Jan 2022

This is our first newsletter, we have been running for just over a month now, forum membership is excellent with 307 members (I have a test account, so I deducted 1 from the total). Activity is good and for the last 3 weeks we have averaged around 160 posts per day, with a peak of almost 200 posts. Considering membership was initially slow to get going, that’s really excellent.

So far we have:

grown the membership
grown the activity
Upset Vertical&*^%$ 🤣
Started to find our feet as a forum
I have submitted us to google, yahoo and bing search, we are starting to climb the rankings as our activity level increases
We have approximately 5 or 6 times more posting activity than the old forum
Settled on the extensions that don’t cause problems
decided on how to handle private messaging

Overall it’s gone very well and thanks to everyone who put up with all the changes as I experimented and got to grips with the administration.

We have some things to decide around the commercial directory function and retailer specific areas. I have checked the TOS of freeflarum and although we are well within them, I am not comfortable that we are following the spirit of them. In as much as providing free advertising for Retailers is using a free service to support their profits….even if such profits result in a “possible” discount advantage for members. I’m personally coming around to the view that we should (for coffee related Retail/commercial members):

Remove the commercial directory
Remove retailer specific areas
Retail/Business members should retain commercial against their name (so we know they are businesses
Allow them to take part in discussions, but not to use said discussions as sales pitches
If they want to sell something, or have a great deal for us…they can use classifieds like the rest of us
Unlike non commercial member classifieds, prehaps we should remove commercial members classifieds once the offer has expired?

I need to discuss the above with the other two mods over the coming week or so…but the more I think about it the more comfortable I am with this way forward. It’s important where we have a forum where we can discuss things freely and fairly, without feeling we might upset an “advertiser”. Primarily, this is our forum for our benefit.

Thanks

Dave

P.S. Tell anyone you know who is into coffee about us, hopefully we will still be here, even stronger than ever, if those who have still not transitioned from CFUK finally have enough of a corporate monetising the shit out of them. They don’t pay tax in the UK, care about the community, or it’s raison d’etre, they are definitely not a good thing for lots of forums, who lose their soul in the process.