I have been repeatedly told that people feel discouraged from posting in a forum like this one, because they feel they need to catch up with what has been posted before. For the lack of a better term, I call this phenomenon Archive-Induced Posting Inhibition (AIPI). This inhibition is quite understandable, since it may be perceived like crashing into a party or wedding you haven’t been invited to. And it’s actual common netiquette to familiarize yourself with a community before engaging with it. I’m not going to suggest any specific time as guideline to get into touch with the “spirit” of the Fractal Future Forum. Please just do what feels appropriate to you.
However, what you don’t have to do is reading every post, or even the all the posts of the last day or week. It would probably be a good idea to select a single category and then just briefly check out some representative topics. There are a few advantages of this forum that should help to reduce your AIPI:
- There is a really good search function in this forum. If you aren’t sure whether something similar has been discussed, feel free to use the “looking glass” icon in the top right.
- While you start writing a new topic, the forum software checks what you writes and automatically compares it to other topics that have already been written. The results of this comparison are displayed to you in real-time! This makes it very easy to find out whether similar topics have already been discussed! Yes, this actually works! You have to try it to find out how crazy this technology is!
- The members of the Fractal Future Forum are nice. Even if you make a “mistake”, we try to be polite about it.
The existence of an archive of previous posts is not an obligation to actually check it out! It may have felt that way, though, especially on the old PHP-based online forums, but times have changed. This is an example for positive change through advanced technology! 