Quote Originally Posted by paulbarden View Post
Quinn's forum was a low traffic space at the best of times. It wasn't unusual for weeks to go by without a single post. Clearly much of the traffic went to Facebook, and I expect that is one of the reason's Quinn decided to pull the plug on it.
Now that most viewers believe the forum is gone, I imagine few (if any) of them even have a bookmark to the site now. Restoring traffic is going to be difficult, because I expect Facebook has now captured most of the refugees. Such a shame.
That's not true Paul, when I started wetplate in about 2006, there were just two online places to learn how. the Civil War Collodion group run by Bob Szabo, and Quinn's collodion dot com. There were no facebook wetplate groups. On Collodion there were posts and questions and long threads daily. We had such a vibrant active group we even planned a group gathering in Paris to do a wetplate demo at a show. We started the World Wetplate Day, and published a book of the first year's plates done by everyone. I made a lot of friends, many from around the world. Some have visited me. Just like here, on the LF forum back then. Remember when 45-50 members here were the experts, checking in daily, commenting on their expertise, advising, selling dozens of lenses a month, commenting on recent lens sales, gallery openings, and the like? I do. Camera shows used to be common too. Today.....it's crickets. Everyone today on FB does their quick flyby question, and then they filter the 14 FB answers to try to find the truth. There is no community or friendships formed, it's a bunch of meaningless "names" of people you see once or twice and never again. OR, you get one "super user" that runs the group and answers every post - allowing no real discourse - it's his personal soap box.

What I don't like about the FB format (among many things), is it's not a "juried show." Anyone and everyone can comment, answer wrongly, be rude. there are no rules, no moderation, and if someone gets kicked off for being mean, he just switches over to one of the 14 other wetplate groups and starts up again. They're all the same and have all the same members. There's no peer review or expertise. It is....chaos. And the misinformation highway.

Many have started supposed "Brass Lens show and sell" FB groups, basically so they can scoop up the ones that newbies show up asking questions about. The whole FB place reeks of fraud and aggression and politics.