This is not so much of a gripe but the numbers below seem to dictate a small bit of oversight in regards to the importance of one past UBC Forum of the Month that has been denigrated into currently a much less popular forum header. Here are the numbers: Number of threads on the left with the number of posts on the right. PHP: Fruit Trees 224 899 Grapes 98 310 Fruits & Vegetables 94 323 total 416 1532 I think the numbers above speak for themselves. It can be argued that a Citrus forum could have been established to coincide with the Fruit Tree and Grape forums considering the number of varied responders that have been posting in some Citrus related threads. There are two Citrus threads in particular that have to be close to setting a record in the greater UBC forum for the number of posts in a thread. Jim Please let me know if the table is all messed up. Not sure how I will fix it as I could not use a "pre" tag instead to place the numbers right where I wanted them to go.
If I can figure out a better way to organize the display of the forums, I guarantee Fruit Trees will return to its "top-level" status, perhaps along with a Citrus sub-forum. Right now that middle section of forums is huge - I'm thinking of chopping it up a bit. Still a work in progress!
With some forums there may not be a steady involvement as interest may seem sporadic for a while yet some of those forums may become popular at some point in time later. I would not welcome trying to ascertain or envision ahead which forums have the potential to become popular later. I can see forums now that I just have to shake my head in wonderment why they are not flourishing in popularity as it is. There are some forums that will be more popular for people that are more local to the UBC than here for example but that does not mean that people from here do not have an interest in those plants i.e. Rhododendrons, not so much Azaleas however. It can be tough to try to explain details of a plant that we have grown for many years here and then learn that others including professionals and even some educators are essentially beginners with these plants in their home areas. I have felt and still feel that someone from Canada should be addressing some of the issues that others have had with their Fruit Trees grown in Canada as those trees in many cases are a different animal than the ones grown here for example. I do think for the long term that an all inclusive Gardening forum may be necessary. The gardening forum can entail a new to gardening sub-forum, a vegetable and fruit sub-forums as well as an intermediate and perhaps an advanced sub-forum whereby we might be able to invite Master Gardeners from various locations to come in and help out. Even a nursery forum may be in the offing later but I suggest that forum be restricted only to members of the UBC forum. There is the risk of commercialization that I really worried about a while back but there are times that naming a nursery such as Monrovia or an online auction host like eBay should be named. I was not the person to set the precedent for these names to come out into the open I might add. I went to extra lengths at times not to mention any commercial entity by name but how could we have prevented it from happening? All we can do is keep that information pertinent and even then I have some reservations of people becoming involved in a forum that have an agenda to sell plants, even perhaps a unregistered person in the Maple forum and that I would not ever let happen. If Mountain Maples wants to involve themselves in the Maple forum then by all means ask Nancy to come back in as I will be glad to see her involvement but a nursery we do not know or a nursery without a track record cannot be permitted to openly pronounce themselves ready and available to sell plants and I believe something similar has happened in here already. It might be a different story if they were members but still their end game will be figured out by most people but not all and therein is the main issue in that they've used the UBC forums as their portal to try to sell plants to people that may be a little too naive for their own good. We've seen enough naivete of buying already just in the Maple forum. Daniel, I think a Fruit Trees forum can stand on its own. I think the Grape forum can as well as I see much of the interest in that forum coming from mostly Canadians and that I might add is real nice to see. There has been some real and genuine interest in Citrus which delights me to no end. I think there will be interest there for quite a while, especially when some cultural problems start showing up but I must admit I am real proud of some of those Citrus aficionados for doing a lot of their homework as they are going along, even before they bought their plants. Impressive is the best word for it! Do we trim down the forums now or do we let the more popular forums stay as they are? No matter which way you turn there will be almost the same amount of work involved. Welcome to how it was for some of us that lived and breathed Maples for a number of years. Do we separate out the green dissectums and the palmate atropurpureums or do we lump them all together? I might add that our separating them out has led to some real long term problems in which there unfortunately are no good solutions for, it is too widespread now. Still, these forums are going to grow at a steady pace I would think. I agree it will be tough to slow down the runaway train but I think with the idea of having a moderator for the more popular forums that a lot of the time element involved in determining which e-mail questions to post and which ones not to can be handled by people that have an interest in that forum. Get someone like Junglekeeper or the likes to moderate the Citrus forum and then you will have the help you need but as time passes by there may be more e-mails to come in. Personally, I would not allow the e-mails to come in at all, I'd block them but that is not my decision to make. The hardest part is finding someone that will want to become a moderator that has the free time to do it. We may not get our first choice of whom we would like to have do it but we cannot at the same time frown upon or yell and scream at someone that is willing and able to be the host either. The time is not right to be extremely selective in that regard but we do need some assurance that the person is willing to keep the best interests of the UBC in mind at all times. Kinda rules me out as I have some rather pointed views to make to some of the people involved in the Botanical Garden and elsewhere that are listed in the "View Forum Leaders" section. I'd like to know why many of those people have not been supportive of their own forum. Why have they not been posting and is it that they do not care about plants or do not care about the current members of the UBC forum? There are too many names listed that just seem completely uninterested in the realm of plants in this forum and I wonder why that is. It is not like there are not members that are every bit as qualified in plants than any of them are. It is sheer lunacy to think that they are "better" than the rest of us if that is what their thinking is. Enough of that. I did not call for action, nor did I call for an explanation of why the Fruit Tree forum had been displaced but I think that forum will become much more influential on the internet as time goes by. Perhaps in time we may even figure out the right pollinizer for a Pembina Plum or a Grenville Plum which has evaded many a university researcher so far to date. All it takes is people wanting to know and will work on getting an answer for their own question and help others in the process to achieve logical answers to some of their questions. Involvement and initiative are the keys in this forum to success. Jim
Jim, all UBC staff members are members of the forums because we use the forum software for our own internal documentation. As an example, we have a forum for "Library Books - Wanted", or perhaps more interesting, "Travel Reports". When a staff member posts to the travel reports forum, an email-list's forum subscription sends out an email to all staff informing them that a new report is up and archived, which they can then view at their leisure. I'm somewhat constrained from asking the horticultural staff to participate in the public forums, as replying to public enquiries is only a very small part of their job descriptions. Any expectation of going beyond the job description would become a matter for resolution under the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the union and the university. We have also lost a management/professional position this past year due to having to meet a particular budget (the education coordinator), so assumption of some of that position's duties have been offloaded to others, putting more of a strain on some of the UBC staff who are not bound by the CBA. I believe the phrase that encapsulates it is: "Running to Stand Still"
