Raising profile of ALF

[MrSydney]

Hi All,

A big thank you for keeping ALF alive!  But overall it is very quite these days.

The question is - do you want to raise the profile?  If so, how?

A more active community should help with donations and cost, though I can't be sure that everyone wants the site to become more active.  I assume the answer though is that we do as it helps ensures viability longer term.

First question - there should be a database with user details.  Can an email be sent to all the registered users (bcc so details arent' shared of course) letting them know the forum is active and it would be great to see them back?  Ask them to share with others that this site is here and has a lot of great information on it.

Facebook groups - there are lots of these.  There are always lots of newbies on them asking where to find information.  It wouldn't be hard to get permission from Admins to put up a post directed at newbies (but will be seen by everyone) talking about good resources for research and information and just happening to mention how good ALF is as one of the first things (I'm happy to do this with the groups I belong to if told this is a good idea and to go ahead).

Remind your local lapidary club - ask if they'll put a mention in their next newsletter.  A lot may say 'no' but some may say 'yes'.  Again maybe the subject may be somthing around 'planning a trip' - don't forget there are websites like ALF that have great information on them (and provide the web address).

Just been thinking about this and thought I'd share my thoughts.

What do people think?

[Faceting Frank]

Yes I agree that advertising the forum on Facebook etc. would be a good Idea. I'm on a few Facebook faceting forums, so could help out in that regard, but I suspect most of the forum members are in the US.

[RoughCreations]

ALF is such a great resource and more viewers registering and contributing to discussions would be a positive thing. Once again, many thanks to the very noble Aussie Sapphire people for transferring ownership of ALF about a year ago and allowing it to continue in its current form, in fact, continue at all.

The last 12 months have been about bedding the site down on the new host, getting familiar with it, and upgrading the SMF software.

MrSydney, great thread, your ideas make a lot of sense to me, any promotional activities would seem beneficial. I often put links to ALF at the end of my faceting Instagram posts, with a short promotional statement, I'm not on Facebook.

Activity levels on bulletin board (BB) discussion forums such as ALF have generally trended down across the web during the last 10 years or more, but we seem to have hit a baseline with support albeit at lower activity levels than in the BB heyday, but support nonetheless. There clearly is still a place for quality BB sites such as ALF, but they are more of a 'niche product' so to speak at this point in time. The fact that ALF is easily searchable back to the start makes it a valuable store-house of information as well. There are lots of things that could be done with BB sites to encourage participation, especially with the younger, very internet-savvy generation. A good example for ALF is moving to a site theme that is also mobile-friendly, as most younger people prefer to use their mobile to do their browsing.

We do get a lot of non-registered people viewing the site, probably via search engines (which reminds me that I will have a look at the referring sites statistics and look for some trends).
It is relatively easy to extract registered user names and their email addresses from the ALF back-end, there probably is also a built-in way for admins to send bulk emails - will investigate.

RC

[Pete49]

In my opinion the best way to kill ALF is by putting it on farcebook and other social media sites. Please don't.
Pete

[RoughCreations]

In my opinion the best way to kill ALF is by putting it on farcebook and other social media sites. Please don't.
Pete

Hi Pete,
I don't think anyone is talking about *moving* ALF to social media, just promoting/advertising ALF via social media e.g: putting links wherever so people easily find the ALF forum, then hopefully join and contribute right here!
Cheers,
RC

[MrSydney]

Roughcreations is correct!

It costs money to keep this resource going for us all and often there are no posts in a whole week.  But you can have different kinds of questions and conversations on a forum like this than on Facebook and there are great old threads for researching things.  A few more people here will liven it back up and should help spread the costs over more people going forward.