Another Question For Jay

[jay]

members have left the Forum because they did not like all of the negativity and personal attacks that were posted here. 

One city council member left for the same reason.

[jay]

We need to bring back into our fold those leaders who have left us because they have so much to offer our group.

Over the past several years members have left the Forum because they did not like all of the negativity and personal attacks that were posted here.  I have even received messages asking to have three of these attackers removed from the Forum.  I resisted removing them so the complaining members left.   

[Towntalk]

Jay I sent you a private message giving you the link to her fb page.

[Towntalk]

Not so, on her fb page she has a lot of stuff about the valley.

[jay]

I believe the site owner no longer lives in the area and perhaps has less of a connection to the city.

[jay]

I used to try to post events for the downtown area and sometimes for other sides of town.  I eventually realized that Forum members were not attending these events.

The downtown area now has its own events coordinator.  I'm now leaving it to him to get the word out about downtown events and it is up to Forum members from each side of town to post their own local events.

[Towntalk]

OK Jay, lets just say that facebook is overrated, but that still doesn't explain why only you, Peggy and myself are trying to publish as many of the local events as we possably can, and why of all the regestered members of this group only a very small handfull post messages here. Lets leave facebook out of the equation and simply deal with mahoningvalley.info. Why is it that the heads of the various neighborhood groups doesn't post events here? How many people have regestered here, but never posted a single message? More importantly whenever WKBN, WYTV, WFMJ, and The Vindicator are looking for local event info they always turn to facebook and not our site. Even this site's owner is on facebook more than here, and she was the person who encouraged me to get a facebook account, and I thank her from the very depths of my heart.
My point is, we've got to find a way to get more regestered folks involved more.

[jay]

I recently attended an event that was sponsored by a group that had over 630 likes/friends on Facebook.  Only 3 people actually attended and two of them did not hear about the event on Facebook.

[Towntalk]

My friend, and you are my friend ... you gotta be to put up with me    I agree that many "friends" are not in the immediate area ... I've got people on my facebook page from as far away as the Netherlands but then my facebook page is a music page as opposed to say 7WCC or the various local organizations. I've also got "friends" from several states. Actually facebook's use of "friend" is a misnomer unless you know as a matter of fact that the person is a personal long standing friend. The rest are people who happen to like what you post, and otherwise they wouldn't know you from John Wayne if you get the point. Have a great week coming Monday.

[jay]

you look down at facebook groups suggesting that they are useless

For some things it is overrated.  I didn't state that it was totally useless.

As I said before, I know people who have had hundreds of "friends" on Facebook and posted an event hoping to have these "friends" attend.  More often than not, the turnout for the event was minimal.

[Towntalk]

I don't know Jay, I was at a family reunion all day. Members from back home that I hadn't seen in years were there and I didn't want to miss them.

[jay]

I feel that each group should post their own events wherever they expect to have an audience.

Question
I couldn't tell from your photo.  How many people attended the 7th Ward Citizens Coalition's picnic?

[Towntalk]

Spammers was not the question. The question related to ACTUAL MEMBERS. ONLY THOSE WHO CAN BE FOUND IN THE MEMBERS INDEX. When was the last time that either south side Mary posted a message here ... or Phil Kidd ... or Linda ... or Youngstown News ... and the list goes on. I don't care why they no longer participate here for that is their business. How many neighborhood groups post messages here other than Peggy's group. I started getting more active in posting 7th Ward material, but when was the last time that any leader of one of the West Side Neighborhood group posted a message here about events in their area?
The whole point is that you look down at facebook groups suggesting that they are useless, yet in most of the facebook sites that I belong to, I glean events that never make their way here. In the past month I posted here two big events in the 7th Ward not counting the Lansingville Parade and Picnic which I started talking about in the latter part of June. Neither of the other two would have been brought to our members attention had it not been for me, and I got all the information from facebook.
We need to bring back into our fold those leaders who have left us because they have so much to offer our group.

[jay]

How many are from the Mahoning Valley?

You would be surprised to know how many spammers (some from across the globe) try to join the Forum every month.  For this reason, the Forum manager tries to limit new members to those people who actually live in the immediate area.

[Towntalk]

 Question for Jay

I am curious, and would like some stone cold numbers to this question, not percentages,

  How many active members are there in mahoningvalley.info?

• How many inactive?
• How many are from the Mahoning Valley?
• How many are outside the immediate area?

 
In going through the list of registered members I've found that many have yet to post a single message, many have not posted anything for the past two years.

When I say "active" I mean people like you, I, and several others who live in Mahoning County.

When I first registered for an account under the screen name Kitten many years ago, our group was very active posting wise, yet today activity has dropped considerably.

As a long time member, I love this site, we have a whole lot of great people who are registered members, and this is the one site that I will always be active in, but over the past two years, I have also become active in a number of local Facebook accounts that are just as active, and I have, sadly gleaned more information from the Facebook sites than I've found here, and I've also noticed that while you do a good job posting West Side events, we do not see other leaders from the 4^th and 5^th Wards posting anything here, yet on their Facebook accounts we do find more stuff.

This past year information about the 7^th and 3^rd Wards has picked up thanks to Peggy and myself, but still there is a big hole where many great events are not posted here, and unfortunately, aside what few events you post about 6^th Ward events there is nothing else, and forget the 2^nd Ward. I doubt if they even have a Facebook account.

What it comes down to is how can we here draw back those members who were so active here, but are now devoting all their energies to Facebook accounts?