Should We Continue Friday, Nature Unlimited??

[ShunCheung]

Of course pretty much all of us are aware that photo.net's viewership has dropped in the last decade or so. Dieter is wondering whether it is still worthwhile to continue the Friday, Nature Unlimited threads, as participation is pretty limited. But then, this week's thread has 9 follow-up posts. If there is sufficient interest, I am sure we are glad to continue, but I encourage everybody to post.

Also, we haven't discussed this for a few years. Last time I polled, most people favored the one-image-per-member-per-week restriction. But optionally, we can open it to maybe 2 or 3 images per person. I just wouldn't like to have one person dominating the thread with 10, 20 images.

Thoughts?

[Sanford]

I was wondering the same thing about the Street/Documentary forum...nothin' there any more. What I would like to see is a slight tweaking of the W/NW forum rules.

[Roger G]

I would like to see it carry on. Allowing say 2 photos per member would be ok I think, but not more than that.

[Bill J Boyd]

I am OK with keeping it.  But, my vote is for 1 Photo Only.

[William Michael]

13 hours ago, ShunCheung said:

Of course pretty much all of us are aware that photo.net's viewership has dropped in the last decade or so. Dieter is wondering whether it is still worthwhile to continue the Friday, Nature Unlimited threads, as participation is pretty limited.  . . .

Thoughts?

Hi Shun

Trust you are well.

I believe that my thoughts are from one who sits outside the 'participation' metric that Dieter is applying. Please allow me to explain with two points -

1. I am a Member who looks at the Nature Forum regularly, especially the two 'regular forums'. I do the same; looking at No Words where the topic interests me and the Canon EOS Thursday Photo and also Mirrorless Monday. I have never posted many of my images 'regularly' and I am not very active with the "like" option.

2. It's 1330hrs Sunday as I write, I think that equates to 2030hrs Saturday West Coast USA. I see now (at this time) there are 527 Users viewing Photo.net; five (5) of whom are Members, including me. Interrogation and a preliminary data analysis reveals the other 522 "viewers" constitute very few (extremely very few) Potential Spammers and, by way of general information, very few are viewing "Nude and Erotic".  A quick analysis of the 22 pages of these 527 "Viewers" allows me to reckon, prima facie, the majority are looking for an answer to a technical question, the next most populated group seem to be browsing images generally, mostly, but not exclusively, within "Albums" or "Galleries".

 

In your decision as how you will move forward with the regular Friday's Nature Unlimited I suggest that consideration is given to:

> the relevance of the decline in Photonet's viewership

> what the metric "participation" means

> the drivers of the Members who contribute their images to  Friday's Nature Unlimited

Good luck with your choice.

 

WW   

Edited May 12 by William Michael
Because I used a wrong pronoun and I couldn't stand the flak

[ShunCheung]

Within this forum, there is slightly more participation for Monday in Nature than the Friday, Unlimited thread. I can understand that it is frustrating that you go through the trouble to start threads every week, but there is not much participation.

I always wish that there were a mechanism to automatically start these weekly threads, and you don't have to attach an image to the first post. Since I took over Nikon Wednesday this year, and I was on vacation most of April, I had scheduled three threads before I left. It turned out that I had decent wifi access from our little cruise ship on that trip so that I was able to start threads on the road. I had been on that same ship back in 2011 and 2015, and there was no wifi access before.

[bgelfand]

I would like to see this forum continue.  It compliments the the Nature Forum with more relaxed rules concerning the Hand of Man restrictions. There have been some very fine images posted here that could not have been posted on the Nature Forum with its strict rules. Several years ago, Shun, you posted an image taken from a boat that you said you could not post in Nature because there were very small waves caused by the boat (Hand of Man). 

As for the number of posts to this thread, I think the quality of the images posted for outweighs any quantity requirements.

As for automated opening of the thread, I did not see any rule that requires an image be posted to any message in this forum. I would think a simple message with the heading for the week and  one line saying the thread is now opened and locking off the previous week's thread would suffice.

[JDMvW]

Like the little bit of extra freedom, but one image per forum is plenty.

[ShunCheung]

One of my favorite landscape images during my February 2019 trip to Antarctica is an evening image of the Lemaire Channel, with the setting sunlight on the peaks and reflections on the calm water. Obviously I was on a cruise ship and there are ripples in the ship's wake. Strictly speaking, those ripples are human made. That may disqualify this image based on the stricter definition for nature photography.

[bgelfand]

That is the image I was referring to (above). I liked it then, and I like it now.  BTW the waves are an excellent addition; deleting them would diminish the image.

It is an excellent reason to keep Friday Nature Unlimited.