I've made some really useful discoveries recently about the importance of noticing areas of tension in other parts of the body besides the eyes while shifting, and promise to write a post on this topic sometime soon. In the meantime, I've lost some motivation to post because I feel like whenever someone takes the time to write a well-thought-out post that might actually be useful to others, it gets lost in a flood of panicked posts to the effect of "help me! now! tell me, tell me, tell me!" from people who don't have the patience to try to read what others have already written and to experiment around on their own to discover how they strain and what works for them.
It's irritating. None of us OWES an explanation to a random stranger, and most of us with things to say post only because we're excited about what we've discovered on our own and want to get the word out to others who have enough patience to actually read, experiment, and try things out.
It is incredibly difficult to explain to others the ways in which we strain and how we discovered them, and it's great whenever somebody tries to do so. Dave alone has put in much time and effort and I appreciate what he does for us in hosting this site. But the usefulness of this forum gets degraded when there's so much noise.
My suggestion is for there to be a forum section that flags certain "must-read" posts--containing both things Dave has written as well as particularly useful contributions from other forum participants--and anyone who wants to post to the forum has to agree to read all of the must-read posts before making any posts of their own. I don't know whether there's a way to enforce people's actually reading the posts other than through the honor system (but perhaps there's a way). The trade-off is that forcing people to read the must-read posts raises the entry barriers a little bit for newcomers, but I think it would make the site much more useful for the rest of us.
I agree with you there. I'm getting pretty good at classifying new threads: people who ask the "obvious" questions, people who ask thoughtful questions, and people explaining an idea (new or old). It's really the first kind of question that turns me off, simply because it seems that someone new asks the same old question every two weeks or so. I'm sure if someone had a bit of time on his/her hands, he/she could compile a FAQ post, but even then, I'm not sure newbies would take the time to read it.
I don't think that there is an easy way to enforce what you are suggesting though. The first solution that comes to mind is that we can split the "Bates Method" forum in two: one titled "New to the Bates Method?" and another titled "Bates Method Experiences" or something like that. Then, at the very least, if someone wanted to, he/she could filter out the help threads.
Yes, I've thought about this too. One thing which occurred to me is to force a system where someone's initial post (or maybe the first 3 or 5) has to be manually accepted, like most blog sites handle comments -- if it's not from an email that's posted before, the blog owner has to approve it. Yes, this is more work for David, and maybe he could designate a few "sub-web-master" people to help him. I'm not sure I'd want to take this on myself. I also feel it's too exclusionary to set the bar higher for initial posts, but I hate to see the quality of the forum, which has been such a useful resource to me personally, deteriorate.
People today have really short attention spans. Especially internet users who just go bouncing around. So there will always be those newbie questions. I saw an unrelated site that actually has a whole separate forum for newbies, and you have to get invited to the hidden member forum by qualifying in a few ways. But traffic is too low here for that yet. Only a handful of people post regularly as it is.
Eventually when I get some better content online (like that comprehensive method I'm slowly working on) I want to get some kind of revenue stream going so that I'll be motivated to promote the site more and bring in more traffic (the ads on the site now aren't doing a whole lot), and at some point having additional moderators and some way to feature the most popular threads would make sense.
Site Administrator
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
David, if you need moderators in the future, I'd be happy to help. I also understand the need to monetize.
For participants here who aren't the fly-by-night posters, it is incredibly frustrating to spend time on a lengthy discussion with details on what worked for them and pitfalls to avoid, only to have the discussion bumped out of sight.
