The AntsCanada Ant Forum's

So the anting (specifically AntsCanada) interest has BLOWN up this year.
AntsCanada SocialBlade Stats: http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/AntsCanada
AntsCanada Google Trends: https://www.google.ca/trends/explore?q=ants%20canada

I know the forum is great and totally meets the needs of this current community but I feel the 2017 season is going to be overloaded with new members, or a significant number of people are going to be turned off by the old school forum concept.

I recommend we claim the r/AntsCanada Subreddit asap and start building a community there. The only ant subreddits are comprised of posts from misguided souls looking for a community like this. We could grow a dedicated ant identifying group and reduce some of BatSpiderFish's workload. It would be SOOOO easy to run a offshoot like r/AntsYourCity and really connect with people in your area. You wouldn't be bothering other people far away with your posts, if they live in Canada and don't want to hear about people in Australia.

Just a thought and gauging interest. I'm totally willing to mod r/AntsToronto !

Chewyrockafeller wrote:So the anting (specifically AntsCanada) interest has BLOWN up this year.
AntsCanada SocialBlade Stats: http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/AntsCanada
AntsCanada Google Trends: https://www.google.ca/trends/explore?q=ants%20canada

I know the forum is great and totally meets the needs of this current community but I feel the 2017 season is going to be overloaded with new members, or a significant number of people are going to be turned off by the old school forum concept.

I recommend we claim the r/AntsCanada Subreddit asap and start building a community there. The only ant subreddits are comprised of posts from misguided souls looking for a community like this. We could grow a dedicated ant identifying group and reduce some of BatSpiderFish's workload. It would be SOOOO easy to run a offshoot like r/AntsYourCity and really connect with people in your area. You wouldn't be bothering other people far away with your posts, if they live in Canada and don't want to hear about people in Australia.

Just a thought and gauging interest. I'm totally willing to mod r/AntsToronto !

It's a good thought. But moving all of this forum over to reddit could be quite difficult. Also, reddit opens up a lot to bots and more people wanting to 'take over' the forums.

I totally am aware Reddit has some flaws but that's normally because of lazy moderating. If you look at how the trend has blown up, It makes me think 2017 is going to grow just as much, if not double the influx of this year.

I guess I wasn't here this summer until too late but I bet the forum popularity did not compare to the YouTube and generally purchasing traffic. It was probably the best its been but look at that spike! Most subreddits manage perfectly. It all about the community and I think we got a pretty good one here.

Chewyrockafeller wrote:I totally am aware Reddit has some flaws but that's normally because of lazy moderating. If you look at how the trend has blown up, It makes me think 2017 is going to grow just as much, if not double the influx of this year.

I guess I wasn't here this summer until too late but I bet the forum popularity did not compare to the YouTube and generally purchasing traffic. It was probably the best its been but look at that spike! Most subreddits manage perfectly. It all about the community and I think we got a pretty good one here.

You should most likely bring this up privately with Mikey or with one of the mods/admins. I think it would need quite a bit of work, so with this growing popularity most of the team wouldn't be able to work on it.

Also, it will take a while to start up. So late 2017 early 2018 would be the time it gets into full swing.

To be honest I think this is one of the easiest and well organized forums. I like the others but find it difficult to find flight sightings in my area as the other forum has all sightings in one thread.

I had joined the skype group and it started well until more ppl joined and there was no control and everyone wants to run it wich I impossible.thru skype anyhow. I'm kind of nervous bout moving to another group.

Reddit=yuck for me. Too chaotic.

Cool thanks for some of your opinions. Yea I'm definitely not talking about 'moving' this forum is any way. Your right too I really like how this forum is laid out, but I also grew up with this type of forum. I just really want to see the ant keeping hobby grow. The forum here has 1700 members. If that number grew somehow to ten thousand it would be very hard to manage I think.

I used to think it was very chaotic too until I started to use it and noticed how powerful features like voting on threads and comments are. Think about how an ID request could work. A user posts to subreddit r/AntIdentification. The post title is "12mm NY 10/1/2016" The content is photos and other descriptors. If the title doesn't contain a measurement, date and location it is automatically removed. When others users comment if they think camponotus they simply upvote someone who previously commented camponotus rather than adding a new comment thereby lengthening the post. This is also great for archival because when you reference an old thread generally the best comments have been voted up to the top.

I was just a thought I had and nothing critical. Once again thanks for your opinions.

The forums are not going to Reddit. Too many issues there.

its good to start promoting this ant community on other social media platforms for betterment of ant keepers and awairness as well..
we're with you.. support !
Cheers!
#Brain