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from here

what “all the time” ??

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

what “all the time” ??

Well you always call out owner associations for having “paywalls”. That is what they do. It isn’t immoral.

EGTK Oxford

Well you always call out owner associations for having “paywalls”.

Owner associations? Nonsense.

Some years ago, we had a “religious war” here (a variation of the “moderated forum = nazi censorship, therefore the moderator is a nazi” theme) when a couple of individuals forcefully demanded the right to post links to certain sites which nobody could read unless they paid some $$$. I think COPA was one of them. This is completely pointless; most people don’t even click on a link let alone give some site $50 or whatever to read it. We had to introduce a policy that such links are not allowed. One of a number of examples where somebody (a very few people actually) set out to create difficulties on EuroGA and rules had to be introduced which in a better world would not be necessary. The said individuals went berserk and left, slagging off EuroGA and me all over the internet, as such people usually do

What else should one call it? Paywalls are common. Most newspapers are behind them now. They are to prevent access unless you pay. It is not immoral but one is entitled to be critical of something that claims to be an information resource restricting access, to make money. The value of linking to such sites is very low.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

is not immoral but one is entitled to be critical of something that claims to be an information resource restricting access, to make money. The value of linking to such sites is very low.

Well, you could equally say they are a resource for members and never intended to be a general information resource. Sure, linking to them makes not much sense. Sometimes they actually do release stuff to the wider world for free though!

EGTK Oxford

Who would want to create a closed forum?

It doesn’t work for privacy because anybody can join and read past posts. The perception of privacy is indeed created but is nonexistent in reality. I’ve been in several closed forums over the years and all of them had problems, sometimes major ones when somebody joined and read posts about his “business practices”.

The only way to try to control that is what the freemasons do: a blackball system, where any member’s application to join is put before the existing members and any of them can block the new member. Many years ago I was briefly in a “breakaway Socata user group” – tblounge.org – which was run like that. I left because there was almost no value in it; the tightly closed nature with nearly all males ensured that a lot of p0rn was posted

So the only possible explanation for a forum behind a paywall is to raise money.

It also creates intractable problems for the moderator because if you need to chuck somebody out, you lose their income. You also lose the income from a number of others because (a) a number of others will leave in solidarity (especially in a European forum) and (b) the removed member will prob99 bad-mouth the site to everybody who will listen so a lot of potential members won’t join up. I think the concept works in the US where there is a vastly bigger pool of pilots, and indeed the bigger US forums can afford to be ruthless and fast in their mod practices. However, most of the US sites also run advertising and need to operate a “no bashing” policy, which is more to consider…

In Europe, forums behind paywalls mean one has very few members in there. And one has still got to administer it…

One can debate whether newspapers are intended to be an information resource. Charitably, the answer is Yes (in most cases) but in reality they have to make money for the proprietor or they will get shut down eventually.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The question in my mind recently is if fora are really still viable at all but for very specialized discussions such as EuroGA. Here this works because we do have a rather strict moderation but mainly because all people here are real world aviators and share a common interest. Trolls are virtually unknown, even tough we’ve had a few over the years.

The call for “closed” fora comes up over an over again, in many places. I remember discussions in proon where people demanded that posting members would have to supply credentials and pay a fee for the privilege, we are currently having discussions at flightforum too where some people want to elf others and close off for a very close network of maybe 5-10 people who share a common interest. Well, for this you don’t need fora, a whatsapp group is much easier.

The way it looks to me is that internet fora of old are a thing slowly on the way out. Young people won’t participate, they have instagram and snapchat. Remains the old farts whose posts usually ressemble that, angry old men who grind their axes on any target of opportunity. Add to that old-school moderators who will not elf people fast enough before the damage is done.

I don’t have the solution. But paywall fora need to really offer vital content to attract enough paying members. Some do, most would not.

For me, I am violently against shutting out people by principle, country, race or what not. Fora if at all are a place where people can get together, take that away and they are useless. But those who do not behave or threaten fora by trolling or trying to spread rubbish should be elfed without any further ado. The trouble is, that in many fora there are too many of those and until you can catch them they will damage the culture in there often beyond repair.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

I still think the forums are the best way for specific interest groups to discuss. Especially when it comes to archiving useful information which may disappear quickly on other platforms or be very difficult to find.

