Because it requires an attention span of longer than twelve seconds, maybe? Or maybe because RyPN doesn't exploit invasive technology and the willful ignorance of its users to target its posts to individuals and demand their attention?

Okay, maybe I'm being facetious, but the general point is valid. You're comparing a curling club to the NFL.

The Chalenger work was and still is under client, customer confideniality and as far as I am concerned intellectual property. You can ask for ever I won't tell and who ever said a report would be made never spoke to me. I learnt the lessons of what happened good and bad and the picture I posted shows the result of my further work. In effect an upside down rocket. This validated what I had learnt durring the leaning cycle on many an exhaust system. That is my personal intellectual property. There is no obligation on my part to hand such information over to others simply because they demand it. I am willing to apply it in the appropriate way, time and place to the benefit of the steam locomotive in proper hardware and way.

As to the wider debate. Part of what I know and tried to pass on in simple plain understandable terms over more than 20 years of trying is still treated with denial by many who don't or won't understand. The frase 'what you don't understand is by definition wrong' constantly comes to mind. I know what I have learnt is right but better shown in hardware. I will explain the workings of such things as Lempors and draughting in the right time and place when needed, not here or in any other similar highly charged atmosphere to be abused and ridiculed.

I would say its facetious on the face of it. Most people who use the internet have at least heard of facebook no matter what their interest lies in. Most people my age (28) have a computer or have used one and know of facebook. It's not that facebook uses invasive technology or something nefarious, it's simply that people who have low exposure to the internet, do not know how to navigate effectively and how to search effectively. Facebook is the dock where they find the ships to the sea of 'knowledge'. It also allows people to start groups and not be beholden to others who already share that interest but might have differences which manifest themselves poorly in personal interactions aka politics.

Proper searching and net navigation was something I did not learn to do far into the late 90's and I grew up with multiple computers in my hands. Think of it like waking up inside the 1893 columbian exposition or the world fair. An example of almost anything you can be interested in can be found, and you might be able to walk around and see lots of stuff that you have a cursory interest in. You might even ride in a carriage around and have different items presented in front of you so that you can't avoid noticing them (electric lighting perhaps or horseless carriage). But if you don't walk out the gates and go to a library or a place like a factory or a farm where the knowledge of that interest is applied or stored all you have done develop an interest not knowledge. That said facebook is full of pictures and is a good medium to get people to flush out a direction that research should be directed. May I also point out that I would have never found RYPN if it weren't for facebook. I joined because it seemed and seems like a more mature crowd of people without having to see the same childish unrealistic wishes, requests and statements in the comments.

I would never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, and won't attribute to incompetence that which can be attributed to ignorance.

As for why do more people not use this forum? Its clunky. I mostly stopped using these type of forums in highschool, BB type forums suffer from the same layout problems and the older technology makes things like formatting harder to those who have never used older platforms such as this. The last editorial was published in 2004. I was just starting High School in 2004 and my 10 year reunion is coming up... Last brief filed 2011, Last article 2008. I didn't even know we had flimsies until I just looked.

Please dont assume this to be an attack on the forum, its members or operators. I just think we're comparing apples and snow tires here. This site is news, and does a good job of it as well as services such as classifieds to those who don't want to use the facebook platform which I appreciate since facebook makes me want to stick my head into a tank full of piranhas. And for things like the 503 or other "emergency announcements" rypn can't be topped. But if I want to know whats happening ABSOLUTELY right now, facebook aggregates all that information (because most groups have at least 1 person who updates it periodically) and scoops the hell out of everyone else except those who make the announcement.

Very few things in railway preservation require RIGHT NOW timeframes. The 503 situation has moved along about as fast as any I can remember....... and knowing about something of no real urgency first is pretty much no more useful than knowing about tomorrow.

