The Forum Is Open

As I’ve said in the podcast, creating the forum was a tough decision for us. We’ve seen where forums can sometimes lead — both goodand bad. That’s why we were very reluctant to change the formula we accidentally stumbled upon that enabled all of you to find GWC and enjoy yourselves here.

But the kick-ass meetups going on in Philly, NY, and Dallas, and the incredible discussions and friendships that’ve formed in comments finally pounded through our thick skulls the idea that the community has outgrown the blog’s meager interactive tools. So, we put in a hard few weeks to try and upgrade GWC’s infrastructure to support all the great work you’ve done building such a quality community.

And for those of you who missed it in last week’s podcast, let us reiterate in print: the only thing more important to us than Battlestar Galactica is you.Participating in the GWC community is an important part of our lives, as are all the friends we’ve made via the ‘cast. The GWC podcast, blog, and forum aren’t going away, regardless of the short (or long) future of BSG.

That said, we’d like to offer a few notes about the forum and how it interacts with the blog:

First, we’re going to leave comments open on the blog for all but podcasts and frak parties. With the release of the next podcast and frak party this weekend, we’ll turn off comments for those posts and instead add a link to the appropriate thread in the forum.

Podcast threads will appear in the GWC Podcasts fourm, and frak parties will appear in the GWC Online Events forum. We called it “online events” instead of “frak parties” since we envision adding additional re-watch, group reads, and so on there as they come up.In fact, keep an eye out soon forthe Buckaroo Banzai re-watch you heard about last week.

If you have ideas for official events — or for future podcast guests or discussion topics and so on — we’ve created a News/Suggestions forum for that purpose. You can start threads at will in this forum, so we can all participate in sussing out things the community will enjoy. We’ll then create online events, blog posts, and even mention them in the podcast as they take off.

We also created a “Meetups” forum to serve as ground zero for planning your own GWC get togethers. We’ll add your meetups to the official GWC calendar — now contained in the forum! — so everyone can find you and attend, and we’ve even got some neat stuff to help you plan your event. Look for more on that soon.

The forum features a few general discussion areas, including one specifically targeted toward BSG. But don’t worry: we know that discussions here on GWC sometimes head off in other directions, so there are forums for other sci-fi talk and even an “off-topic/other” forum to catch all the rest.

Finally, there’s a Forum, Blog, and Podcast Issues forum for technical discussions of problems you find with the GWC infrastructure. We’ve done our best to get it all working and to make it all available to everyone, but we’ve probably missed something. Let us know in this forum, and we’ll correct it or help you out. Or maybe you’ll help us out. Either way, things’ll be better for it.

The blog will remain available, and we hope you’ll check it from time to time — or maybe grab an RSS feed to stay current — as with the advent of the forum, it’ll take on a more active role in keeping everyone aware of all the cool stuff going on in terms of meetups, BSG news, GWC news, and of course, Audra’s sweet top-ten lists.

One last thing: the store is open as well. As we mention plainly in the store itself, it’s not intended as a big money-maker. If every one of you bought a T-shirt, we probably wouldn’t cover hosting costs because we’ve set the markups extremely low. In most cases, Cafe Press will make 90%+ of whatever you’re paying for the items.

The point of the store is to give you a chance to grab some gear that you (or we) couldn’t otherwise have — gear that hopefully represents some of the fun inside jokes that we in the GWC community share. And if you have suggestions for additional gear that you’d like to see, drop a post in the Suggestions forum. When Sean has time, I’m sure he’ll oblige if possible.

Enjoy!