Fragmentation of the electric motorcycle forums

[mattmccutchen]

Currently there are three major electric motorcycle forums that I know of: http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/, http://elmoto.net/, http://brammoforum.com/.  The accepted practice to reach the entire community seems to be to post to (and read the replies on) all of them, as demonstrated recently by the owners map and my group ride announcements; this is a PITA.  To collect some data on how important this actually is: which forums do you read?  Would you be willing to help the community function better by standardizing on one forum at least for brand-independent group rides, and possibly for a broader range of topics if the fragmentation doesn't seem to be serving any purpose?

For myself: I check all three forums for group rides (though probably not often enough) and would be willing to standardize on any one of them, though I'd prefer one with a brand-independent title, and if I have to pick one, I'm partial to http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/ as the first one I found.

[protomech]

I primarily read brammoforum and electricmotorcycleforum.com using the unread posts links. I read elmoto infrequently - lots of good information and knowledgeable posters there, but I don't have time or attention to stay current with it all the time.

There's a lot of good information specific to the Brammo bikes on this forum, and it has its own culture. It's the first electric motorcycle forum I started posting on, so it has a special place in my heart.

http://brammoforum.com/index.php?action=stats
http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?action=stats

EMF is older by a couple of years, and really exploded (IMO) with the introduction of the 2012 Zero bikes. It's continued to grow by about 20% year over year since, again largely due to Zero owner activity. No small part of that has been teeth-gnashing over the various "quirks" of the Zero bikes : )

On the other hand, this forum was most active in 2012 and has slightly tapered down since then. Partly that is due to a shift from speculation over the Empulse to rider reports, and partly it is due to a shift from high-profile racing with TTXGP to a smaller (but perhaps more significant) role racing in AFM and AHRMA.

There'd be a lot of benefit to merging the forums, in terms of reducing fragmentation and making it easier to follow general interest topics.

There'd be a lot lost as well, I think.

As an alternative: I wonder if it is possible to create a subforum that is shared between the two forums (BF and EMF) .. and perhaps map the Empulse / Enertia forums here to EMF (EMF has a Brammo subforum, but it gets very little traffic). This would be non-trivial .. especially if de-duplicating users .. but perhaps possible. AFAIK skadamo is the technical admin behind both sites.

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=171340.0

[Brammofan]

Protomech does a great job of outlining the history and pros and cons.

Skadamo runs both EMF and BF, with me as a co-administrator on BF.

I keep up with the BF posts by subscribing (clicking the "notify" button) to almost every new post or by replying to a post, which automatically subscribes me to that thread.  I do the same thing on EMF, but only get "new post" notifications on certain subforums.

Richard230 is great because he posts news on all three of the forums you mentioned. I really appreciate him for doing that.

My experience with forums (inside and outside the EV world) is that they all "fragment." A big forum breaks the information up into subforums. Those subforums often divide like cells when new subjects come up and a need to parse things into sub sub forums becomes apparent. Then, someone comes along and starts a whole new forum on an issue that may have started on a thread deep in a subforum. And on and on it goes.

Combining these back into one point of origin, a super-forum, so-to-speak, seems to go against the natural flow of forums I outlined above. We're probably not going to do it with BF and EMF, but perhaps skadamo can chime in with his opinion.

And, while I started on elmoto way back when, I rarely go there today. This has less to do with the administrator - who is a great guy - then it has to do with some of the people on the forum and the culture that goes along with it.

[Richard230]

If you want to see what a well-fragmented single-motorcycle model forum looks like check out this one:  http://f800riders.org/forum/forum.php

While it was designed as a forum for the BMW F800-series models, it has fragmented into a number of sub-forums.  In this case it seems to have worked out really well, especially as the people who post on it seem to get along very well, with no flaming or attitudes - but a lot of tongue-in-cheek comments and good natured ribbing.  When they don't have anything to say about their motorcycles, they tell really bad jokes:   

http://f800riders.org/forum/showthread.php/155914-Worst-Jokes-Ever!!!/page10

[mattmccutchen]

The aggregate answer across the three instances of this topic: (1) people want to use their separate forums for different culture, post count, or whatever (which probably shouldn't have been a surprise), and (2) no one expressed interest in group rides, never mind choosing a single place to post them, which matches the level of response I've had to those posts since March 22.  I guess that leaves me posting community organization topics all three places and group rides nowhere in particular, but probably at least on http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/ to leave the door open in case someone new interested shows up and follows the trail.

Richard: I'm talking about fragmentation of the same topic areas across sites.  You seem to be talking about subdivision of topic areas or "boards" within a site, which is much less harmful because there are a limited number of possible places (ideally one) for any given topic and there's a greater tendency for people to notice topics of interest on other boards on the same site.