how to set up forums through my years as a BBS Sysop, and learned the administrative end of operating the software from directories.

So here we are. I was involved in another senior's forum that some of you were also involved with. When the forum administrator told me he was closing it, I asked about buying it from him, but it turned out to be way cheaper for me to start my own.

I have been a member of several forums, and I try to avoid some of the things that annoyed me about some of these forums, in the process probably annoying members who were more comfortable with those things.

Before I started this forum, I discussed some of the ideas with other forum administrators in an admin forum, every one of whom told me I would never be able to maintain a forum that used first and last names, rather than handles, because people were too used to joining forums using a handle. However, nearly all of these people had no problem joining Facebook using a name. This is our fourth year and, while there are certainly larger senior forums on the Internet, I never intended this to be the largest senior forum available. We do lose some people who cannot understand why we don't accept handles, but there's no need for several forums doing everything the same way, and these people would have simply been upset about something else, in all likelihood.

That's it. Are you sorry you asked?