There is a large assortment of high quality tools available for setting up internet forums, and most of them are free (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison … m_software). As a consequence, it is easy for a webmaster to add a forum to his or her site – and many of them do.
The webmasters of the various “Fernie” sites are no exception. A quick search turned up a couple of other forums, plus a number of “Fernie” sections in other more general forums.
The other forums don’t look any more lively than this one, the forum at “OurFernie” seems pretty quiet (http://www.ourfernie.com/forum), and the forum at “Virtual Fernie” (http://www.virtualfernie.com/) doesn’t even seem to be running right now.
I believe that the problem with all these forums is they divide up the “Fernie” traffic, so none of them get enough traffic to reach the “critical mass” required to become a vibrant on line community.
I suggest the webmasters of the various sites throw all their weight behind a single forum so the traffic doesn’t get spread out. They should also spend some time patrolling the forum and posting replies if necessary.
Hopefully once people see some activity they will start visiting, and contributing, on a regular basis and the single forum would be able to sustain itself.
I realise that this is easier said than done, and it might be hard to get the webmasters to agree on a single forum – after all, they all want to drive traffic to their sites. But I do think it’s worth a try.
