Peter and David, your energy, passion, authenticity, helpfulness and tenaciousness to keep this site awesome is really appreciated. Thank you!
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I’ve seen some fora develop like that, from a small but highly competent and socially adept group to free for all places with huge numbers of participants. Almost every time i’ve seen that happen, quality disintegrated. Some of these places are no longer useful, most of the original staff and posters have long thrown their hands up in disgust and left for other places.
I have to disagree. Look at VansAirforce forum. All people around the world who is building or flying RVs knows about it, and many visits regularly and/or participate. It is free for everyone, but you also can donate. In fact, the guy running it finance his whole family, and run the board with these donations. The collective wisdom and knowledge on that board is amazing. It’s structured nicely and older stuff is relatively easy to find. It’s been going for 18 years. The only annoying thing is probably that the guy running it makes it overly clear that “God loves America and it’s armed forces”, but you can live with it, it’s his prerogative as the owner and maintainer. And no such things are allowed to be discussed on the board itself.
EuroGA is nice as well. it’s “lite” and straight forward. But I also think it is not capable of growing much, for a number of reasons in addition to the obvious language barrier. The main reason is it’s too “lite” and simplistic. It’s good for discussing “today’s news”, EASA regs, but not much more than that. There is no “subspaces” for anything, thus the smaller grouping that could exist simply drowns in the prevailing niche. What prevails is crossing the English channel IFR at 10+k which is pretty much uninteresting for 99% of all PPL pilots in Europe. After 1 1/2 year I’m still the only Norwegian here (except Aviator who lives in France). A board like this becomes what the owner/maintainer wants it to become, there is nothing else to it.
Le Sving,
Would you consider leaving some of the EuroGA leaflets around at airfields that you visit in Norway?
If nothing else, it would prove a good test bed to see if they work and we get more visitors from Norway. I think Norwegians in general have good English, so it’s not likely to be a barrier, so it could be a good test bed.
I appreciate that many people might not feel comfortable leaving them, but nobody has ever objected in the slightest when I’ve asked.
Look at VansAirforce forum. All people around the world who is building or flying RVs knows about it, and many visits regularly and/or participate
The Vans forum addresses a very specific GA sub-community. It is mostly American, and like the other US sites it has critical mass. There are of the order of 10k RVs based in the USA. A European Vans forum would never get off the ground. The European scene is already full of dead narrow-scope forums. We are now 15 years since the internet became popular and a forum doesn’t just fill itself like it would have done in 2000.
Another thing I notice on the US forums is that off topic posts are almost totally missing and I suspect they are quietly and instantly removed. IMHO that is not so good.
But, anyway, for us, the problem with these US sites is that they are unattractive to Europeans.
For example another type-specific forum – the Socata forum – which was set up c. 2000, used to have loads of Europeans but they gradually disappeared – IMHO because they got bored with the almost totally US-specific content. The presence of several individuals there who were ready to beat one around the head with a bible and had a zero sense of humour was another issue… Europeans still post there a little bit but it’s nearly always just questions on part numbers, and these are answered always by the one guy who owns the site. But also it is a registration-access-only site which means it has zero SEO (google sees nothing inside) so it will always be sterile. A side effect of this is that it is utterly sycophantic…
There is no “subspaces” for anything, thus the smaller grouping that could exist simply drowns in the prevailing niche.
This is a good point, but is a significant challenge.
David and I have always kept a close eye on opening up new sections but these can so easily remain dead. The Bizjets section is quiet, and I am not surprised since bizjet pilots – the ones that actually fly rather than sit around waiting for somebody who wants the RHS filled with somebody who has the SIC rating 
– are busy running around and sorting out their next hotel and few will hang out on forums. But it was a good thing to try. The Instructors section was put in on the request of a guy well known on the UK scene who claims to be a busy instructor (he’s a CRI I believe) and who was going to participate early on, but he vanished and since then it has remained fairly quiet. I know we have a number of instructors here who read the site all the time, and some post, but my guess is that they are reluctant to ask questions on stuff they feel they should know (which is a pity).
If anyone has ideas on new sections, please do suggest them.
What prevails is crossing the English channel IFR at 10+k which is pretty much uninteresting for 99% of all PPL pilots in Europe
With respect Le Sving I don’t think that is true. We have had tons of trip reports which were way more varied than that.
There is a factor in operation here which IMHO is that IFR pilots simply do write more than VFR pilots. That’s just the way it is, which is why it would be great to have more VFR writeups and VFR related postings.
But this is a community which depends on members, so LeSving why don’t you post some Norwegian / VFR content?
Would you consider leaving some of the EuroGA leaflets around at airfields that you visit in Norway?
