In preperation of a forum for another project I came upon www.proboards.com a free hosting site for forums. As I was making one up for that project, I made one to accompany this site and the “coming soon” new Connections event site.
http://wargaming-community.boards.net/
“having too many ways to say the stuff dilutes contributions and segments the community”
“I hate (insert mode of online comms here) so I don’t participate. Set up (insert other mode of online comms here) and I will!”
Somewhere there is a happy medium between gentlemanly decorum
And typical internet chaos
We have wonderful email lists, in particular Simulating War and MilGames (which is sort of like a volcano – its lies dormant for months at a time and then erupts…).
We have wonderful Blog sites (here, PAXSims, GrogNews, etc.)
We have not a had a forum, so no we do! I happen to like them. Unlike email, the correspondence is all in one place, available to all. Hopefully other people do to! All are welcome to register there but to keep spam down I must approve your membership. Being free, it has some ads, if it gets popular we can look to ways to pay to go “ad-free”.
One day we may be able to add a professional journal to the mix, but now we have 3 of the 4 modes of communications that have been requested at past Connections conferences and MORS Wargaming CoP meetings.
Wargaming Connection 
Hi Paul,
I think Sabin’s Simulating War is a forum, not just an email list. That format, in which people are vetted before joining and then can post, with some moderator function to prevent flame wars, seems the most effective to me.
Take care
Peter
BTW, do you know the source and story of the picture on the Connection site with the US Army guys wearing what appear to be WWII uniforms, standing around a gaming table?
Peter,
Dr. Sabin uses “yahoo groups” to host what used to be called (perhaps is in some quarters) a “list-server”, a hybrid that acts an email list server and manager allowing moderation of which submissions get promulgated, and a repository so all the emails are available if anyone wants to go back to find discussions. The difference between that and a forum is the emphasis on the distribution of the content. A list-server uses email to the members of the list as the primary distribution means. Topics are “emergent” and tend to be intermingled across the history of the email “stream”. The repository is there more for newcomers to the list to “catch up”, to search if a topic has come up before.
Forums are focused on enabling the users to interact within the structure of the board topics the forum admin sets up, so rather than being organized sequentially as people contribute to the emergent threads, topics and subtopics are more hierarchically organized. You can subscribe to particular topics you are interested in and only get those you are interested in emailed to you. Its a bit more control when you have a busy forum – a problem that would be great to have…
On the picture, I found it at: http://www.armygroupyork.com/history-of-wargames.html and thee are some other interesting ones there.
I didn’t see any sourcing info there.
All the Best,
Paul