Yo... to the lurkers..

[Eidetic]

I can change that with one sentence.

The reasons you have so many lurkers is easy.

1. Mostly shop talk. Shop talk is great, but you need a balance of fun too. I respect, and like all you guys, but this place is duller than a butter knife. If someone is not fully into projectors there is not much else to talk about. This is the lounge section and still all you guys talk about projectors. One thing LPF did have over this forum was a lot of funny, and informative off topic socializing.

I never post about projectors. Holography was included here but hasn't caught on because of the three other places that serve the professional/hobbyist participants. Two on facebook and one on the web. Lots of activity amongst them, with (I just realized) essentially no discussions about laser safety. Holographers build complex optical systems all over large optical tables with beams all over the place. In 34 years I've only heard of one who had a spot on his retina from an accident while cleaning/troubleshooting a large frame Coherent ion laser. Lots of drama there too, from old-timers who have huge bones to pick with each other, but who also manage to keep it civil (for the most part) despite provocation (and not always from me!).

Anyway, I don't agree that what we need here is more off-topic chit-chat. The computerization of the hardware and its output have rendered the building of it boring. Components are bought and assembled, not improvised and created individually (producing unique results), to be a peripheral for the computer giving canned results (notable exceptions presented only here). But that's across the board. Youth of today seem to only want to do one thing with their hands; poke at buttons.

[planters]

WolfMax,
I'm with you all the way. I agree with all your points. My response is to move away from laser projectors as the only legitimate end and build other photonic stuff. I love the beams and I will relax with these from my projectors. And, when I'm at a LEM or a show I still enjoy them just as much, if not more.

One thing about surplus equipment. Its like rehabbing a house. You buy all the quirks and have to live with design limitations (Grand Designs). But, if you can get some equipment at very low cost you can get some great components and some important free engineering guidelines. Buy a LS 800 for $500 and the fans and cooling loop are worth more than that.

I've visited other forums and I am still impressed with how poorly these sites deal with questions or requests for help. PL is still tops in the friendly and open response to newcomers who presumably come from that pool of lurkers.

[flecom]

I wonder if those saying "DUH, just use SEARCH you lazy bum" have actually tried to find things with the search facility. For some terms, the signal to noise ratio is so bad that search is useless. You might as well just read the entire forum top to bottom, it would take about as much time as checking all of the search results. This is especially true when the information is slightly older. I went looking for information on divergence and collimation setups from around the time period when the first big blues came out of the Ca$i0 projectors and it was hard going. And, much of the information is several years old and potentially out of date. A person looking for information doesn't know if the information is out of date or not; it's much better to ask. It's probably better to ask in a forum post instead of a PM, but search is no panacea.

in another large board I am in we deal with this by making "FAQ" threads that are closed, they have a list of common questions with links to threads that pertain to said question

someone did that here with a lumia round up thread IIRC, but for the post part everything here is very fragmented or discussed quietly

[absolom7691]

in another large board I am in we deal with this by making "FAQ" threads that are closed, they have a list of common questions with links to threads that pertain to said question

someone did that here with a lumia round up thread IIRC, but for the post part everything here is very fragmented or discussed quietly

I think this is an awesome idea. I was considering doing that with DTR's diode tests. His sales thread, useful as it is, is quite large. I was going to link each diode he sells with the corresponding test in that thread. The good thing is, he started doing that on his sales site so, no longer a need. I think it's a fantastic idea. The only problem I see with it is the thread owner would have to be responsible in keeping up with it. New items/techniques and such.

[LaserCo]

I agree, the search service sucks on vbulletin or whatever this forum is ran from.
try this, goto google.com and do is type

sitehotonlexicon.com kniveedging

the results even show the date and it is helpful


EDIT, the string I typed to use on google is being turned into an emoticon
site : photonlexicon.com kniveedging

remove the spaces before/after the colon after 'site'

[Banthai]

I joined this site because someone told me it was full of sexy ladies ... how wrong they were

all the best

Billy Banthai

[JohnYayas]

andycon turned me onto this site back when we were both making Boom Dog scanners with Basic Stamps and ebay stepper motors.

[absolom7691]

I joined here looking to see how to get more power out of a red diode and had no idea that you could PBS a pair of DVD burner diodes. I lurked here for a few months and then finally started posting.

[flecom]

I think I found this place on google, I really have no idea how I ended up here

[Admin]

I was just looking at the bottom of the page. I see it all the time and sometimes give it a thought but, right now, there are supposedly 2389 people on line which is 193 members and 2190 guests. Seriously?? There is 193 of us contributing, bickering, trolling each other, buying and selling, etc. and over 2,000 just what... reading our shit?

Who are you all?? Are you afraid to invent a screen name, password and chime in from time to time? You MUST have some sort of interest in lasers or you wouldn't be here. An opinion when things get testy? A question? And it's not just now.... it's all the time. On any given log in, there are like a couple thousand guests reading.

Once in awhile someone says they've been lurking for years and finally comes out an asks a question. What's it take to motivate you?

I just was finding it a little bizzare this morning that there is always such a huge gap between members and "guests" most any given time.

The disparity is rather pronounced everywhere that has user metrics on display. Reddit for example: I believe they stated that 10% of the user base is logged in and only 1% participates in the "conjuration" of content. 90% "lurk" - This isn't really a problem on a super busy site because 1% of eleventy-trillion is still a bucket^3 more than a single brain can remember.

The downside to this is that those that participate control the flow of conversation and how things play out for everyone. No real solution as there isn't a good way of getting those who consume the content to participate reliably. And those that do bridge the gap eventually get annoyed with having to catch up in addition to participating. That is one of the reason why, when I started this little mess, I had post counts and all other measuring sticks disabled. That experiment didn't last long. Post count(and arguably: quality of post) went up when I put some of the self-referencing measuring sticks back in play.

The other side to this is that a bunch of the users are bots/spiders crawling the content for "use" elsewhere. I remember a site a while ago that was basically harvesting all content here to use as a way to game page ranking algorithms at search engines. On the upside, PL is all over google for esoteric search requests which do, sort of, bring in new people.

Another point: I have the "active users" thing set for a few hours before it clears the table. Any shorter and people writing huge posts will get logged out by the time they hit submit (Buffo and Buffo, and probably Buffo)

So... No idea what to tell you or how to "fixxit" short of offering valuable cash and prizes I really can't afford for user conversion.

Over the years I've noticed a trend or two, and one of the most recent ones is people can't seem to figure out what a forum is... I've received a non trivial number of messages from people clicking the "contact us" link and replying that way, as if this was some sort of centrally curated blog. I suppose times are changing a bit and people just want cracked style top 10 lists.

Another one: Hotmail is a shit and for whatever reason has decided that all mail leaving here for there is spam and refuses to deliver it, including registration emails. Bit annoying, that.