Stickley Era, the Arts & Crafts Movement

[Stonecat]

I just thought I would raise the flag a bit here in terms of forum growth etc. because we seem to be hitting some nice round numbers.

Only 5 months old and over 1000 posts, more than 200 per month.

38 members and contributions from all but a few.

One member has reached "Venerable Fra" status, Jeremy, and one is closing in, Fred. A little corny, but why not

We have also been picked up by the Google bots as far as I can tell, and traffic seems to be picking up in terms of 'guests'.

On the other side of the coin, we seem to have the same deal as the old forum in terms of lots of 'views' on threads but sometimes lacking in 'comments'; oh well that's just how it goes I guess.
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Stonecat

[Steve06]

I have noticed that just about every time I get on the forum there are some new posts. That's good and many of them are very interesting... We also may be having a larger impact if discussions here encourage folks to email people on Ebay for example with furniture pieces not attributed properly...(e.g. Limbert bookcase).

Also, I have been thinking that it would be good if the forum had a new URL that was more appropriate. I know we talked about this before - what's the status on it? I just looked up at the forum title - it could be as simple as stickleyera.com, which doesn't seem to have been taken...

[Jeremy]

Have you considered partnering with the hewnandhammered site perhaps? His forum has been in development status for a while now and hasn't really taken off yet. You could both offer the other something, you have a developed forum and he has the visible site name getting traffic. Just a thought...

[Stonecat]

I've done some research and honestly I'm not too worried/interested in the short url thing, at this time. It makes no difference in the Google bot searching and registering content. A short url would cost money to register, cost money to host, cost money to do the ghosting thing (where the old long url is hidden), and cost money to have a private url ownership listing (to avoid brutal amounts of junk mail, email spam, and telemarketing). I know people might be willing to doante a few dollars to help with costs but what's the point? For your money you would get the same forum but with a short url. I don't see the point. I'm not interested in building a dot com anything - I don't want to commercialize the forum and conversely I don't want to spend anything more on it than I have (I've paid for ads removal so far). To me this is a hobby and that's the beauty of it and why "we" seem to be doing OK, I think - there's no advertising or business overtones.

I look around at the other forums, blogs, and groups, and basically things are pretty slow everywhere, and have been for a long time. I think on a per capita basis we have one of the most active core groups of people going. If it ain't broke don't fix it...for now anyways.
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Stonecat

[Steve06]

Excellent points Stonecat - I had no idea there were so many costs involved to do such a thing and I thought it actually mattered in terms of Google finding the forum. If not, I totally agree, keep it just the way it is. I also agree that without any sort of business, money-making motivation underlying the forum, it has a completely different tone to it unlike anything else on the web.

Keep up the good work, we appreciate your efforts in putting together the forum and keeping it going!!!

[Wabash]