Posted by Rich on December 12, 2000 at 15:09:58:
In Reply to: Re: The Rise ... and the Decline & Fall ... of Mohicanland posted by Danalee Lavelle on December 11, 2000 at 16:30:08:
Hi Danalee, Gayle, MacWilliams, et al ...
I was going to withold comment on the comments to my bombastic Sunday post until I had time to digest them all and could fashion an appropriate response, but I thought I had better step in here lest anyone gets the wrong impression.
The subject matter of this Board, and in what matter it gets presented, has long been a subject of debate. We've heard it all through the years, and in fact, there are many who no longer post here who departed over just this issue. Too much role playing. Too much history. Not enough on the movie. Not ENOUGH history. Too much on Native issues. Not ENOUGH on Native issues. The beat goes on. At one point, you might remember, we instituted a new Board, called Mohican Colony Muses ... specifically for role-playing posts ... as a solution to what some perceived as a problem. I felt that it didn't work. BOTH boards seemed to lose their spontaneity, and we decided to re-combine the two.
I have no problem at all with a great variance in the type of posts we have. The more the merrier, I say, as long as an effort is made to connect to the subject matter in some way. Keeping threads in order - in other words, responding to posts using the follow-up method, rather than beginning anew - also helps keep things sorted out, facilitating a board browser's ability to find the posts of interest to him/her. Let's face it, except for a real sicko like Doctor Mary, not too many will find EVERYTHING here of equal interest. Yet, the subject is so broad that there are likely to be many interested in each & every facet.
Bottom line here is that the Mohican Board's widespread appeal is largely due to its relatively expansive, yet related, topic - it's not JUST about Fort William Henry; not JUST about Eric Schweig; not JUST about James Fenimore Cooper, or Gatherings, or Michael Mann's films, or Pilgrims, or Pequots ... it's about ALL that stuff and a lot more. So, it's not expected that you limit yourselves to 90 minutes of film. Take the forks in the road. See where they lead. That's half the fun of it. When that happens, the Board is at its best and then closely parallels the Site itself ...
And, I'm beginning to ramble! Nuff said, for now. Thanks for taking the time to even consider solutions!