Pauline
Forums Admin
I know how we used travel forums in 2001, but things have changed so much on the web that I have to rethink travel forums. When I started the SlowTrav forums (in 2001) I wanted something like the AOL Italy forum, but with a different focus. I wanted to talk to people who stayed in vacation rentals all over Europe - mostly because I wanted to find great vacation rentals to stay in! By then I had been running the website for a year and I was getting a lot of email with travel questions. Instead of saying the same thing over and over by private email, I set up the forums.
As the website and the forums grew, we (me and the moderators) changed the forums to be more than just travel forums.
Remember when Cristina's expats forum was part of SlowTalk? It has been its own forum for years now.
We created that Everything Else forum so we had a place to talk to each other about anything, or to post mini-blog posts about what we were doing. But now we have Facebook!
I ran that dreadful photo software so we could upload and group travel photos. Now we Instagram, Flickr, Google+ photos, Facebook photos.
We even hosted blogs on the site. Now I would tell someone who wants to blog to use Wordpress.com. Or Facebook. Wordpress did not exist when we started. Neither did Facebook. Or Twitter.
On SlowTrav Chris wrote a Trip Report manager so people could write about their trips and we would have a place to easily find this information. Some of the other big forums (Fodors and Trip Advisor I think) encourage people to post trip reports on the message board. I like that idea, but I think it is best to have all the Trip Reports in one forum, so someone can look through just that forum for travel ideas and inspiration.
In my SlowTrav days I was not happy with people linking from the message boards to their personal blogs and websites. I was a "content hog". I worked so hard on that site that I was unhappy to see people use it to take traffic to their site. I have changed. Times have changed. If you have your trip report on your blog, do a post on the Trip Report forum, put in a brief description and link to your website/blog. If you have a website/blog with great travel information on it, start a thread and link to the page or section you are recommending.
I think we use these forums to share travel information and ideas, to inspire and support each other in our trip planning, to have fun talking about something that we all love to do - travel!!
And I would love to hear your ideas about how we should use these forums!
As the website and the forums grew, we (me and the moderators) changed the forums to be more than just travel forums.
Remember when Cristina's expats forum was part of SlowTalk? It has been its own forum for years now.
We created that Everything Else forum so we had a place to talk to each other about anything, or to post mini-blog posts about what we were doing. But now we have Facebook!
I ran that dreadful photo software so we could upload and group travel photos. Now we Instagram, Flickr, Google+ photos, Facebook photos.
We even hosted blogs on the site. Now I would tell someone who wants to blog to use Wordpress.com. Or Facebook. Wordpress did not exist when we started. Neither did Facebook. Or Twitter.
On SlowTrav Chris wrote a Trip Report manager so people could write about their trips and we would have a place to easily find this information. Some of the other big forums (Fodors and Trip Advisor I think) encourage people to post trip reports on the message board. I like that idea, but I think it is best to have all the Trip Reports in one forum, so someone can look through just that forum for travel ideas and inspiration.
In my SlowTrav days I was not happy with people linking from the message boards to their personal blogs and websites. I was a "content hog". I worked so hard on that site that I was unhappy to see people use it to take traffic to their site. I have changed. Times have changed. If you have your trip report on your blog, do a post on the Trip Report forum, put in a brief description and link to your website/blog. If you have a website/blog with great travel information on it, start a thread and link to the page or section you are recommending.
I think we use these forums to share travel information and ideas, to inspire and support each other in our trip planning, to have fun talking about something that we all love to do - travel!!
And I would love to hear your ideas about how we should use these forums!