We are in the middle of our year-end planning for BootsnAll.com here in Portland, Oregon and we almost all of our discussions are about the community. What's good about it, what sucks, and what we can do to facilitate positive energy and discussions about independent travel. So I thought I'd share what we came up with. Please share your thoughts on the this. Agree, Disagree, got something to add? Let's hear it!

I want to hear. If you want to personally email me how you feel/what you think, please do. sean at BootsnAll dot com.

Why do people come to participate in the BootsnAll Travel Community
- 1st hand info passionate travelers
- Want to connect with others that have a similar interest.
- Feel connected to what we represent
- It feels good and welcoming
- Plan their travels
- Can't travel now - place to talk with others that care
- High % interested in RTW travel / long-term travel

What makes a great member
- Substantive Contributor - smart/eloquent
- Patience (Veteran Members)
- Enthusiasm for travel
- knowledgeable and friendly
- seeks quality travel information
- wants to share and connect

What are we doing good at in the BootsnAll Community
- Providing Active Forum for independent travels
- Providing personal introduction/welcome from company when new folks apply
- Most questions answered
- Very well moderated (thanks mods!)
- No trolling allowed (low spam volume compared to similiar forums)

What are we doing bad at in the Community
- Not engaging the community, ie not participating in the community as much as we could/should (it starts with me)
- Connecting Community to Content and vice versa - there are a lot of relevant data across BTN that should be connected to the community
- Not rewarding excellent members like we should
- Not developing the Insiders Platform

You heard what we think, hit reply and tell me what you think!

I wouldn't spend time on this forum if, on balance, I thought the suck outweighed the good. The biggest area for improvement I can see is increasing traffic. More traffic would obviously result in a deeper base of travel advice to dispense, which is the reason for the site, if I'm not mistaken. I rely on other fora for pointers on the area of the world where I tend to travel, because of greater traffic. I'd love it if more people here were familiar with, say, rentals in Puerto Escondido, or things to do around Medellin.

All in all though, it's a great forum.

Felix,

Agreed - more traffic is generally a good thing. One thing we have seen in the past on parts of BNA and other forums is lots of activity - but little value. I personally don't want activity for the sake of activity - but activity for the sake of providing value and meaningful information and interactions.

Thanks mate!

I.

It's hard to cultivate a greater volume of substantive responses without simultaneously cultivating a greater volume of spam and trolls. BnA serves it niche role well: a small community of travelers who enjoy other travelers.

Better to let Thorn Tree continue to serve as the Internet's equivalent of the over-crowded Info counter at Roma Termini offering an abundance of friendless facts about where to stay proffered by a disinterested and somewhat caustic local.

BnA functions well as the Internet's equivalent of a friendly hostel dorm room; where maybe only a handful of seasoned vets actually know the territory and an even larger number of somewhat less experienced travelers offer (admittedly dubious) tidbits gleaned from the guidebooks they've read or from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone else who lived there for three months with this one local girl he met in a bar. (And this isn't a criticism. Again, I really believe BnA is all the better for it, as the folks here generally offer the same level of positive energy found in such dorm rooms. Excluding myself, of course, being but a cranky old man. And the Kumqwat.)


II.

As much as I joke about Bali, each section needs a Nick. A friendly go to guy who will answer inane questions with patient aplomb. Jessie does her best to serve this role in the Europe section, but she and Static and the other mods have enough to do just trying to keep Stoo and I in line amongst all the other sections.

The Insider's platform is a great idea, but, as you stated, it is undeveloped. And the only way I see it developing is for you folks to start asking veteran members to fill certain positions and connect those positions to specific forums (again, as with Nick in the Bali section.) 2wanderers and Stoo have both answered their weight in Schengen questions, and other members have become, essentially, BnA's de facto authorities when it comes to other topics. I'm sure many of hem would be happy to accept an official role if asked.

You might also consider opening an office somewhere in Italy for Jessie, relocating her and giving her the ability to do first hand research throughout Europe as a whole. Then she could better serve as the full-time Europe go-to gal. When asked a question, she could simply fly to that location on the company dime and research the answer. (By the way, Jessie, if this actually happens, you totally owe me a plate of gnocchi and a bottle of wine for suggesting it.)

I tried your search engine to look for the BnA mission statement - nothing. Couldn't find it.

Eventually, I rediscovered the BootsnAll "Code of Conduct" which is okay, I suppose, when you are just starting out.

The question might be: What is BootsnAll trying to achieve? What are you? What do you want to do? Why, as travelers, should we be here?

Personally, I have found little information that I can use on BnA other than asking a direct question on one of the travel forums, and even those results seem to have declined in relevance, due in part to lack of volume by knowledgeable Boots.

It seems to me that BnA has become reactive rather than proactive. So again, for my part, I turn the question back to you, Sean et al, what are you trying to be?

