Closing of the forum.

[Dave H-Tranter]

A Facebook page is the way to go, however uniform and conformist it may appear. People are on there all the time and will get used to taking a look at what is going on and then hopefully join. The question is how you set it up - do you go public and have it monitored against the foodies, the general cranks and the non-member or do you go private which keeps it in-house but has less exposure. We have a private one for the Fungal Friends Group and the members use it regularly. I am not a Facebook fan but it is a necessary evil when pushing walks and gigs.

Cheers

FP Dave

[Leif Goodwin]

I can't say I know what a facebook page is. Surely if people can post information, then either you get trolls and spam, or you have them register, and you get the same problems of spam as here.

An option is to prevent registering here directly, and have it only by invitation or from people known to for example the FCT e.g. members. That will limit involvement, and make it a bit cliquey I guess, but at least someone does not spend their life checking spam registrations.

[Roy Miller]

Surely if historical posts cannot be effectively searched for (as reported by Geoff, and also experienced by myself), then that must make Facebook a non-starter for the type of info that is posted here. By all means use it for up-and-coming events and for publicity, but as a forum, you got to be joking. Besides, it looks like that about half of the regular posters here, don't like it, or even use it.

[GeoffDann]

[Sheila Lillie]

Hi Geoff
I don't use Facebook but I do use iSpot and have done for over 6 years they have a scoring point but to be honest I do not take much notice of it I found forums good if you add decent photos showing all the key features and with as much information as possible too then you can usually get to genus or even pin it down but I personally would never be 100% sure unless it was something very obvious. I think people do not understand what a difficult subject it is and are under the impression that a quick photo usually a bad on can id a fungi. I say let them get on with it but as for this forum I think sadly its just the way things are going and maybe in a few years it will be back in fashion.

Sheila

[GeoffDann]

Some perspective.

Today I contacted one of the admins of a facebook group called "Mushroom Spotters UK", to ask whether he'd consider updating his pinned introductory post from September 2016, which included a list of fungi-related books, but didn't include mine, which didn't come out until October last year.

His reply included some history:

"Funny thing the mushroom spotters group.. it started out just as a bit of fun by the anti fracking group people. John, who set it up, does loads of work to support the campaigners, he also founded the reality party. Spotters was supposed to be a bit of light relief, non politics, mushrooms only. The original members are still there, and they are in complete awe of what it has become! I came along at an early stage, just a complete amateur myself, only just getting into it all. There were 36 members..."

That facebook group was created in July last year. 13 months ago. Today it has 6,652 members.

This forum, and thousands others like it, are about as relevant as steam engines were in 1967.