If I understand it right, we have a Google group, this forum, and a blog. It is hard to know where to post a question to the group. Wouldn't it be better if there was a single place to post? I ended up posting my request for help making molds to both this forum and the Google Groups forum and might have posted to the blog if I could have figured out how. Which of the three has the most exposure or should I just continue posting duplicate (or triplicate) messages?

Hi Don, good question. We also use Twitter.

It's hard to say which channel has the most exposure. We probably have more members on the bulletin board than anywhere else, but a short list of active participants.

The organization started as a bulletin board and personally I consider that the main hub for question/answer exchanges. But like anywhere else, people have different preferences. Some, like myself, do not use many of the other social media channels. Your best bet for exposure would be to use as many channels as you can and want to use.

Speaking for the bulletin board, which has been my primary interface, I would say that most questions will be noticed and answered within three days or so, maybe sooner.

Questions about organizational matters, e.g., for the Board of Directors, can be sent to info [-at-] tcmaker.org.

Well now you have confused me. Which one do you consider the bulletin board - this forum, the Google Groups group, the blog, or something entirely else that I do not know about?

Sorry 'bout that. I was referring to this forum as the bulletin board.

frankly, it comes from us finding each new means of communication to serve a niche purpose, and a niche portion of our community, and them adopting it. some folks really wanted pushed notifications from a list serve, others wanted to browse at their leisure on the forums, others only the live interaction on irc.

personally, i think the forum was a brilliant means to do most of the multi thread discussion and archiving that we needed when we didn't have a physical space, but a lot of the general discussion happens in meatspace now.

given my druthers i'd have us using a google group open to anyone with gentle moderation (need to be approved as now, but anyone can join) folks can browse online, or get daily or # of message digests. it's accessible to anyone with an email. not that just because everyone else is doing it is it right, but most other maker spaces use listserves, which offer a limited version of the google group +/-. some have MASSIVE traffic, others have just a few messages a day, but folks see them and respond in a timely fashion.

twitter, facebook, google+ and the like are all more promo sorts of things than actual internal communication imho.

plus facebook, g+, the wiki, a chat room that is largely inactive, and some other services like flickr...

facebook, forum, irc, blog

I don't think this problem is unique to the TC Maker community at all. It is a problem inherent in internet communications these days. Between all the social medias, instant messengers, voice chat, video chat, message boards, email, etc... I have more ways to communicate with people than I have people to communicate with.

I think it would be better to have the "Forum" link on the main website's header point to
http://www.tcmaker.org/forum/search.php?search_id=active_topics
instead of to
http://www.tcmaker.org/forum/

So people immediately see the new forum posts instead of a list of topic areas. They can easily go see the topic areas by clicking on Board Index in the forum.

Also, the forum should be fixed so that links show with underlines, like the rest of the internet. Currently they appear as slightly darker text.

Doug, I have had the same thought about the forum link. I can probably change it. I wouldn't necessarily say the rest of the Internet has underlined links, but we can perhaps mod our forum template for that. Personally, I have often in the past set my personal browser to not underline links, but present them in a different color. The author of the forum template apparently had that preference as well.