Announcement 4/07/2017 DPF "State of the Forum" Address and (Possibility of) DPF 2.0
I've been coming here almost daily for a year and half. I love it here. I'm all for helping whether it be a membership fee, donation button or pin donation game....count me in.
My only suggestion is to weed through the posts and get rid of (or archive) older posts more frequently. I know, in my early days, I was guilty of finding old threads (not paying attention to the date) and thinking it was active.
Thanks to all the women/men behind the curtain that makes this forum operator.
I've been coming here almost daily for a year and half. I love it here. I'm all for helping whether it be a membership fee, donation button or pin donation game....count me in.
My only suggestion is to weed through the posts and get rid of (or archive) older posts more frequently. I know, in my early days, I was guilty of finding old threads (not paying attention to the date) and thinking it was active.
Thanks to all the women/men behind the curtain that makes this forum operator.
I personally feel that it would be good to have a donate button, with maybe a special fund drive for a week or two a' la NPR but without the giveaway umbrellas . I definitely don't think that there should be a membership fee to join. New and old members may not want to contribute until they are comfortable and I'm sure some seriously just cannot afford a monthly fee. A few perks like more storage would be great, and better messaging is a must.
Just another suggestion would be to ask for pin donations and members can donate a pin (or two or three, whatever they feel like donating) and each month you auction off a pin or two or three and all the proceeds go to the website.
This is exactly why I haven't closed many (really any) threads. Unless, of course, they have been so drama-laden they have to be closed or are in blatant violation of DPF rules and cannot be edited to bring back into compliance (and so on). I was thinking, for future, maybe we can lock threads that go 3-4 weeks without a response and archive them 6-12 months after that. I was thinking that each forum could have its own archives, where its inactive threads are stored. That way, everyone can see them but they won't clutter up the active threads.good suggestion; My intent was to keep all the posts since the inception available, since there's quite a lot of good, useful info in older threads. Archiving the most popular/biggest, or most helpful threads could be a possibility, and placing them in an "archived" forum for research purposes only. But, I'd still like to keep _all_ threads since...forever, really, available. Perhaps locking threads older than, say 6 months or a year -- might be something we can do when the "new" forums come.
As far as mods go, there are my thoughts: I think activity is important within the community, but there seems to be a lot of behind the scenes things that mods do that I know I wouldn't want to do, including mediating disputes, determining whether posts should be edited/deleted, that sort of thing. I think it should be someone who is an established trader and is somewhat seasoned - has been involved in DPF for several years now and still has time to deal with the sort of stuff that mods deal with. One has to set aside their own personal feelings for particular pin traders and act as a neutral mediator when dealing with disputes and, well, that's hard to do for a younger person (sorry to insult younger people, but that's IMHO).