Sorry for this lengthy post here...
Chris wrote:
dselder1962 wrote:Also I am aware that there are frequent posters who no longer own a Diamond (hello Antoine!
)
Can the moderators advise me please.
Yes, we've allowed members to retain their full login rights. For the most part, that has worked out fine, though some days I'm tempted to revisit that (but not because of Antoine).
Never thought of that. That brings up the question if we have to check on every member if they still own a Diamond. If someone breaches the forum rules, just bring them to Chris or my attention.
Chris wrote:In the spirit of full disclosure, we've also granted membership to a small set of CFIs and A&Ps who have significant experience with Diamond Aircraft, since they are able to provide high-value input to discussions. To my knowledge, we have one member from DAI as well.
DAI Austria 2 or 3, DAI Canada at least 2 and Diamond China 1. Those are the ones I remember, Following Chris´spirit of full disclosure, they did not contribute much recently.
Chris wrote:When Kai created this forum back in 2010, it was intentionally made a closed community to maintain higher quality content and to encourage a give-some-take-some atmosphere.
Chris, many ideas came to play in those times. The previous Diamondaviators Forum was not open to Google and nobody could not even read it without paying an annual membership fee. Most of the members agreed it should be open for everyone as well as for search-engines to read. Most of the content here is safety-related and I wanted to make sure that fellow pilots can read it.
It had 200 members and the other few thousand pilots and owners of Diamond aircraft had no access to the information. I think all of us members then wanted to change that. The only one who objected was the owner of the other site had no interest in opening it up as 200 members still paid him $10,000 per year to get access to the information they provided themselves. We thought it was unfair.
I opened this forum initially with the subtitle "for pilots and owners of Diamond aircraft" and everyone who applied received a login and free of charge. While the other site had a paywall, this site was so open that the quality of posts was a major concern of the people who actually posted the best and most interesting articles on the other site. They did not feel good about posting quality content and having to deal with comments of trolls and people who have not invested time and effort to understand enough before posting and it was hard for me to convince them to come over.
Indeed the quality of posts here was initially an issue and the amount of pilots chiming in who had not much relation with Diamond aircraft. On this forum this was all discussed on how to improve and there were all kinds of opinions. Some wanted it more open, others preferred the old forum which was completely closed. A good trade-off was to admit from then on the access to the forum to owners only while keeping it visible to everyone. Some time later it was discussed that there are some people who have legit questions regarding Diamond and they needed to be given a chance to post something. So I implemented the open forum.
After restricting the access to owners only, I realized that the moderation work melted down to nearly zero. From an admin´s point of view, there is nothing less pleasant than discussions why a post was moderated or deleted. The forum, since we have changed to "owners only", has become the place we all wanted it to be. Or at least for the ones who have seen it how it was before. No fights, no insults, no political discussions, just Diamond- and aviation related discussions and chatter. But most of the people who chimed in here in this thread are relatively new members, so you might not know how much the benefits of this step outweigh the downsides.
Chris wrote:Non-owners, and particularly shoppers, tend to ask a bunch of questions, which almost invariably have been answered multiple times before, and then disappear. So the quantity of posts goes up without a corresponding increase in quality. Others want to use the forum for buying/selling aircraft, which is also expressly forbidden. Kai can chime in for himself to provide more background if he is following this thread, but that's my recollection.
There is another way of putting it: 2 or 3 times more new member registrations, and 10 times the moderation work while making this place unpleasant for the ones who actually spend time and effort to contribute and help. Have also in mind the age structure of Diamond owners and pilots and not all the members here were brought up in digital times and are less comfortable dealing with trolls and might just refrain from posting when replies get more aggressive.
I would like to remind all of you who are asking to open this forum up, that it will be a completely different job for Chris. He does this voluntarily, the forum is free and as far as I am concerned it will stay free. We have no advertisements here and if circumstances or the change of requirements of the community lead us to open this up, it will eventually lead to the question how to manage this and who will deal with the workload involved.
It was often suggested to go the COPA-way and it is a good idea. But I doubt that with the lower numbers of aircrafts and pilots this is a way which will not lead to sufficient commercial benefit to keep it up and still readable by all of us. I have quite often offered to hand this forum over to any non-commercial organization which takes better care of Diamond pilots than what we are able to offer. Forum members discussed to open an organization and in the end nobody did it.
Sandy wrote:
I, too, was initially declined membership before I became "committed", on the other hand, I do think that when someone who is seriously looking to commit seeks membership, they should, at least, be allowed a "provisional" membership for a period (3-4 months???) of time.
Sandy
Sandy, only one out of five will actually end up buying one. One will never login again. The third one will have a few questions which have been asked over and over again. Another one is a complete dreamer who sends ten posts and finally comes up with the question "is there anyone who will lend me his Diamond to round the world? (I will have my PPL soon)". And maybe another one asks questions, gets replies and finds out that a DA42 cannot be bought for the 100k he had left on his account. I am exaggerating a bit and it might not be that bad but the examples are real-world examples and while some of those posts might be amusing from the user´s view, it has lead to major frustration on the admin side when we had to close the account again.