I am on Facebook every day but am very wary of it, I always open it in a private window (I use Firefox) and I don't accept friend requests outside my circle. I think facebook has pushed their luck too far and will be going the way of myspace but what will replace it is not clear yet, attempts to create a nonprofit social networking website patterned on wikipedia have not gained traction so far. There is a new social networking place I just signed up for called MeWe that emphasizes privacy, they apparently make money by offering optional services, but to this point I don't see the sort of railroad photos or news I can find on facebook.

It can be surprising where technical discussions come up, sometimes. The definitive series on Franklin type D poppet-valve gear was, of all places, on a narrow-gauge site (WW&F) and I consider myself lucky to have come across it.

There is no real reason why Facepalm can't be used as a 'free' hosting site with different bells and whistles from, say, the eGroups version of e-mail reflector that developed into Yahoo Groups (and then devolved to near-dysfunction and is now being rivaled by groupsio). I don't particularly care for the social-media optimizations or the whole anyone-can-comment-off-topic nature of the interface, but there are quite a few legitimate organizations that have de-emphasized a typical stodgy 'Web presence' or site in favor of social media people enjoy interacting with. (Just don't expect me to join the Borg to participate!)

If there was a FB discussion of exhaust nozzle theory or design that went to five pages, I'd like to have the link to look at it. I would be concerned that the probability of negative commenting countered by various forms of denial would be far worse there than on, say, RyPN.

Can A Facebook page be used to steer people to RYPN?

Another question..... Why should people come to RYPN in the first place?

Don’t jump on me too hard here. I’m a RYPN supporter. I’m just trying to encourage some discussion.

Why people would come to RyPN in the first place? Because it's likely to be the place where the serious preservationists (and not-so-serious ones who still have something to say) will be watching and listening. Any serious preservation question I'd ask would be here first -- with an expectation, tacit or otherwise, that I'd be put in contact with qualified people as needed if the first contact here warranted it.

I don't see a Facebook page commanding that breadth or depth of response, although there is no real technical reason a page-owner couldn't try to generate it.

I also, rightly or wrongly, have seen RyPN as a place where professional advice including quite a bit of technical wisdom is given free and relatively openly. I have lost count of the number of learning experiences I have been given here in just the few years I have participated. I would not like to see that spirit lost, but I also would not like to see it abused or taken advantage of.

I'll throw my two cents into the discussion...

I have set both my Google Chrome and Firefox browsers to remember my passwords for both Facebook and RYPN, so logging in is accomplished simply by clicking the bookmark tab.

As to the Facebook is useless comments, when was the last time you saw an update from the K&M diesel group in Niles here on RYPN...? On Facebook they post very frequent updates, as do many other groups that have Facebook profiles. I agree that posting photos here is comparatively a nightmare, but I think Facebook is just seen as easier tool in general to post quick updates on projects. To that extent you could summarize my Facebook use as a constant update feed of restorations, access to the "for active members" Facebook page for my organization, and updates for my friends.

To the comment about constant push feed advertising, I have set my feed to only show restoration updates and content from my friends, anything after that and I honestly stop caring. This can be set when you click like on a group, and then right after click the drag down menu on following and set it to see first. Really does help avoid a lot of add content!

HOWEVER....

I absolutely love RYPN and have been so glad to have access to it. Facebook is nice, but it is quite literally accessible by anyone. RYPN has a large draw to me, as more often deeper discussion occurs here, and is maintained by people with credibility and knowledge backing up their comments. I have also seen a broad range of useful and non useful discussion in my nearly 6 years on this forum....myself contributing to some of the useless discussion material in my early years. Facebook however doesnt really have that filter, and I have seen many foamer types make full fledged attacks against groups and honestly post way too many redundantly simple questions simply because they refuse to read the post or previous comments...

To answer why we arent picking up these useful discussion topics on RYPN...I think it really is a visibility issue. In some ways I am glad this occurs, because Facebook is a good example of what happens when anybody can access something and comment. Sadly however, this also means we miss out on some of the knowledgeable people in the world and their associated discussions. I think the best way to handle things would be to create a facebook page sort of as an advertisement in a sense to RYPN with a link provided. It might serve as a way to broaden the preservation topics we come to discuss.

