harveyc

I personally would prefer not to see forums broke out by global regions, etc. because, as Pauly indicated, many of us have similar climates (i.e., I've been chatting with Kalabrian in southern Italy and with Dr. Parmar about the Hill Banana of India).

Paulo, as Bob said, your comments don't contain anything that should upset anybody. If I understand you correctly, your experience with the forums at Dave's Garden with their e-mail newsletter is an endorsement of the idea I started out this thread with. I think it would be worth a try if some volunteers would help write it up (maybe a hot topic or a few from each sub-forum could be covered by someone different?).

There are certainly some posts which can be offensive, though I don't know it's usually been bad enough for someone to withhold commenting, but you may be correct about that. Maybe instead of having a "thanks" button we should have an anonymous rating for each post. If someone is getting some negative ratings, that might be a clue to them to tone it down. Maybe our wizard Jarred could even program the forum to give someone a time-out (30 minute, 4 hour, or whatever suspension) if they get a specified number of negative ratings in a certain period of time. Just a thought (not necessarily a good one, I've just dreamt it up! LOL).

I think our forums run pretty well so I don't know that we need to change anything, but sending out a periodic (monthly, semi-monthly) e-mail out to folks about "hot topics" might bring in greater participation, more ideas, etc. Just more-around fun, okay??!!

Cheers,

Harvey

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