I've been asked to post some commentary about the trials and tribulations of trying to start a message board for a 55+ community that is deeply right wing (~2/3), computer-averse (the existing Yahoo egroup works solely by email), and grumpy. I'm welcome to suggestions and snark, in reasonable proportion - especially advice from people with experience!
As I mentioned before, Liz is "helping" me with this - by which I mean doing a lot of the backend work as I learn how to do some of it, since I'm using the same software, albeit the upgrade that I bought and which she is about to upgrade to. So I pretend to justify in my mind that she's been getting experience on the 2.0 version by helping me, as she prepares to upgrade our board to 2.1 when it comes out (and then help me upgrade too??).
The history behind this new message board: when we moved here to this 55+ community in the West Valley near Phoenix (Goodyear AZ), we really didn't do much research. We selected this community because my daughter's inlaws live here, and they did THEIR research a number of years ago and liked it, and were encouraging us to move to the same area so the kids would HAVE to come visit at the holidays, since we're all here. We bought the first and only house I looked at here, and have been reasonably happy with the choice of home, price and location.
But to say this community is full of conservative old farts would be an understatement. People whose brains no longer comprehend the possibility of change and evolution, much less the value of same.
There are two long-standing community Yahoo egroups run by members of the community, one of which (the main group) is for communications about stuff for sale, griping about things, and requests for recommendations for every service you can imagine - doctors, restaurants, remodelers, auto services, house cleaners, repair people, etc. No way to store the answers, and most of the answers are sent directly to the person asking. As you can imagine, these requests for recommendation are very very often repeat questions. And no discussions are allowed, because of the volume of emails that would result. Moderation is fairly intensive, as the mods have to stop discussions (which piss most of the people off), and because people forget to sign their posts with their full names (because we are a community who live together, and people's email addys are often not their real names).
The other group is the Talk group, which is supposedly for discussions. It is run by a bunch of alt-right nutjobs, and only has about 700 members (there are about 7000 homes in the community). I was warned by some more liberal folks I met that they kick libs off the board for any weak excuse, and after reading the board for a while and then posting a bit, I was quickly kicked off, ostensibly for forgetting to sign my name a couple of times, but actually because I was pissing off the old members for arguing religion by referring to a deity as a "sky daddy," for supporting the right of NFL players to kneel during the anthem, and being against the Second Amendment.
(Continued in next post)
As I mentioned before, Liz is "helping" me with this - by which I mean doing a lot of the backend work as I learn how to do some of it, since I'm using the same software, albeit the upgrade that I bought and which she is about to upgrade to. So I pretend to justify in my mind that she's been getting experience on the 2.0 version by helping me, as she prepares to upgrade our board to 2.1 when it comes out (and then help me upgrade too??).
The history behind this new message board: when we moved here to this 55+ community in the West Valley near Phoenix (Goodyear AZ), we really didn't do much research. We selected this community because my daughter's inlaws live here, and they did THEIR research a number of years ago and liked it, and were encouraging us to move to the same area so the kids would HAVE to come visit at the holidays, since we're all here. We bought the first and only house I looked at here, and have been reasonably happy with the choice of home, price and location.
But to say this community is full of conservative old farts would be an understatement. People whose brains no longer comprehend the possibility of change and evolution, much less the value of same.
There are two long-standing community Yahoo egroups run by members of the community, one of which (the main group) is for communications about stuff for sale, griping about things, and requests for recommendations for every service you can imagine - doctors, restaurants, remodelers, auto services, house cleaners, repair people, etc. No way to store the answers, and most of the answers are sent directly to the person asking. As you can imagine, these requests for recommendation are very very often repeat questions. And no discussions are allowed, because of the volume of emails that would result. Moderation is fairly intensive, as the mods have to stop discussions (which piss most of the people off), and because people forget to sign their posts with their full names (because we are a community who live together, and people's email addys are often not their real names).
The other group is the Talk group, which is supposedly for discussions. It is run by a bunch of alt-right nutjobs, and only has about 700 members (there are about 7000 homes in the community). I was warned by some more liberal folks I met that they kick libs off the board for any weak excuse, and after reading the board for a while and then posting a bit, I was quickly kicked off, ostensibly for forgetting to sign my name a couple of times, but actually because I was pissing off the old members for arguing religion by referring to a deity as a "sky daddy," for supporting the right of NFL players to kneel during the anthem, and being against the Second Amendment.
(Continued in next post)
