Was playing on another AU Forum that was kinda going nowhere and old style. Thought I'd have a play around with the new style of forum and see if they wanted to update to it. Showed it to Doorstop who in turn showed it to the owner of the other forum, who in turn spat the dummy, reckoned I was the biggest bastard God ever put breath intoand took all my stuff off their site. Silly person.
That made me decide to keep it as my own forum and to hell with people who treat me like sheeit for trying to help. I set it all up, even though I really had no experience with anything like this before. Showed it to and asked if he wanted to come on board as and Moderator as he had done a fair bit of forum surfing and knew much more about forum protocols, decorum, etc than I did.
From memory I had an IBM 486slx or something, running Windows 98 and only had my new 56k modem for a few weeks, prior to that I had a borrowed 13k modem. I had a pretty big network of woodworkers because of my School of Woodcrafts and years of working as a carver, woodturner, restorer, etc. Let it be known what I was doing and invited everyone to come have a look and participate if they wanted to.
And the rest is Woodwork Forums.
Oh yeah for the first few years and I ran the whole shootin match almost entirely by ourselves. spending as much as 7-10 hours a day online keeping an eye on things, sorting out problems, etc. We used to read or scan every single post and often started many threads to actually get things happening and encourage a bit of interest.
Until January 2005 I fully funded the forums it was about then that the Google adds started to bring in a couple of dollars and for the next few years those adds paid for a fair percentage of the forums.over a year ago somethoing happened and that income dropped dramatically to the point where i was again funding the major part of the whole shootin match again. Last year I implimented the Sponsors Bannersand with their help The forums are now almost completely self funded.
We've tried a few things to improve the forums over the year. To date pretty well everything has worked, all bar a few glitches with programs or hacks that didn't work the way they were supposed to. Possibly one of the worst things I've done is to separate the Reno Forums from these forums. Should have listened to my own feelings instead of anyone else. Don't think it'll ever pay its way in its own right, but did make a huge contribution to these forums when it was on.
The forums were originally set up with the main emphysis being on Woodturning, and Finishing and to a lesser extent Carving and General Woodwork. It's sort of grown a little bit since then.
Why did I do it? Partly because I was forced. Mostly to give back some of what woodwork has given to me over the 40 odd years I've been mucking around with it.
What's next.
New Library:
We are currently working on a new Library that will put info at your fingertips and list many of the brilliant projects from the froums with only the relevant information and none of the drivel that crops up in most of them.
New Buy Sell n Swap
This will shortly be revamped with with new sub forums to make searching or particular items much easier and keep them to the fore for longer.
New Free Stuff Prize Draws format
This has alread been implimented with the first draw to be done in June
Is that enough...... I've gotta go to bed. Big day tomorrow.
Cheers - Neil :U
