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The day the Forum died

Allen Stark

The Forum died for me 4/3/18. It has been resurrected a couple of times, but it seems to be on life support.

4/3/18 my wife got her hip[ replaced and while I was in the waiting room I logged on the the Forum and it wasn't there and there was an ambiguous message. It finally came back to  no fanfare and we were told it was a necessary update. Activity on the forum was low. It was updated again to more fanfare but activity was still low. I inquired about it and was told Forums were an outdated system. This surprised me as the other forum I frequent (for DnD) has gone though similar updates and is vibrant. I am' repeating again on the Forum, my theory and solution. When the Forum was vibrant anyone could post and we were getting posts from all over the world. One person from another country said it was THE best source of information for masters swimmers. Now it is restricted to posts from USMS members only saying it is a perk of membership. It would be a much better perk if it was a vibrant  site and good marketing for USMS. Imagine asking about finding a workout in another country and having someone from there answering. That used to happen. 

I know USMS staff monitor the Forum, please open it up, I can practically guarantee it will not drop enrollment. Has anyone said ,since 4/3/18, "I'm joining USMS for the Forum.". Open it to the world and someone might.

  • in reply to Allen Stark

    All this discussion of the expense of running the forums, but I wonder about the cost of not running the forums. It semes to me that the forum is a pretty good recruiting tool. The forums pretty much brought me into USMS. Oh, I was vaguely aware of the existence of USMS, but I found the forums and because interested in joining. There must be other similar cases. Also, the forums surely bring more swimmers into meets to, because you can learn of meets in the forums that you might not otherwise hear about, or learn that a meet has some interesting feature (event, place, time, etc.) that makes it more attractive to you.

  • in reply to Allen Stark

    I caught myself responding to random questions on a suggested facebook group (I am not part of it) called "swim parents" because it's so fun to share knowledge and wisdom or get a good giggle in. Oh fun this forum used to be.