CoOp, as usual, offers sound advice. Though really, Stoo and I have answered ONE schengen question with our weight in information. We've barely even touched the million other permutations of the same thing.

While more info would be great, I think signal-to-noise ratio is more important in keeping this a strong community.

On a technical side, one thing that frustrates me to no end on BnA is how new messages are marked. It's too reliant on cookies, so every time I log in from a differerent computer, many messages that I've read are marked unread. It's also all-or-nothing...for a long time through my day, a lot of messages are marked unread, then they all disappear in one reload. I know you don't run the software yourselves, but this seems like a simple enough improvement to suggest to the people that do.

Other things that suck:
- people stop posting in the afternoon. What's wrong with you people, don't you have boring jobs that you need a distraction from?
- Jester.
- Forum inflation. Have we arrived at the point where we can admit that having a few destinations split out of their continent groups (London, Ireland, South Africa, Kilimanjaro, etc.) just because they relate to a blog or other BnA project hasn't been particularly successful?

Things that are great:
- Friendly people, mostly helpful answers.

My 2 cents:

Like attracts like.

The more crazy a board like TT is, the more crazies gravitate towards there. The friendliness and intelligence of the BnA posters attracts like-minded posters. But likewise, energy itself attracts more energy, which brings me to my only critique of BnA: it needs more traffic. It needs new members -- and especially needs new regulars. The old regulars will eventually fall away. Except for static. And NTFT.

More traffic w/less content-rich postings isn't entirely bad -- the activity itself draws people to clickety-click on this and that and hang out awhile. Think of blogs and chatboards you like to visit that aren't travel-related: if it hasn't updated when you've checked back a few hours later, you're not going to bother checking in frequently. In this online world, we're shallow like that (or I'm shallow like that). Inactivity therefore attracts more inactivity.

I don't think increased volume is necesarily a problem, so long as the moderators continue to enforce basic boundaries and weed out trolls/poor e-behavior. I can envision a much more heavily trafficked BnA that still maintains sanity. It doesn't have to be the extremes of being a smallish travel community or being batshit-crazy-flackjacket-wearing-sexist-mofo-Thorntree.

Why do people post?

- They do indeed have travel-related questions. But this is only the most basic reason.

- They are bored (search for "Jester").

- They like the attention (search for "Jester"). Actually this is true for everyone -- we all like it when people respond to our posts. I suspect a lot of the regulars got lucky with people responding to their early posts in a good way. It motivates us to post again -- I mean what's your motivation to post if you get no response?

- They like the interaction and conversation with people. The humor and sparring and bippity-boppity chatty postings. Even if it's virtual. As NTFT says, BnA is kind of like the office water cooler. That's why people become regulars anywhere -- on BnA or TT or other chatboards -- they get to "know" the other regulars and want to keep interacting with who they "know".

- They like feeling useful. They like one spot in the world and want to share that info with others. So a board with lots of people asking questions about a place will attract lots of people who know and like giving the answers -- especially locals who are proud that travelers want to come visit. i.e.: I've tried to invite some of the TT Philippine forum regulars over to BnA, but they don't stick around because hardly anyone on BnA asks questions about the Philippines specifically. So they're not checking in when someone does post anything Philippines specific. This has to be true for other regions too. As Felix says, the TT has really specific info because there's more locals who are regulars.


In general, I think BnA has all the structure and practices in place to attract friendly + intelligent posters, it just needs MORE of what's already there.

PS: I never gave it conscious thought, but when I analyze things, I realize that the decent percentage of female moderators and vocal female regulars is probably a big contributor to why I'm on this board. Like attracts like. I already know certain kinds of sexist bullshit won't be tolerated on this board because I can see all the women posters on here and I can do the math. This makes me more willing to hang out on BnA because my peace of mind is worth something.

Thanks Cont-Op, Spiralout, 2Wanderers, and Cristina in Brooklyn for your thoughts. I'll try my best to answer the questions as well as add my thoughts.

It seems to me that BnA has become reactive rather than proactive. So again, for my part, I turn the question back to you, Sean et al, what are you trying to be?

Good question. What we want to be part of, what we intended to be a part of, and what it actually is - is not that far for what we originally got this thing going about 9 years ago. Our 1st thoughts were - "I wanna connect with travellers and locals, that is my favorite part of travel" - and that got translated to let's "cultivate an organic community that encourages independent travel".

From there we went nutz and built crap loads of content, community functions, and commerce applications to support it all.

The past year, we have not given as much resources to the community as we want to. All sorts of stuff comes up when running a business from my perspective and frankly, I lost site of certain parts of the community.

What do we want to be going forward?

I want to be a part of, and help build a community that is "the best" English Language independent travel resource and community on the web. Head and shoulders better than all of our competitors, but more importantly - just a fucking awesome place to get inspired and get kick arse travel info.

