Taking The Temperature Of A Six Year Old Forum

Hi, I am a long-time lurker and have learned a lot from this forum and its participants. Things I have found particularly useful are (in no order):

• Welcoming and open discussion, with a few guardrails. I find the focus of the forum to be very helpful, and not a deterrent generally to open conversation. Others may disagree but for me it is clearly stated and does have it's intended effect.
• Forums and threads organized by topic. When great conversations about a particular topic are buried under the wrong title it can be confusing. In a way this is just ongoing effort on behalf of the forum to identify and organize the past conversations. I see this work going on constantly -- as a new and ongoing student this is extremely helpful, for example trying to understand Pre-conceptions one can find all of the historical conversations here on the forum.
  • On the other hand I like how there are stubs of interesting ideas and areas of focus that might just sit there for a while until something clicks. These are the things an internet forum is really great at.
• Regular forum members and their contributions to the forum have really helped me. The forum is an archive of all these thoughts, and there is so much good stuff in there.

One thing that can be improved is that the forum is overwhelming, especially as a person just interested in epicureanism, or as an epicurean coming from other points of view. If you put on that person's shoes for a minute, and come to the front page, you'll see what I mean. It's not until you scroll way down the page that you see a section devoted to "New User Orientation" -- make that a stickied Thread and link it from the top of the home page in the Welcome section. This is one reason I started https://www.epicswerve.com -- this and other similar sites are intimidating and I hope to create a more focused and less intense introduction for people who are just interested in the philosophy.

A project to undertake is to clarify what each site is for, and then let that site do that thing, and link to throughout the network -- ie instead of each site having it's own list of the ancient documents (that have to be maintained) have one site that is the documents, and then point there from all the others (I know that was noted as a project so I'm just seconding that effort; I like the idea of making it a github repository that anyone can pull from). Maybe it isn't that simple, and I know I am proposing work for someone to do (but I am happy to help).

Overall I feel forum is working and there are increasing numbers of regular participants. The more participants, the more discussion, the more helpful threads are organized for future readers -- so outreach efforts are key but obviously outside the normal scope of the forum.

These are just some thoughts. Thanks for everything.

I believe that was a bust of Diogenes Laertius.

Upon review, we can definitely update any text that is unclear. It's meant as a teaching tool, so it may be in need of some refinements.

One last request, after living with your redesign for a little while: Could you switch the Epicurus portrait and Podcast logo sides? That way the figures would each be facing *into* the page rather than facing off the page. Nitpicky, I realize, but it metaphorically "invites" people into the page rather than directing outward.

Quote from Cassius

Done!

EDIT - And done as to the "New Users" page as well.

Oh, yes. I do like that better!

Quote from Cassius

However I am coming around to the view that people may be using phone-size screens 90+ percent of the time, so I think it makes sense to fine-tune for the phone screens rather than for the desktop, and in this case the difference is minor. Thanks for the suggestion!

You are welcome.

Does your platform provide any usage statistics for you along those lines? That would be an interesting thing to know. I know I personally use the mobile version the vast majority of the time.