Absolutely – very much worth a try. I am just getting another 1000 leaflets printed so anyone just drop me your postal address 
My best customers are in Norway and Switzerland and I agree that the Norwegians speak very good English.
I think the amount of content and number of users is getting big enough that the different sections could be further subdivided, to cater for more specific interests.
For example:
Split “Flying” into “IFR Flying” and “VFR Flying” – this would also mean the VFR guys have their own place without talk of Eurocontrol, icing, whatever.
Split “Avionics/Maintenance” into two.
Split “IT/Website” so we have a section for flying-specific software/technology that is not Avionics, eg discussions on Autorouter, SkyDemon, Gramet, whatever, and a separate section for all the random stuff like Gmail, photo editing, etc.
I also think you have enough of a user base now to build a very good database (not just unstructured posts) of airfield reviews and reports. So I enter EDAZ or LFAT or whatever and get a single page with all reports, reviews, feedback on handling charges, etc consolidated on one page. TripAdvisor for ICAO codes. With the ability to tag/link between an airfield page and all related trip reports. This in itself would probably attract new users, the sites like this that are out there already aren’t very good.
Split “IT/Website”
+1
Split “Avionics/Maintenance”
+1
Split “Flying” into “IFR Flying” and “VFR Flying”
Don’t agree: even if goats and sheep have many differences, they have many points in common too.
On a final note: I don’t think it matters very much what “chapters” OR “SECTIONS” there ARE, I think most participants use the “active threads” button to see what’s new – in whatever section.
LeSving wrote:
I have to disagree. Look at VansAirforce forum
Yea, Mooneyspace is like that as well. Why? it is a type specific forum where all the folks have something in common. Mooneyspace is great, but it is a definitly different forum to this one or the other GA fora which went t.u. I guess the VansAirforce may well be similar.
Here, we have a wide variety of folks, from the experimental scene to biz jets.
I like the forum very much because of the competence level in both technical and social matters that people here display. As long as we keep people who are like that coming in here, it will be great to see it grow. It reminds me a bit of the Avsig days, which were great times.
Peter wrote:
If anyone has ideas on new sections, please do suggest them.
Not that all of them will be filled up particularly fast, but at least people are invited to write something.
I guess I could hand out some leaflets. Although to be honest I would rather advocate others into experimental homebuilt, experimental classics, microlight, aerobatics etc, which I consider much more viable for a whole lot more people than cruising at 20k with a Cirrus 22T. In my opinion flying is for everyone, but a Cirrus is something for the very few. Nothing wrong with cruising IFR around Europe, that is not what I mean at all. It’s more that for most people it is outside there “urges and dreams”. This place turns up very often in google search for some reason. What I think is happening is that many people do visit this site, they look around a bit, and it doesn’t “hit” them because most of it is “above” their ambitions. Some more sections would help.
I guess I could hand out some leaflets. Although to be honest I would rather advocate others into experimental homebuilt, experimental classics, microlight, aerobatics etc, which I consider much more viable for a whole lot more people than cruising at 20k with a Cirrus 22T. In my opinion flying is for everyone, but a Cirrus is something for the very few. Nothing wrong with cruising IFR around Europe, that is not what I mean at all. It’s more that for most people it is outside there “urges and dreams”. This place turns up very often in google search for some reason. What I think is happening is that many people do visit this site, they look around a bit, and it doesn’t “hit” them because most of it is “above” their ambitions. Some more sections would help.
Hello LeSving
I would like to make sure I understand you correctly. Are you saying that you could hand out some EuroGA leaflets at Norwegian aeroclubs, if we implement the following new sections
In order to enable us to assess whether the extra work is justified, could you supply some details e.g.
Many thanks
Peter
Splitting and categorization is the wrong strategy. In which category do you put your Greece vacation photos? Under Greece, Vacation, or Photos? Just add a few predefined tags, and allow each post to be tagged with one or more predefined tag. Search takes care of everything else.
I disagree that most US forums are of no interest for Europeans. The following forums are mostly region agnostic: Engine and Avionics Technology, Meteorology, Human factors, air frame talk, aerodynamics, crash investigations.
Weeding out the wheat from the chaff is possible. For example you can add the ability to up and down vote posts. You can auto-delete down voted posts via algorithm. Having software algorithm taking care of it, as opposed to a human, avoids being seen as a benevolent forum dictator. You leverage the wisdom of the crowd. Technology is able to solve the low quality posting problem to a large extent. The other forums went downhill simply because they did not apply technology to the problem.
To summarize:
You won’t be able to change the ratio between high quality contributors/low quality contributors/silent lurkers. The ratio is pretty much static for the entire web. Hence, to attract more high quality contribution, you must grow the audience. Use technology to solve the low quality pollution problem that comes with growing the audience. The strategy is really not new and accepted. Why would it not apply here?
