As I have said in other posts, the main objective that I have to that new bulletin board is its appearance. People like to be able to look at a single Web page and just scan down see all of the notes that have been posted for the past few months. And when something doesn’t have attractive features like that then they might lose interest in it.

If you are having 400 people visit the board each day then there is a LOT of scanning being done!!!

My own Web sites can keep track of how many people visit each day and their countries of origin. Most visitors are from the U.S. But there are a tremendous number from the Ukraine. And I am wondering why on Earth people in the Ukraine are so interested in my Web sites.

Getting back to the new board, I feel that any managed and regulated bulletin board is better than no bulletin board at all.

It is going to take me a while to decide if it might be possible to get other researchers to post any notes to that newer board. It is probably fairly easy to create features for it that would keep people who feel that earthquakes can be predicted from being constantly criticized by people who don’t believe that. And that might be necessary.

In any case, time will tell. If it doesn’t look like it would work for the earthquake forecasters then I will probably have to create a bulletin board for my own Web site and have to go through the trouble of moderating it.

Finally on this,

It would be a good idea in my opinion once this board stops running to take the entire history of posts and pack them into a single zip file if one that large can be created. Or multiple zip files might be created if that is necessary. And those files should then be made available through your Web site for downloading.

The reason for this is that the EarthWaves board has been in existence for a very long time. And posts over the years do in my opinion actually provide a type of invaluable historical record of what people have been thinking and saying over the years about earthquakes and earthquake forecasting.

An earlier version of the board was called QuakeNet. And I think that I myself might have copies of most or all of the posts to that board. They were at times circulated a little differently such as by E-mail. Eventually QuakeNet split into this present EarthWaves board and the Yahoo EarthWaves board that still circulates posts by E-mail.