Hey Phillip, this is sort of along the lines of suggestions and improvements, but just wondering if you saw the PM I sent you a while back (a week or so ago) about little aesthetic things to do to make the site a little more easy and visually pleasing to use. Thoughts? Responses?
Yes, I have it and I turned it over to John who is trying to learn more about this software and what can be modified and what cannot. I have been tweaking things to make it as easy as possible to navigate around here, including increasing the number of posts per page, etc. My technical skills at modifying the code that makes the software work isn't good enough, so I have to wait on John. I have kept your PM in my box so it's on the list.
That is such a refrershing attitude, Phillip. One community I was a member of was driven off a message board because the guy running it didn't like the way we madeit a community. He decreed that (for example) wishing each other happy birthday was off topic. We upped and left.
Let's face it. If we weren't a community building something special with one another, why would people keep coming back night after night. It's not
all about the movie. I'd like to see lots more general topics grow in forums like
Anything Goes. The movie provokes many of us to do something different in our lives, and this site should always provide a place for updates, no matter what it is you are working on in your life. I have been trying to wish people Happy Birthday myself when I see it on the calendar. Heck, I've started congratulating people whenever I see they have achieved a cool number of posts. One of our great users here hit the big 500 yesterday. It's a great achievement.
I like the community idea as long as it is related to the original subject of Brokeback Mountain, whether it is the movie of the Annie Proulx short story.
But, I see a lot of stuff that has absolutely no connection whatsoever with the topics brought up in the story or movie. And the fact that some of the graphics, meaning posted pics, keeps being reposted AND reposted in member's replies and takes up broadband width space.
TJ, there will
always be a place for these discussions here. We haven't even seen the pay cable viewers hit here yet, and they'll be coming with the same questions and thoughts we had back in January. But life is about change and evolving and growth. Annie Proulx encouraged us to finish the story in our own lives, and that is what a lot of us are doing. I am doing it myself personally. If I confined my comments exclusively to the movie, I'd have burned out by now. The movie is a catalyst for changes in my own personal life. I started this site to help me build confidence that I could launch something meaningful and it would be useful, not just to me, but to others. I am working towards other projects as well.
The movie discussion forums continue, and unlike some forums which delete messages after say 30 days, a lot of the remarkable threads here will be here as long as this site is. Don't worry about the bandwidth and the site space taken up by the informal discussions here. The entire site can still easily fit on a CD-ROM and still have a ton of space left over.
And to everyone, I agree that as time passes, we are going to keep coming back to the movie, as well as exploring new remarkable things we encounter in our lives and journeys forward. And I'm sure Annie Proulx herself has some remarkable stories we can explore in the days ahead as well!
