Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

I bought a Civic Type R earlier this year, and it was their voluntarily run discussion forum that that gave me the concept of establishing this forum.
If you want to see how sucessfull a forum CAN be, have a look at it the link below (it's registered only forum, so you'll need to register to have a look):-

http://www.civictype-r.co.uk/phpbb2/index.php

At any one time there are usually OVER 20 PEOPLE logged in and browsing. They once had over 100 users all logged on and browsing at the same time.

They have 9,604 registered users, with 501,192 articles posted.

I've always had replies within about 10 minutes of posting, with people viewing the post within a matter of seconds.

Worth a look if you're wondering what we could become!

Julian

Julian,

Thank you for taking this initiative. I think it's a really good idea .

In my work as a freelance IT person, I have evaluated a lot of websites for the Lottery over the past couple of years. Many of them started with the idea of a forum, and tried to build a community around it - very difficult. However, here we have a community that already exists outside cyberspace, and giving it an additional presence inside is likely to be very successful and productive.

Best wishes,

an EVEN better example of a successful forum can be found at

http://www.ironmaiden.org/

and you don't even need to be a member to view it!

hope this helps

http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com - another very very successful one, addictive to timewasters too![/url]

For a community that is scattered world wide (even though its centre of gravity is in the UK) a bulletin board like this could work wonders. I have used bulletin boards for almost a quarter of a century, since the emergence of the first PCs (I worked for a very large oil company then and the employees' computer club set one up to link all the members scattered across various sites in a large country - direct dial-up via modem to a server). More recently I have found the various expat bulletin boards trhat exist in most foreign business centres, especially in Asia, very lively and useful. I am planning to retire to one of these places and the breadth and depth of contact that I am able to make through these boards is incredible.

I think that the Old Blues and the wider CH community have needed something like this for a long time. We have to be grateful to generations of Old Blue Editors of the Blue and to people like Steve Webb who have kept us going until now, but I suspect that the time is now right for the CH community to spread its wings (seeing that so many of us are now on-line) and embrace the power of the bulletin board. It deserves to succeed and I wish it every success.

Brian Walling
MaA 53-60

GOOD IDEA.

Skoda owners (don't laugh, they're great motors at the moment!) also have an excellent board - see http://www.briskoda.net/

Thanks (and hello by the way!) Julian for this, may it prosper...

Yes, no laughing. I have a Skoda...it's really good, and was relatively cheap. Skoda felicia.