State of the Forum Address

Hey all the politicians are doing it, so why don't I? And like the politicians, this will be a LONG speech, even for me.

Well congrats to everyone on the 5th anniversary of this version of the forum. For those of us around that far back, the previous version about probably 2 more years.

If I don't say it enough, thanks to EACH and EVERY one of you for making the forum what it is. Congrats to ALL OF YOU.

And a special thanks to CS for creating the forum and supporting it throughout the years. Says a lot about the company and the people behind the company, to put their information on the web for all to see.

The view to the past

Check out the first forum at:
Original CS Forum

Thanks to Steve Falco for all the work making that happen. Brings back some good memories, and gets me thinking about all the characters we HAVE on the forum as well as HAD on the forum and they don't visit anymore.

So, as of today, the forum has 5628 members, so #6000 isn't far off.

Posts are now over 50,000

I hope everyone realizes how much information and value we have in the archives. I spend a LOT of time moving all 50,000 of those posts so that we can archive the wonderful information.

The Owners Archives has 4223 posts, so there is a wealth of information there.

Another great Archive is the "best of" Archive with 3545 posts. As I moved posts from the Open Forums into the Archive, I make a subjective decision to move the "interesting" ones into the Best Of forum.

For meat topics, in order:

• Pork Butt/Shoulder archive 3751
  
• Ribs 2416
  
• Brisket 2331
  
• Poultry 1935
  
• Seafood 1076
  

As you can see we talk a LOT about Butts, over 1300 more posts on that topic than brisket.

And let's not forget these two forums:

Forum Archive 11730 and Professional 3706

Anything that doesn't fit in one of the main topics above, gets put in the "forum" archive

Pros forum. Wow, lots of useful information there.

And last, but certainly not least, the FE Forums

• Owners 2659
  
• Contest 1943
  
• Open 1787
  

We started the FE forums on 12/29/04, so just a little over a year and a few months, but lots of activity.

So I would say the State of the forum is great. WHY you ask. No, I won't take the credit, I'm just the moderator. What makes this forum special is each and every one of you that contributes something. The new guys/gals for just asking the basic (even without searching first) The old hats who put a lot of time and energy into the posts.

Hope everyone takes time to read the "Introduct yourself" thread and see that we all love BBQ. There some good stories in there:

Introduce yourself

Who dat?

• SO 5638 posts
  
• Tom 4260
  
• PrisonChef 1234
  
• i2BBQ 981
  
• TJF 942
  
• Two Greyhounds 745
  
• Donna 719
  
• Wheelz 684
  
• Woodburner 626
  
• KathyE 496
  

So what does that tell me. That a few of us respond to everything, right Tom? You 'da Man, and with all your help, you've made the forum what it is today. And Tom was around on the original forum.

What you may not realize, is that I don't do this for pay, neither does Tom. We do it because we love BBQ and sharing out knowledge about it.

If you're on the list above, you deserve a special pat on the back for being a MAJOR part of the forum.

But it also tells me we have a lot of people come and go. At least that's what the stats tell me. Wish they would stay around more. They come in, get the basics down and don't come back.

Come back...shane, come back If you haven't posted in a while let us know and come on back.

The view to the future

So were do we head from here? Donna is working on an announcement soon of a new forum. No details yet, but it will cover a subject we get asked about a lot

More 101's. Looking at the 101s, they're all probably 4 or more years old. They need to be updated, so that's on my list this year. I got good feedback about PB 101 so I hope to have that out soon. The ribs and then brisket will get updated. And also working on some of the new 101s for Q University(R)

I'm also building a Forum 101. Plan on showing the basics of how the forum is set up, how to use the tools, like search. I have some screen capture software that I can use to create good "how to's"

Lessons Learned needs an overhaul, so it's next on the list.

So that's it. We all love the forum because of the friendliness and genuine love of BBQ we all have.

And thanks to all, I don't answer as many posts as I did in the past, because all of you have become experts at sharing your knowledge of the smoker we all have and love.

Best to each of you, hope to see us all here in 5 more years.

Russ