More than once I’ve vaguely recalled reading a thread about something which has come up as an issue.Being able to dig back to find the information can be priceless. Because of this I always try to go back into a thread to put in an answer if I find one myself just so it’s there to help others searching in the future.

Moderating is always a tough one to call, but having clear rules helps a lot.

Well, this forum is the only one I know these days which is a pleasure to visit and have discussions. I suppose the reason for that is, along the excellent moderation, the fact that we are quite small in comparison and target one very specific interest group: Serious GA pilots who are passionate about their flying. We do all have a very solid common ground here. We may disagree on nuances but generally we all love flying and are primarily interested in sharing that passion and help others make their experience better.

In other places these days, there is a downward spiral of trolling and political b.s. I would not be surprised if most of these close down before too long or massively reduce and restrict their membership to stay manageable.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

There is a lot of truth in that, but it depends on the details.

EuroGA user activity in recent years (for tech reasons I can’t easily plot contiguous data before that)

Regular users are now approaching 2k each day. No data on who they are, of course…

Clearly the content is valued and is accessible. EuroGA has excellent SEO and most people searching for info use google, and EuroGA scores highly on google searches.

What has changed over the last maybe 5 years is that the “one line tossing” activity (posters who toss in one-liners comprising mostly of drivel, smart-arse comments, etc) has moved to the new social media channels, with facebook being the main one for older people (the young are deserting fb and are moving to twitter, instagram, etc). And most forums, across all subjects, are full of that stuff.

This is a real problem for a forum which relies on advertising, because while these people may not have written much worth reading they did generate a lot of advert clicks.

Another real problem for relatively unmoderated forums is that “kicking and beating-up” threads generate way more clicks than polite threads, so they are stuck. If they choose to moderate, they will lose a lot of income, and they are losing income to the other channels anyway. So no forum which suffers from poor content is going to reduce its membership.

I had a discussion about this recently with a guy who runs dozens of forums, across all sorts of topics, which he bought up over many years, moved to his own server platform, puts ads on them, and basically milks them… He reckons forums are going nowhere now as a business proposition because of the desertion to the other social media channels.

BTW I would not call EuroGA “strictly moderated”. We have quite simple Guidelines whose most controversial feature is not allowing personal attacks! Sometimes one gets the feeling a lot of people have a real problem with this but the statistics are these: over any past 30 days, around 200 people have posted, and of those only 3 to 4 have ever (since we started in 2012) written anything which a mod needs to take action on. IOW, around 98% of these regular participants have no difficulty in being continually polite. Clearly it is not rocket science to be polite – despite protestations by the other 2%.

Of course there is a more complex story behind the 2%; it includes some high volume posters and this is where most mod workload is located. Consequently very few people have been banned (average maybe 1 a year, not counting spammers and other total time wasters) because we try hard to carefully manage this area.

So I don’t think an informative forum like EuroGA which mirrors some popular activity and which is moderated to retain intelligent contributors is going to have a problem going into the future. The challenge is the funding model and if EuroGA was relying an advertising I would be quite worried. Fortunately the donations have been very generous during 2019.

The longer term challenge is whether GA itself carries on into the coming decades; we just don’t know. At best, the activity is fairly constant (UK) and in most places there is a slow decline.

If we went behind a paywall we would lose many people, but more importantly we would not get anyone new coming along. It tends to work for type specific forums because people regard them valuable for maintenance tips (virtually the entire value of the Socata one is for maintenance and specifically for part numbers; Socata itself doesn’t communicate meaningfully with TB owners, and actually the Socata one is free access!) but every other paywall forum struggles each year to recover the numbers who left when they got the last membership invoice.

Also a lot of things work in the US which would not work in Europe – due to 10x bigger numbers in the US.

I’ve been observing this stuff since the early 1990s and Compuserve forums

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

From here

highflyer wrote:

Migrants can continue to enter the country, infected or not.

I had a discussion about a few news reports that the borders were closed to most Europeans entering Germany but that it was still open for migrants from Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Can this possibly be true and is it fake news? To me it does not sound credible but then again the welcome mat in 2015/2016 sounded fantastic as well.

A little guidance from someone in Germany would be appreciated.

KHTO, LHTL
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