Forum and what it to be.

[raybark]

The fact that those "spambot" subscribers exist is simply a fact of life for a forum that allows self-subscriptions. If you were able to see the statistics of other forums, you would likely see the same sort of thing, they just don't display them. The important thing is that those bots do not clutter up the forum with "trash" posts, so why even worry about them? The fact that those spambots do not interfere makes me give kudos to the admins, not knock them.

I, too, have wondered why this forum is as "slow" as it is, but I think in order to get a true answer, you'd need to poll the folks that don't participate. Yeah, some may still have a bad taste in their mouths over former issues, and some may have "political" issues with the AOS itself, while others see this as the place where that "ice cube orchid" question will likely be posted for the umpteenth time (I - being one of the "usual suspects" that frequents forums - actually see it more elsewhere). No doubt there are plenty of more "reasons" - or maybe it's "rationales".

One thing that I perceive is a hard-to-describe "dryness" to the posts and posters here. The former may be due to the intent to keep this forum to a "strictly orchids" theme, as Kathy mentioned, but the latter is due to the posters.

Taking, for example, the threads that (primarily) DavidCampen, Kentucky, and I kept going for a while - greenhouse misting, for one - even though they were very informative and mostly based upon fact, the depth of the discussion and fringes of contention we ran along at times (I was halfway expecting a "Jane, you ignorant slut" comment in some of them) may have seemed a bit intimidating to some. I am not, for a moment, suggesting we abandon that sort of thing, as open discussions of thought processes and the facts of the subject-at-hand are the surest way to learn from each other, but we should probably think more about how we come across to others.