Hi everyone,

One thing that stands out about these message boards *overall* , is that they don't seem to get much traffic. Of course some counties and surnames do, but especially ones that involve genealogical methods and projects and such, just don't seem to. And the same is true of Rootsweb mailing lists. Futhermore, this is despite the fact that Ancestry and Rootsweb actually share the same boards (I come in through the Ancestry interface), and that Ancestry owns Genforum, which has separate boards.

Personally I don't like mail lists and far prefer message boards, though I would prefer even more to use a "normal" bulletin board software like vbulletin or UBB or such. Of course I am sure many people do like mail lists, and that many boards here are copied to mail lists (though not vice-versa it seems).

Thus it would seem to me, that there might be much greater overall traffic if the mail lists were eliminated and the discussions merged into these boards. Of course I realize that Ancestry makes the decisions, and that they are particularly responsive about message board issues, which is especially evident given the lack of official responders to comment on complaints and suggestions (although of course many think some posters are actually shills who do so without stating they are reps of Ancestry).

There is one topic more than any that seems to me would get a lot of traffic here, and that is USGenWeb. While it is buried somewhat under "Projects", it is findable by those interested. Plus the overall discussion mail list for it on Rootsweb mail lists doesn't seem to get a lot of response except when there seems to be some internal policy controversy.

I realize too that most users who come in either through Ancestry or Rootsweb, are mainly interested in posting or replying to queries about families that they are researching, and that is mostly what I do as well. However I would love to discuss serious advanced genealogical methods topics, and those involving collaboration projects, but haven't done so because I don't think there is enough traffic to warrant the effort. One thing about judging the traffic that is difficult here, as opposed to other bulletin boards, is that there is not a thread view statistic next to replies to see how many view of that thread there have been, even when most don't actually reply.

Anyway, I would be interested in the thoughts of others here on this (if more than a handful are reading this thread at all let alone soon :) ).