Internet Forums and Blogs

Rick Borstein, FAAS President/Webmaster

As a webmaster, I often am asked if my club hosts a forum. First of all, what is a forum? The amazing on-line dictionary Wikipedia defines it thusly:

The barebones definition of a forum is the ability for people to start threads and reply to other people’s threads. (Someone posts a message which is visible to everyone, you read it and then have the option to post a reply which will also be visible to everyone, thus a discussion can build up without all users having to be online at the same time.) Depending on the permissions of community members as defined by the board's administrator, they can post replies to existing threads and start new threads as they wish.

Forums are a many-to-many experience. Forums can be great or forums can be lousy depending on who posts to them. I recently talked to a club that experienced a near mutiny from several forum posts. There were one or two members who posted several hateful diatribes on the forum that led to a split with in the society.

There are already a great many fish-related forums out there such as the cichlidforums.com. Forums need to be policed which takes time and dedication. Unless you have someone who reads all posts daily, I do not recommend that your club host a forum.
A forum is also not a good substitute for a website. While the data is structured, the society is not in control of the content.

Blogging is one of the hottest areas on the internet at the moment. They allow individuals to easily post their thoughts and opinions as—primarily—a one-to-many experience. Again, I’ll refer to the Wikipedia:

A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”.

Getting a blog is pretty easy. You can use the nearly ubiquitous Typepad at http://www.typepad.com to create a blog inexpensively. Depending on who hosts your site, you may have access to blogging software.

I think a blog might be something interesting for a society to explore. The attractive thing to me is the self-publishing aspect. You do not need to know much at all about HTML or the internet to write an entry. It would be interesting if the President of the society had a blog about society happenings. That kind of general writing has a hard time fitting into the structure of a society website.