My posting in the Forum Feedback forum didn't allow poll creation, but I can do it here.

As a friend who is a networking security professional put it, "Facebook. It's like the Wikileaks for your personal life." :/ I have no idea why this suggestion was even made. IMHO as soon as we put a stake through its heart and bury it at the crossroads at midnight, the better.

I agree. If Nexus moves to Facebook, then I will drop out of Nexus.

Easy vote for me, I do not have a facebook account, and even if I did I could not get to it from work

Ed

don't believe this would be a good idea on a couple counts- as mentioned, security is lax and we all know where that leads- also i have found the fb program itself to be very buggy and unreliable- can be very frustrating to cope with

please keep things as they are !! yeah fb may give the forum more exposure to the world but at what cost ? i'll take what's safe and familiar

IMHO

nick

Since I read the Heinlein Nexus from the bottom up, I was totally baffled by the first post I read this morning which happened to be Peter's poll. For those in the same situation, I am taking the liberty of quoting Peter's post in Forum Feedback section to alleviate the WTFO! factor:



A late arrival at the Heinlein Nexus, and an infrequent poster so far, I would prefer to defer to the more active members here. But, if the Nexus were to move to Facebook, I would be standing on the platform waving goodbye [with a tear or two in my eyes] as the train pulls out of the station.

As far as "... expose us to a wide audience and make access and posting easier." is concerned, remember alt.fan.heinlein in the old days of Usenet? Particularly the resulting "noise" from that wide audience and easy access and posting, which ended up making a.f.h an unusable forum even before the Usenet started to fade away from carriage by the major ISPs (e.g., Comcast)

Both the Heinlein Nexus and the Heinlein Society have pages on Facebook. They can include links to this Forum. Personally, I hate the Discussions and Notes functionalities within Facebook. It's not geared toward in-depth discussion at all. Their "messages" upgrade is a waste. I love it for keeping up with my friends in general, but not for any real discussion of any topic.

I obviously voted "no" in the poll.

I am an admin of the Heinlein Society Page on Facebook, along with a couple of other people. I'll try to take a look at it and improve the pointers.

Passionate arguments. I respect them.

I will also point out that roughly half of the posts on this site for the last three weeks have been the ones on this and the other Facebook thread... until a few more posts were made on a couple of other topics in recent hours. If you want to keep this site to ourselves then shouldn't there be more going on? Some of the familiar posters here have made more Facebook postings about Heinlein in that period than there have been total postings here.

Do we have a conflict here between one set of people who want to attract as many fans as possible to the Heinlein conversation and another set who want to keep the conversation to the current set of familiar faces?

I'm not asserting that quantity is better than quality. But there is such a thing as stagnation and atrophy. Personally speaking, my goal is to bring the gospel according to Bob to the widest audience of people who will appreciate it. To curl up in a little ball, however cosy and familiar, is to deny that goal. I acknowledge that not everyone may have that goal. But let's start the conversation on where we're going, because at the rate postings have been happening here, in a year this place will be a ghost town unless we do something.

Jim's prediction that the place would shrivel without him is looking uncomfortably prophetic, and Ghu knows we don't need to give him any more reason to feel smug

I can understand the desire to move to FB, but, as others have pointed out, it is not designed to handle extended conversations.

As to bringing in new blood, I can say that it is daunting to be among many of the posters here. The sheer volume of information that can be found on the forum simply cruising the threads is akin to finding hidden treasure.

I do not know what it will take to bring a new generation of readers to the table to discuss Heinlein's works. I do feel that Heinlein deserves to be studied and discussed.

Rob

No!

Fer gossakes, I've been ranting about the devolution of online communication for at least the last few years. We've devolved to the point where carrying on a coherent conversation of any depth whatsoever is nearly impossible. A forum such as this is the last ragged bastion of focused, intelligent, coherent discussion... and it has as a grievous flaw the isolating need for users to visit THIS site, and log into THIS system and no other. We're back to the original BBS days, where you had to dial up Fred's BBS to correspond - serially - with the other users of Fred's. Then came Fidonet to tie things together. Then Usenet replaced Fidonet and the world could chat in coherent, length-unlimited, topic-divided streams.

Now all that's gone and we have a choice of this slightly more accessible but still isolated forum, or the bleating blather of 160-character twits and tweets and wall scribblings, with no threading, no topic separation, no room for extended comment and all the longevity of a fart in a hurricane. I hate it with a black fury. I bemoan the loss of intellectual community to the flood tide of vomiting one's immediate thoughts and trivial actions to the adoring hordes.

F*ck Twitter. F*ck FaceBook. F*ck all the stupid, shallow, brief-thought-today, forgotten-tomorrow "communication" tools.

Did I say "no" yet?