Please Help Me...

[trumtrum21]

OK, I'm sure some of you have been here. I a graduating senior at the University of North Carolina. I am taking a class that analyzes virtual communities, I have been a member of this one, but part of the class is to "interview" a couple other members. If anyone can answer these 5 simple questions please, it would help me tremendously....
1)How long have you been a member of the community?
2)How often in a week do they visit the community? Participate?
3)What do you think makes this community successful?
4)Do you have any suggestions for imporovement?
5)What motivated you to join a vitrual community?

Please either post your answer or email them to me, HAT8092@UNCW.edu

Thank you!

[Java]

(1) 6 years here at LD (after being redirected here when another message board closed after a few years in service) The old message board was part of a group of message boards hosted by CitySearch which were basically a in conjunction or attached to a number of radio stations across the country but all connected together by CitySearch. I used to be in with a group of local people originally and these people I would keep in touch with this way (as a group instead of sending out bunches of individual e-mails)... plus it was a great way to meet other local people too, not to mention the nature of the internet being international, we also invited others from far off places to join in too. (I had a number of cyber friends from across the country and overseas from other websites, mostly science related but we needed a place for off topic banter ect...) Anyway once here, we gradually lost a number of people (life changes, etc) and since the old boards closed and the remainers of folks kept getting channeled into smaller and smaller confines of available cyberspace, we (what was left of us ended up here.) Luckily a few of us had bookmarked a number of the radio station message boards from the old CitrySearch sites and once they all closed (April 15, 2000) there were 2 weeks of limbo where the radio stations which left their message board links up, well the links went to nowhere... until Radio Alice in San Francisco suddenly to our surprise had their link connected to LD, and what few of us knew about it from outside our own area jumped onto this and then ventured outside the radio message board areas into other branches of LD and the rest is history.

(2) I visit here maybe 5-6 days a week to take a quick peek around but post on maybe 2 -4 days out of the week lately. Originally it used to be every day mainly because there were a lot more folks posting during the earlier days.

(3) What makes an internet community successful is a good supply of intelligent or interesting topics to discuss (plus people thinking along the same wavelengths so posts aren't just tossed out into some kind of neverneverland, never to be replied to or read), or just fun things to chat about, or topics of common interests (Photography seems to be the best thing going for me in the Completely Off Topic Forum).

(4) Improvements I can suggest would be for LD to contact various outside sources such as radio stations, etc to see if they can provide links to LD so new folks can find the place. The internet is a big place and with so many sites all over the planet, as people drift away from this place to find others which are newer or 'more exciting' there seems to be a severe lack of newcomers arriving to fill in the ever deepening empty voids left after their departures.

(5) What motivates me to join a virtual community is the people and the topics of interest they post or chat about. Though after a few years in the same community habit sets in even if the interesting topics of conversation wane away to nearly zilch. No doubt people often try to revive the place but with so few left amongst us, it's difficult at best to sustain any kind of revived activity... plus after awhile with just the same folks around year after year, we generally run out of new (or previously unheard of old stuff) stuff to talk about, and things tend to get a bit boring (no insults intended to anyone here, I know I've tried too, plus I suspect a lot of folks are tired of seeing my same old subjects come up repeatedly but skewed to incorporate different angles, ect.) That's why we need a fresh supply of new folks -- new material to talk, discuss, chat about, etc to keep the place buzzing.

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So you're posting from UNCW?
Are you a native North Carolinian (or have you at least lived here in NC for a number of years previous to going to college), or just a student from outside the state? Just Curious. BTW, I'm from NC, just in case you might be interested to know.

Anyway, I hope the responses I supplied help in some way for your project. Also I hope I didn't supply too much information, making it too confusing.

[trumtrum21]

I am not a native N. Carolinian. I am originally from upstate NY. I decided to come down here and take a year off after high school. I knew that there were so many different schools to choose from in NC and I ended up staying in Wilmington.

BTW, that you so much for replying to my post, it's hard to actually get someone to take the time...