I'll get off my soap box now. I hope what I've said comes to be seen as useful

Point of order that any of the IT pros that lurk here can attest to:

Facebook is a marketing and promotional tool. It's a way of getting your news and views out to an audience that chooses to follow you or seeks you out. How well it works depends on how well you use it. (EDIT: Or how much you pay them.)

It IS NOT an adequate substitute for a competent website.
It gets used as such by groups and small businesses that lack either the knowledge or resources to set up an independent, stand-alone website, but that FB page IS NOT a "web page."

And, given the many increasingly problematic issues surrounding FB as a company and platform that are gaining increasing public attention (privacy invasion, selective censorship, and even just FB's terms of service), the use of Facebook for such a group should be viewed at best as a "necessary evil," not your "best friend."

And I say this as an administrator of three FB non-profit pages.

When this website started, AOL chat rooms were all the rage, and MySpace hadn't even been invented yet.

It's because, for many people, Facebook serves as an aggregation service. It pulls together information streams across a wide number of people and presents them in a single stream.

Yes, you can bookmark sites and check in on them periodically.

However, most people are "digitally lazy" and since it seems like every smartphone comes with Facebook's spyware app pre-installed, it's just the easiest thing to do. It's called being "sticky".

If RYPN threads could automatically feed into Facebook, that might be a handy thing in keeping it present in more peoples minds. I know I wouldn't want to build or maintain that though.

Amen.

I know in the Conrail Historical Society's case, we have a huge fan number on Facebook. We can reach a lot of people.

However, the actual number of those people we DO reach is entirely dependent on how much revenue our reaching them can provide Facebook.

It is both a blessing and a curse.

I don’t think anyone is advocating a Facebook replacement of RYPN, but an additional avenue TO RYPN. The idea is to get the knowledge to those who seek it by bringing them to the right place.

Here’s another idea that may be unpopular. Try signing your real name and affiliation to your posts.

But it would probably morph quickly into a 'fork' of RyPN (in the programming sense) with the people who like the FB-style interface and interaction choosing to share their thoughts and projects there, not shift them to the BBS (or to an e-mail reflector group like steam_tech).

That is not necessarily an evil, but I think what would be required for such a site to be an effective 'additional avenue to RyPN' would be to have some automatic way to take relevant posts to the FB site and either bring attention to them on RyPN or establish some kind of activity flag (or perhaps digest) that would periodically appear on RyPN giving the issues or topics raised in the previous xxx hours or days or whatever.

This might also be a useful way to gauge the number of preservation-interested people who would 'do' Facebook but not bother with RyPN-as-it-is. The chief problem with the idea is that [shudder!] I might have to set up some kind of Facebook presence to be able to do technology transfer from the new setup to RyPN on a meaningful or timely basis without continually having to watch stuff on the wall or whatever features of a page would be relevant.

Some mods, and then I, have fought the battle about real names in posts. And I for one was effectively shot down about it. Yes, we've figured out who most of the egregious pseudonym handles are, and no, I'm not outing them. It's America, where free speech is supposed to be a right, and where I am able to judge a person's worth to RyPN by his contributions and the quality of his expression, and where I'm adult enough to tolerate childish bickering and mean-spiritedness if necessary to get preservation information that is correct ... albeit eventually in some cases.

A question to the programmers, IT types, etc. lurking in the background:

If you could demolish the current architecture of RyPN and redesign it for a different style, interface, etc., how would--or could--you effectively interface it with a parallel Facebook presence?

(Assume that the basics all stay there but usable--articles, briefs, and "Flimsies" can be posted; classifieds available; this forum as is but a fresh look and more robust software, etc.)

One example, and only one: Facebook allows someone to transmit/post "Live" video of events or blather as they happen, available for viewing for 24 hours or so. Would that be a feature or a bug here?