Fora and Images and other things, oh my.

Forums, with all their formats and features, are something that I am still trying to really understand.

Forums are something very different than the Internet that I started with. Then, everything was text, presented as text, consumed as text. The games we played were text. The sites we visited were text.

Maybe this is why I have had such a problem with forums. Early on, the best browser, the best Internet experience, was done via plain old text.

I understand where forums came from. I am not sure when the first web forum I ever saw was (more than likely, I ignored that event, and the next several hundred). Wikipedia suggests the phenomenon started around 1995-->link. That sounds right. That was about the time I thought the Internet was starting to go down hill.

Forums, in whatever form they took, I viewed as something that took away from the Internet in the way I was used to it. Mailing lists and Newsgroups were easy. The clients were easy to understand, and the format seemed simple. And the information available was wonderful. At this time, a lot of companies did not have websites that did more than announced their presence.

Of course, with websites starting to make the slow growth to dominance, soon people started to exit the older forms of communication and stared to setup websites. Eventually, the same knowledgeable people who used to post to newsgroups and mailing lists and IRC sites were participating in forums and did not seem to have the issues associated with the other forms, like SPAM and other net Trolls.

At first, I would avoid forums. It felt to me like the worst social dynamics on the Internet were there. Small groups were running their forums as their own little kingdoms (which, let's face it, they were). And I just didn't feel that I had the same ability to deal with the data stream as I had before. Too many sites, organized by strong opinion, in what seemed a much harder to navigate format.

Of course, I thought Google was not a search engine I wanted anything to do with when it first started.

I avoided forums. And I started avoiding mailing lists. For all the same reasons.

Too many people asking the same questions I was researching. And the social dynamics were difficult. I wasn't posting, because I was watching people with the same questions as I being eaten alive by people who had gotten something to work, figured something out, or had access to information.

At that point, forums seemed more like social clubs than useful information.

It has only been in the last couple of years that I have even started looking at forums in search results. It started as a way to try to see how people were asking the questions; an attempt to fine tune the search query. And then there was Uru.

Just like before, I avoided reading the forums, but with UntilUru, I started running into people from those forums in the game. I even started posting in some of the forums (highest count I have in one is 40 as of today, not counting forum games). The forums started to feel like a community to me.

Greenink had forums for a relatively short period of time. I know some of my brother's friends, but most I only knew by reputation and stories. The forums were funny and lively. I was actually sorry to see them go. But running a very active forum is hard. Running anything with a lot of activity is hard. I would have to assume that with the amount of activity on GI4A since he moved to Wordpress, and got rid of the forums, he really did not have to time to run them.

I have forums here on SysManGo.com. Of course, right now, I do not have much of an audience.

I am thinking (read: stealing ideas) of ways to use them. The advantage I have here is that I can push forum topics to the front page of the site easily. That and the forums are the same as the rest of the site. One of the ideas I have (mostly from the group over at the MxO forums and the Abaddon MxO faction) is playing with graphics. One of the things that I think keeps people in forums in the graphics.

Over the last week or so, I have been playing with graphics. The new gears at the top of every page are an example.

One of the things about for a that seems to attract people are graphic signature, especially animated images. While I was working with animated files for the new gears, I put together some images that looks like and I have started to use as signatures for the various fora to which I post.

Here's an example:

In the SysMango forum, I am going to start posting some of the images I have been playing with. To this point, all are original, done from scratch, using the various tools at my disposal. Most of the real work I have been doing with ImageMagick in shell scripts. Some of it has been in various other graphics editing programs. And some of it has been using the free version of Google's Sketchup.

So, hopefully I have gotten the forum and comments setup right. Stop by and drop a note, join a conversation.

Let me know what you think.