Iām interested in your experience of using Facebook Groups versus mvertigo.org (which uses the open-source Discourse engine but is a completely independent site).
Which do you prefer, and why?
Iām not encouraging you to use FB Groups, if you are content with the experience on mvertigo thatās great, but Iām sure some of you have tried both.
Hey Margaret, thatās very tricky to judge as it depends on how many people donate. However Iāve had some great suggestions on how to handle that and may follow up with a graphical progress against a target.
Perhaps you should borrow a certain famous supermarketās favourite adage and just say āEvery little helpsā when people offer up money towards site maintenance and work from there, James. Strike while the ironās hot.
I personally prefer this forum - I like the smaller number and more āpersonalā atmosphere. I do ābelongā to a FB page - along with umpteen thousand others), but remain a lurker! I have never posted. I find there is just too much to read. often the same things over and over as no-one reads previous posts or even comments before adding their say (the same being said for ANY F.B. pageā¦I belong to several such glass pages!!!) but I do pick up on random links ā¦sometimes interesting - sometimes not.
Thank you for keeping this page going, James.
A BIG benefit that you need to add to the āprosā column: This site is searchable and information is categorized. A user can find posts if he needs to look for them later. On Facebook when I see a post that does contain some useful information, it is nearly impossible to ever find that post again.
I thought this site went away and the Facebook group was the only option. I only very recently rediscovered it. Did it stay up all along and I didnāt know about it?
I originally used the forum back in 2012. I donāt remember when it āwent awayā but I thought it did at some point and just became the Facebook group. I of course could be wrong. Maybe the Facebook group was just an option.
What I do know is that one of the Founders moved to run his group on Facebook, leaving the other to maintain this on the open web. I took over late 2017.
Ok maybe that is what I remember. The forum was a completely different format back then, and I thought it was basically being turned off or something, so I stopped coming here. I was really surprised to see it still here and running a new format.
I always found the forum format way more useful for getting info that the Facebook format. Facebook can be really difficult to dig for information, and kind of devolves into new people constantly posting the same new person questions over and over again since the info isnāt readily available.
Yes there were a few of us who preferred the forum format so I was keen to maintain it. The poll results pretty overwhelmingly suggest that that was a good decision.
We still get people posting like itās Facebook and not using search because thatās what they are used to though!!
I definitely prefer this forum rather than fb. The format of fb encourages quick, reactionary responses in contrast to thought-out comments. Iād often ask a question and have to trawl through replies that didnāt really even begin to answer what Iād asked. Itās too easy to leave a reply without considering it on fb. And nobody uses the search function so itās just the same questions being asked over and over again. If youāre a long time migraine patient, it gets repetative seeing the same topics. I like the categories here, that you can search through really old posts if you like, and the personal diaries section is also helpful. There is alot less spam here. There was tons of it on fb - people joining groups just to sell cbt or some other magic cure, or posting scare stories about meds. Some of the group admins had very strict rules about what you could post, being against alternative therapies etc.
I donāt think it went away, just got very quiet. Canāt remember when I joined but it was several years ago. There was literally a handful of people posting. Nothing for days at times. I donāt check in much these days but when I do I am blown away with how many people are using it!
Iāve never dipped my toe into the cesspool of Facebook and dont intend to start now. Iāve also recommended this site to several others on my thyroid forum as Iāve come across a few VM sufferers in my time.
(feel free to disagree with my points and please add to them):
to run (but you can donate to help here).
