Why are local forums/clubs struggling?

BRS
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Greybeard said:
Chasing away new members because they're female is stupidity beyond reason.

I mentioned my firearms hobby earlier in this thread... that's one place, after generations of effort, us old white gun guys are starting to get it. Women are the fastest growing segment in firearm sports. The first step towards bringing in more women was to put an end to the kind of crap you experienced in that aquarium club.
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Yeah, I went to a Women in the Outdoors event at a gun club this summer. I have to say the guys there were very welcoming and made us all feel quite comfortable. I've thought about trying to find a shooting range closer to home because of the way I was treated at this event.
 
Humblefish said:
I loathe social media (especially FB), so if forums ever go away then so will my online presence. So, I guess wanting to save local forums is somewhat a self-preservation instinct for "Humblefish". :p
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You gotta try a discord group. We literally just get on live chat with like 8 or so people and just talk shop or someone will screenshare their tank while we have a hangout or livestream. No one is trying to sell anything. There are a few YTers on there so every now and then I'll ask for an affiliate link before buying something so they get some money. It's a younger crowd so everyone is broke and not looking at the latest and greatest from Neptune and there are a lot of free things swapped or frags cut for free just to help ppl out. They'll play video games with each other too (as Discord's roots are in gaming anyway).

You also own the server so you can do whatever you want. Want it sponsor free - cut them all off, want a specific region - limit it, what to make it completely private - it has better security then Facebook, want cool emotes or bots - you can do that too. The main advantage with FB is you have to use your real name so generally you will get less trolling --- e.g. - having to mod less.
 
www.dinkinsaquaticgardens.com
The depth of many Facebook posters knowledge is very limited and madding to read actually. Most youtubers are not very advanced but get free stuff to pimp to hobbyist.
I plan on doing something soon but I am waiting to have the time when I retire in 290 days to have the time to devote to education and the hobby. Which is sorely needed and gets more important every day.:)
 
ThunderGoose said:
Yeah, I went to a Women in the Outdoors event at a gun club this summer. I have to say the guys there were very welcoming and made us all feel quite comfortable. I've thought about trying to find a shooting range closer to home because of the way I was treated at this event.
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It sucks you were hit on to the point of making you feel uncomfortable at reef club meets. :( Must have been a bunch of younger guys there. At my local gtgs, it's mostly old fat married guys with their wives keeping a close eye on them. :p
 
Our reef club (South Carolina) used to be super busy, loads of members on the forum and all the meetings were highly attended. Now the forum is dead (there's a few people who post once a month). I just went to a meeting with a friend and there were two other people there (plus the club speaker). We have one big meet per year (I'm pretty sure the only one with stuff for sale) and thats it. We have a pretty bad reef club setup, I'd considered starting one myself, but as a full time college student I don't think I quite have the time to do it. Plus I don't really think we could ever get enough members.
 
Chewy.com
We recently moved from VA. Our local club was WAMAS (local, but still 1.5 hours away in DC). It is an awesome group of people and we dearly miss the club. There were over 600 paid members and lots of people willing to help you out. Each meeting had a great speaker (many of the same ones that speak at MACNA), people selling corals (pacific east, supreme reef, Copps, to name a few), awesome raffles, and social time before the meeting started.

Then we moved to the South Georgia/FL area. The local club here is a Facebook group. Never really found many deals on the group and not family friendly so my daughter could not be involved on the site.

One example of the attitudes on the group is someone was selling water jugs...put in their listing that if they did not sell by a certain date, they were going in the garbage, and they would be destroyed so don’t waste your time getting them out of the garbage. I left the group after that drama.

Without personal, face to face interactions, I think people forget they are actually dealing with other humans. When I come to meetings and talk with the teenager that is so eager to get started in this hobby, I feel compelled to help them out in some way. It is easy to loose that connection when sitting behind a keyboard.
 
WVNed said:
Social media is making people anti-social.

edit
I did not mean this as hit and run humor.

