antiseptic your post made me think is it time a gave up starting threads.
StG,s? well not for the first time made me question did he/she mean me?
I try to post threads of interest, and I try to question my side of politics too.
In threads like power without glory[a thread that may yet be repeated] .
33% wage increase questioned the sanity of some trade unions, and gave me a place to again say there is a difference in unions.
Our name is OLO and Australian politics, I once posted on a forum called Australian politics, only it ever came near this one, it did not however reach these heights.
Politics and unionism are my life, and in truth I say it as I truly think.
GY has never to my knowledge censored us, however just maybe questioning why some post but not others is censoring?
Yes we need to talk about many subjects, want to I am sure, but note few post on some threads now.
Rather than knock those who start threads why not start a few?
I promise to look

Belly. Wasn't talking about you in particular. Just the lack of interest in some of the great threads that have been posted in the past by many people.

...and I'm a him.

There seemed to be a period not so long ago when it was extremely difficult to get threads going without them being taken over by people with axes to grind.

We lost some really great posters but also, it seems, we have now got a whole different cast and crew as well. I had just about given up posting as the effort of fending off personal attacks became just too wearisome. But it seems that some of the more ardent axe-grinders have either disappeared or pulled in their horns.

Perhaps individual threads might not be so long if they are no longer interminable stouches and excercises in infantile name-calling,but perhaps more people will bring their individualism to light?

Over time I have learned a lot here: not least of all the diversity of thought in our community. There are some real treasures on this site whose comments often lead me down all sorts of untrodden paths. I would have hated to lose this link to Australia now I'm so far away.

I don't have much more than just a feeling, but I get the impression traffic is down a bit on OLO. Of course it is difficult to tell as a mere user, given that users have no access to site statistics like the numbers of unique views per page, click-through rates, revisitation statistics, external link posting, Digging, viewer to registered user ratios, and so forth.

Site statistics can be such fun!

An elementary approach to the provision of such information by OLO exists in the 'Today's most popular articles', 'This week's most popular', and 'This week's most discussed' classifications on the 'ON LINE opinion' page (where new articles get posted) here: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/ , but even these classifications are somewhat ambiguous and unquantified to the OLO user. I sometimes wonder whether it would be possible to provide more specific information, maybe even make the site more inter-active. For example, the foregoing classifications only relate to article discussions: there is nothing to indicate General Discussion popularity (unique views and revisitations), at either the topic level (whole thread) or individual post level, other than the visible number of posts.

Perhaps a 'vote up/vote down' feature similar to that used for Ubuntu Brainstorm could be incorporated into the Forum? That way users (and, separately, unregistered viewers) could get to vote for or against a general discussion topic as such, and for or against individual posts. Would that stimulate discussion?

I am not suggesting OLO should be obliged to provide such access to site traffic statistics (it is, after all, a privately run site), but, if practicable, such would be an interesting exercise in transparency seemingly in keeping with OLO's stated objectives. It might stimulate greater interest in OLO as a barometer of opinion as to true topicality of issues.

Perhaps greater ease of interaction with UNregistered viewers could be achieved. A viewer topic suggestion board with an appropriate word or character limit, perhaps like Twitter's,

>>'I don't have much more than just a feeling, but I get the impression traffic is down a bit on OLO'

Yeah I think that too. I blame Col's absense. He brings in the crowds. A natural Entertainer.

Actually I really blame the 'established' users. They're a bit of a clique.

I have a few really good topics but I don't want to post because I feel they're not controversial enough and will generate boring nodded agreement and empathy. General love ups don't generate advertising revenue for Graham.

You're all right. The forum has slowed down a bit, although the overall site is still travelling well. I did send some posters to purgatory for various reasons a while back, and you can probably all work out who. Experience says that removing people who were making a lot of noise leads to the site quietening down for a while then picking up as others find their voice.

I think I may have been too laissez-faire in the past and that the tone of the conversation may have been lowered as a result. Hopefully the tone being better (at least I think it is) will lead to a broader and more fruitful conversation.

We used to run a Yahoo groups discussion group and I ended-up pulling the plug on that as it just shrank to a small vitriolic conversation between just a few who ran the same arguments endlessly.

If this forum could be made to work better than it has it could be a hook for getting better contrbutions from a wider pool of authors as well. We do receive complaints from time to time from writers about the way their pieces are treated in the forum, and I frequently understand exactly why they complain.

Imagine if instead of the abuse they sometimes cop they got some quick feedback on their ideas which helped them to refine what they were saying, even if it was feedback that they didn't agree with.