I am happy, but admittedly sceptical, about the "new" Forum.  I was so disappointed with how the old Forum went downhill to a closure that for the past several months I contributed little or nothing except private posts to those who had in the past been such good posters.  I could have posted my discontent but chose not to as I didn't feel like being exposed to unpleasant and angry responses.

Now however, I feel that the only chance for the Forum to hang in there is to be explicit, honest, and frank---which I hurredly wish to clarify is not the same as bening nasty, personally critical or angry.

I have a few ideas I would like to put forth that are the product of off-Forum conversations with other Forum members and their ideas.

First, and probably most important, is to say that the Forum was designed for a specific purpose and that was to talk and share ideas and opinions about Grease. I think we should strive to keep this in mind. I have no wish to be terribly narrow about what should or should not be included, but I do think the past forum went down hill when, among others, the following types of posts kept coming in view----Personal conversations back and forth about non-Grease topics such as food, clothes, irrelevant personal likes and dislikes, and repetitive saffirmations of undying love and other emotions for various people.

Second, to help with the above, if we can't cure those who have an obsession to chat about everything just to be saying something, perhaps a specific topic label could be established for such stuff.  The Forum is not an idle chat site but maybe a Grease-Fan Chats, for example could be established and used for that purpose and kept out of the other more focused topics.  For example early in the life of the Forum I started a thread labeled Weekly Grosses. It was immediately obvious that a number of people were interested in the subject and for quite a long time we had really interesting and informative imput from such people as Mr. E, Dogs and Birds, Edwardian, Lauras Mom and others. Some good questions were asked and a lot of good answers were presented.

At one point, since my academic background gave me appropriate training and skills, I started on a statistical analysis of Grosses and what they meant and possibly predicted and spent a lot of off-line hours working with the data. However, before I could get the material enough together to present it people all of a sudden started using the Topic for "hellos", "Hello yourself" kind of stuff and it became impossibly complicated to trace back through the garbage. I just gave up and shared stuff with a few via personal notes as did they with me. Manyof those "good"posters have disappeared into the shadows.

I would suggest that we all make a personal effort to keep such topics on thread and send the personal stuff another way.

Perhaps some creative people can come up with some useful topics. Maybe, for example, some such as Past Grease Performers Now, Ticket and scheduling Problems, Questions and answers about Grease, Advice For Going to Grease (Travelm restaurants, hoousing, etc), or some along these lines.

Third, format. Somewhere within the last few months people started repeating a while line of posts by copying all the posts of a topic as an intro to their own comments. This got so bad that to find a first post one had to go back through dozens of repeated posts. Might someone figure out a cleaner way to make reference to what comments are being referred to other than repeating them over and over.

Finally, in my list, I really like it when I know something about the people whose posts I am reading and responding to. It would be nice (and interesting too), in my opinion, if more folks would add some data, or least fill in the blanks, for the individuals biographical entry. It is mofe fun to know something about a person whether yoou are liking or disliking them.  

Well, you get the idea. I'm glad the Forum is still alive (though perhaps not yet listed as "stable") and hope it survives. If it doesn't I promise to quietly sneak away but this time not into the shadows of the Forum but away from the Forum I have just deleted from my browser. I sincerely hope it doesn't come to that.

Stan/Gramps 3