The next time you are sitting in a restaurant look around and see how many tables have people staring at their phones instead of looking at and speaking to each other.
Saw a party of 8 doing this last week.
It is ingrained into people now.
My own kids and their spouses do it.
IMG_0398%5B1%5D-XL.jpg
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This is so true!!! I was just going to say the same thing. It doesn't matter where they are, home, restaurant, beauty shop, doesn't matter. They are glued to their phones!!!!!
 
I really wish it was different, thats where the best frags are (especially pricewise)
 
WWC
ThunderGoose said:
Yeah, I went to a Women in the Outdoors event at a gun club this summer. I have to say the guys there were very welcoming and made us all feel quite comfortable. I've thought about trying to find a shooting range closer to home because of the way I was treated at this event.
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Been there...
 
We had a thriving reef club up in Vermont in the mid 2000's(Vermont Marine Aquarists). We even got brave enough to venture away from the RC forum area and start our own forum with sponsors, etc. It is such a small hobby up here, there is a tropical fish club that has been going strong for years...we should have piggy backed with them. By around 2015, we disbanded the forum/group, there still is a FB page up, but no one uses it. Many of the reefers at that time I thing dropped out of the hobby, many were starting families and these were guys who were putting tanks in walls after the 2 year progressing from small to larger systems. Some of the other big players I think moved out of state. Another motivated reefer, got out of the hobby and focused on fly fishing, to the point of guiding Jeremy Wade of River Monsters.

Everyone was wanting more involvement from me since I've been at it since 2000, but I see the trend, do the build, have fun for few years , have kids, buy a house, sell tank. It was tough getting people together since many here are spread out. I would drive 1 to 1.5 hours or more for a get together and if the weather was bad, you don't want to drive in it. I remember driving to a schedualled meeting 1.5 hours away right after work only to find out it was cancelled last minute due to lack of commitment, luckily I was planning other things in the area. I thought of hosting a few meetings, but knew that people would more than likely not drive the distance.

We did have topics, we did have cookies, we did have food and alcohol(sometimes). Once we even built kalk reactors. We even had T shirts. The most success we had was when were were setting up speakers in colaboration with the better LFS in the area, of course that was one of the meetings I couldn't attend. That LFS is now under new ownership and has alienated another reefer(new LFS owner) who only does saltwater in a location about an hour away. I believe he occasionally sets up frag swaps.
 
BRS
One way our club ( Boston Reefers Society) tried to cater to members is by having meetings all over the state instead of just one place. The most postings are like everywhere else “ market place “
I miss the fragswaps and interacting with members, guest speakers and building stuff.
Our last meeting I fragged up a huge Goni
Ball and another member chopped a Greentree. We made some top viewers and drilled some holes in tanks. Nobody is going to have those experiences on a website. Done ranting :D
 
Toomanyfish said:
One way our club ( Boston Reefers Society) tried to cater to members is by having meetings all over the state instead of just one place. The most postings are like everywhere else “ market place “
I miss the fragswaps and interacting with members, guest speakers and building stuff.
Our last meeting I fragged up a huge Goni
Ball and another member chopped a Greentree. We made some top viewers and drilled some holes in tanks. Nobody is going to have those experiences on a website. Done ranting :D
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Whatever happened to Boston Reefers Society? They looked very busy in the heyday, I used to follow the activity over at RC, but it looks like it is gone.
 
Avast
It's hard to put a finger on it. In Atlanta, too many just wanted something for free. Or, they'd want a frag swap a month which was way too often. A dwindling number of people actually willing to help was an issue too. We had some great members, but it was tough seeing the same people doing the leg work over and over. Honestly, national/international sites like this one impacted the club forum in a big way. You could go to the club forum, and maybe get a few answers to a question that day, or come here and get a flood of answers in a few hours. I advocated for abandoning the local club forum and joining it to a site like this as I was hopeful it would at least still keep everyone in one spot. The local forum was essentially a glorified classifieds that people wanted free access to.

