Given Stuart’s recent thread about shutting down the site, does anyone have ideas as to how we can create more traffic? I’m guilty as heck about not talking a whole lot about tools, especially these days. I try to stay somewhat active on the TIA forums, but I’m usually talking guns or cooking over there.
The consensus seems to be that long-time members don’t want to see the forum go, with some even coming out of the woodwork (pun intended) to comment. There’s a wealth of knowledge on these pages, and the ToolGuyd community is a virtual encyclopedia. Compared to most of you, I’m a novice when it comes to using tools and basic knowledge of them.
Anyway, regardless of whether this is the last one for this site or not, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone here! I put the turkey on the pellet grill before 0600 and am about to start with the praline honey marinade and pecans for the ham. Then it’s probably nap time for a couple of hours, because two decades in the military and my current eclectic work schedule have me off-balance.
IIRC, Stuart’s issue is that he feels he can’t put the work into making the forum viable, even though some of us suggested ways to reduce the work load or even volunteered to do the work ourselves. Part of it is that Stuart feels he has to respond when people ask questions.
But I still try to come here every day, and I think I’ve asked more than my share of questions.
To generate traffic, I guess we could post links to good content in this forum on other online discussion boards like Fine Woodworking, TIA, maybe some YouTube vids, etc.
I guess another idea is that one or two of us could post general, open-ended questions once in a while, just to create discussion. I see on TIA somebody asks things like, “What tools did you buy today?” I remember on the old newsgroup rec.woodworking, a poster couldn’t stop talking about the movie “Sixth Sense.” Somebody asked if it was relevant to woodworking. The answer was “Yes.”
I don’t have a great answer but with the amount of comments on some of the daily posts there is a strong community for Toolguyd. I wonder if it’s as another reader recently stating that they’re unaware of this forum. Maybe driving discussion from the daily posts to the forum is an opportunity.
I definitely wouldn’t want to lose access to the posts and reviews I’ve done and have to set aside some time to copy them onto an archive of some kind.
Perhaps something as simple as a signature with link to the forums can build a little traffic here. Comment on ToolGuyd, with a quip about “Have a question or comment that doesn’t fit here? Check out discuss.toolguyd.com!”
I can understand how Stuart might feel overwhelmed by maintaining this site with so few regular contributors. I got that way with the Zoints sites I ran, where I felt compelled to personally reply to every post and constantly create new content just to try to generate traffic.
The TIA thread is a fairly active one, with me sometimes sharing irrelevant things like tools I passed up, ones purchased weeks previously, or even arguable tools like guns.
As for the questions, I think that something that deters some new users are the odd questions like “What tool is this?”, where only a very few people might have a good answer. I’m not too well-versed in antique, niche, or rare tools, so I often want to try to attempt an answer but decide to defer to someone else (like Fred), who might actually have some knowledge on it.
