I know some folks are irritated by this discussion, but I find it a nice civilized break from discussing the US presidential election. I've been on Facebook for years and also have been in this forum pretty much from the start. To me they're very different things. Facebook is great for sharing images and very short text comments like "o my GAWD what a pretty flower," but a terrible place (in my opinion) to have a threaded discussion about something. This forum is very awkward for sharing images, but excellent for written discussions on interesting topics. Because the two venues are so different, I don't think a PBS Facebook forum would actually cannibalize this one. But I also don't think our forum on Facebook would be all that special. What would we offer that you can't already get on, for example, Bulborum? There's bulletin board software out there that we could move this forum onto, and that would be a better location than Facebook for continuing the conversations we have here -- but it'd require more setup and maintenance and a LOT more moderation, and on a bulletin board the discussions tend to separate out into different threads in ways that dissipate the group's attention. So I don't think it would be worth the pain of moving. What I love about this forum is that, despite or maybe because of the ancient technology, we've fond a nice balance of topics and participants and it makes for a good read almost every day. Don't underestimate how hard it is to create and maintain something like that. Thousands of startups try and fail to achieve that sort of thing every year. But there are a couple of other things for us to think about... --How will we create the next generation of bulb growers? Most young people these days barely touch email for personal correspondence. I'd like to see us nurture the next generation of bulb gardeners, and I am not sure that an email forum is the right way to do that. On the other hand, I am not sure Facebook is the right place for that outreach either; generation Z feels it's old-fashioned, someplace Grandma uses to complain about her knee replacement. --We should also talk about the future of the wiki. When we started it, there wasn't a good place online to find photos of species bulbs, and the resource we all created was amazing. Now there are a lot of those photo places, especially the astonishingly complete iNaturalist. I still love the wiki, but the photos on it are just not as special as they used to be. On the other hand, the accumulated text of all these emails is a unique resource that just gets better over time as we add more to it. I think Mike L is right -- in this email forum we've collectively written an encyclopedia on bulb growing that's not duplicated anywhere else. We do have a way to search it, and it's far better than nothing, but it's also very primitive and hard to use, and it's not indexed by Google as far as I can tell. So we have basically hidden it from the world. I think we could do something really special with that material... Mike San Jose, CA _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net>