Burnout is an issue with local clubs due to lack of reliable and consistent volunteers. It takes a lot to run different events. Takes a ton of time that many members just don't have to give. You end up with a few who do a ton of work, get tired, and walk away.

Then you have personalities. I think people seem more likely to cross lines that shouldn't be crossed. Very few take the high road but instead willingly engage in tearing each other down. Then you always have those couple of members who vindictively criticize the club, accuse it of doing this, that or the other, but refuse to actively take part in helping. It was pretty frustrating. Just trying to keep a site moderated could be a challenge.

I'm fortunate that a guy down the street from me has a tank and can/has helped with issues while I'm away. The Orlando club is pretty good, but very spread out and seems to struggle to attract/keep new members. Extremely nice people though.
 
I live in the northwest San Fernando Valley in S. Calif. The one club I know of meets on Friday nights, early in the evening, at least 60 miles from me, in Orange County. That will probably take me 1.5 to 2 hours to get to and may even take quite a long time to get home from since I have to go through downtown or drive on the infamous 405 Fwy.....on a Friday night. As it is, I drive 50 miles a day, 5 days a week, for work, on the 405.
I'd like to go to the club meetings, but not at that day and time. Everyone has different needs/situations. I see that there are quite a lot of folks in this hobby in S. Calif. who live in Orange County or the Inland Empire. When I look at the selling forum, most of the time I ignore the deals because the travel is oppressively long to where the majority of the folks live. So there must be a lot of folks not too far from the meetings, but that's not my situation.
 
Deltec
I agree with Greybeard with many of the things he had to say. You can get a lot of information from the internet but actual humans that you can count on locally or can see your tank in person is still different than posting parameters and maybe a photo. I wish I could find a reef group in South Florida rather than hanging out in my LFS too much.

I also agree that you take the good with the bad in a group setting. I've seen far too many people be run off in a writers group I was in and usually the people who acted as professionals, knew the least and rarely tolerated newbies. It's a problem in writers groups, photographers groups and I'm sure Reefers as well. You just have to learn what you can get from any group.

Despite that, if anyone knows of or wants to start a reef club in the Palm Beach County area of South Florida, let me know. I'm in.

Mike
 
As unpopular of an opinion as it may be, I feel R2R and that other site, are very much indirectly responsible for the downfall of local reef clubs. Not that it is a bad thing, to be honest. 10 years ago, there was very little reef information on the internet, you had one major site, but if you wanted information or to learn, most people were willing to drive that 30-45-1hr to go to meetings. Now honestly, what is the point?

Unless you live in a dense metro area with a bunch of reefers all withing 30 minutes of each other (So Cal guys come to mind), it is WAY easier and more convenient to do all of your business on R2R and places like it. Yes I understand there are benefits to face to face interactions that you will never get from an internet site, but as you just stroll through this thread and see all of the reasons people don't get involved in their "local" clubs, it's very telling and honestly hard to blame folks. My "local" clubs is 45 mins away for the closest meeting and 2 hours for the furthest. If I lived in ATL, Tally, Jax...etc I'm sure it would be different, but I don't, so for me it's honestly not worth the time/effort/expense...etc.

I have mentioned this before, but it's worth bringing up in this thread. The internet today is not like the internet of 5 or 10 years ago. I've been playing WoW since Vanilla (14? years now). I literally have friends from Texas who we went to Disney with last year, whom I had never met before, but had known for YEARS longer than many of my local friends. It's just a different time and unless you're in a major area AND have good people in your club, I don't see how local clubs can survive.
 
BRS

IF YOU HAD TO TAKE A REEFING EXAM, WOULD YOU PASS?

  • Yes!

    Votes: 32 45.7%

  • Not yet, but I have one that I want to buy in mind!

    Votes: 9 12.9%

  • No.

    Votes: 26 37.1%

  • Other (please explain).

    Votes: 3 4.3%
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