Shutting down of BC Forums

[bluefin]

I believe most of the positives about maintaining the forum have been put forward by members here.
The forum has been a good source of information for like-minded butterfly enthusiast here and around the region.
New and rare finds does create a buzz and makes those on the forum excitable.

I have gain a lot of insight into the behavioral, scientific and photographic aspect of butterflies from this forum and had made many good friends as well.

I do agree that the activities have simmered down in recent months and I am also guilty in contributing less on the local front.
I tend to post more on the trips that I have made overseas. I believe this does add more flavors and diversity to the board as we are able to
showcase different butterflies from different countries and regions.
Anyone for Kenya in 2014?


But I still need my daily dose of BC surfing to make my day whole. I need my coffee

[Commander]

Thanks to everyone who voted in favour of keeping the forums and also sharing your comments and personal views. No one need to feel guilty or anything. This is, after all, a hobby site, and we are just doing this as a past-time and personal interest.

We all have our priorities - work/business, family, other personal commitments, etc. To sustain our online community, however, will need a little bit of effort and time from everyone to keep the forums active. Otherwise it will go the way of many forums out there in cyberspace - where people just move on and the forums become as quiet as a ghost town. We have seen many nature and photography websites fall into that state.

Whilst social media is convenient and probably easier to check and post things on the move (with smartphone technology and who knows what the next hi-tec gadget will be!), sites like FB and so on are transient snapshots of current flavours of the day. As many of you have shared, looking for a past post or picture is next to impossible on FB. If you remember something that someone posted a year back for example, you would probably not be able to find it.

So, thanks and special appreciation to Simon, Ellen, Fed, Nelson, Antonio, Les, Keyang, Sunny, William, LC, Chng and Loke who have penned your thoughts in support of keeping the forums alive, and hopefully, for many more years to come!

[Commander]

Nelson : Kenya??

[Great Mormon]

I'm voting no to shutting the forums down. Facebook may have all the hype and popularity now, but then again, who knows what will happen a couple of years down the road? Maybe there will be a new trend in the social web, then, are we still able to migrate the data across different platforms? I doubt so. We've seen the shutting down of geocities; facebook may do the same once it loses its consumer base.

When I took over the maintenance of the website in 2008, the forums have more than tripled in terms of raw data, we did run out of space a sometime back and had to increase our data storage. The BC forums and blog contain a wealth of knowledge, and I would think it would be a great pity if BC forums were to shut down. I would beg to differ on the part where activity is low, the website served 22.93GB of data last month in Dec, which is the years all time high!

Getting off tangent, mobile version of the forums can be made available, although the forum software needs to be upgraded, for those who are not aware, the next upgrade is a major overhaul of the software. And of course, they do come with those fancy 4.0 social plugins.

[Silverstreak]

I would beg to differ on the part where activity is low, the website served 22.93GB of data last month in Dec, which is the years all time high!

Statistic can be loaded depending on how it is used.

The 22.93GB showed total usage of data by "users", a combination of drawing / adding to the data base of both "lurkers" and "active members" who posted , a breakdown to show passive / additive data would be more meaningful in deriving the participative aspect of the forum IMHO.

Even a forum without a single post, but with lots of lurker that use its database will show a high data been served.

Please correct me if I am wrong .

[atronox]

I'd be devastated if the forums shut down because it is such a great platform for people who share similar interests to interact especially since the forum is quite unique (in ways that have alr been mentioned.

Also, i (personally) prefer to keep my FB activities and BC activity separate and the BC facebook group just cannot quite serve the same purpose as the forum.

[Commander]

Thanks for your views, Anthony and Aaron. Glad to hear that you guys find the forums useful.

Unker Sunny and I observed that Ellen has a lot of nice photos in her own blog that she doesn't share over here at BC. Perhaps she should start letting everyone here see her shots as well, after writing such a passionate plea to keep BC forums alive.

[Commander]

And thanks to all these 25 members who took the effort to vote in support to keep BC forums. What about the rest of our members here? Doesn't matter to you if BC forums were alive or not? Or just go elsewhere?

Alfa, Angiud, atronox, Blue Jay, Blue Nawab, Bluebottle, bluefin, butterfly_effect, Cruiser, Elbowed Pierrot, Glorious Begum, Grass Demon, Great Mormon, Green Imperial, henrykoh, horace2264, Ichoker, Leopard Lacewing, Painted Jezebel, Peacock Royal, Sailfish, Silverstreak, The Plane, Wanderer, WillFolsom

[bluefin]

Nelson : Kenya??

Yep, Kenya butts are exotica.

[butterfly_effect]

My photos nice ar? I think the ones you saw are Nelson's ones lei. Hahaha! I sometimes use his photos on my blog. My photos.... Er .... Same standard as last time wor ^_^