The things I suggested above as well as y'all's thoughts will definitely get us closer. From my perspective it means I gotta invest in resources to make these things happen and get the right passionate people in the right positions to create/cultivate what the community wants.

2Wanderer: More people would cure the afternoon posting decline IMO. Forum inflation - the blog projects that are we building are gaining a lot of steam recently. Our 1st 4 go arounds were not going perfectly - but the growth path is really happening now and I expect these properties and forums to continue to gain life.

I'll look into the cookie issue.

C in B - Agreed that likes attract likes. BTN attracts about 2 million unique visitors/month - I am confident that we can get more "alike" people in here via smart integration throughout our network as well as some of the suggestions above.

Anyone think I am nutz of full of shit? Here's your chance to call me on it. Hit reply!

Whats excellent,

You guys and gals are accepting. When people leave its because you loved them to death... even if they are trolls.
We've lost a bunch of folks that look for a fight, those that share information to be right... not to learn, help, or teach. The boards are lacking experience, and sounding boards of the past (Like salmo, and some of the other olde phart travelers that have seen countries whose names have changed three times since their first tour.)

Right, wrong or indifferent if you stick around BnA long enough you pick up friends. I'd say that 90% of anybody here would give a tour to any fellow bootie if they dropped them a line on account of being a bootie. The quality and character of the locals in these parts is simply stellar.

... The chatroom however, needs to be easier to find. I rather enjoy real time trivia games. Any post that asks for identification of locations or song lyrics goes on for hundreds of thousands of views. Why is the Chat buried under four different menus?

I struggle with the billions and billions of links on here. Click on a link to get to the boards and I end up on a site for travel insurance. If its a community first, and place to buy stuff second... some days it sure fools me. I like simple, and content rich... but if this website was a book it'd be printed on onion paper to get all the pages linked together! (Then again this place is like my one digital vice. I'm an analog dude stuck in a digital age.)

Forums
The problem I've seen in most forums, and I see it here, is that the mods create groups and divisions based on what they think people will want to talk about rather than what they do talk about. The end result is a bunch of fragmented sections, most of which get little to no traffic.

I think the BnA forum could use a massive overhaul, at least with how it is structured. Fewer groups for general purpose things, more for destination specific things. The destination groups tend to be resources that people can search well after topics die out.

Blogs

Most people just want a simple place to post messages to home, photos, etc. They don't want anything fancy. That's fine and the BnA blogs do a good job of that.

However, considering that it is built on Wordpress, there is room for a whole lot more cutomization. There are only a few cookie cutter themes available, yet Wordpress supports hundreds if not thousands. Opening up more of the features of Wordpress to users would be nice, even if most people never get around to using them.

You could probably extend the BnA network to blogs not hosted by BnA. I host my own blog. I like to tinker and mess around with stuff that would be unreasonable for BnA to support. However, I'd have no problem throwing my hat in the BnA blog pool and even put a link or a button on my site. Would be very easy to integrate with RSS. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Other Stuff

I realize that BnA doesn't make its money on forums and blogs. Yet, to be honest, I've never used BnA for booking anything. If I need a flight, I usually end up using more well known reservation services. If I need to book a room at a hostel, I usually type "hostel cityname" in Google and book via whatever comes up near the top.

What I would pay for?? A concierge service. The ability to talk to a real live person via IM or email or Skype while I'm on the road if I need to get something resolved, reserved, or figured out. I might not use it often, but when I need it, I would be well worth it. Even at $30-40 an hour. I don't want someone I have to call internationally. I'd prefer someone I could communicate with online, 24/7.


Podcast

You should do one.

BnA defaults to the North American sense of being E.G. 2wanderers in this thread says people stop posting in the afternoon.

I found this enjoyable for a start as it is different, but later found it to narrow and wanted to be able to get within the daily trials and tribulations of other parts of the world on a travel forum.

That's really just a passing comment, not of critisism of the forum or any individual poster.

Personally I have an ache to get a family on the soil of other lands but, with a last international travel experience 8 years in the rear a vision mirror, haven't really got a lot to offer so I stopped participating.

Still happy to answer stuff about Australia but most nuts and bolts stuff you want to know about Australia is only a google click away.

Originally joined BnA in the planning of a family trip to China. That trip had a set back.

This is not necessarily a good and proper suggestion for a travel forum but I would adumbrate a board along the lines of THE NATIONAL MOOD. Where locals and travellers alike could post the national moods of the day. Could lead to inspirations to travel to certain so far unconsidered destinations for posters and also create a more from all corners of the world feel to the forum.

Yeah - I think we should do a podcast as well. There is so much new stuff out there on the interweb and new ways of communicating - it's tough todo them all. But, yes - they can be fun.

Thanks for the suggestions on the blogs, and integration. Nice thoughts.

I suspect there are folks reading this and thinking - should I put my thoughts down? Yes - do it!.

My thought about the forums....

I like it. Very entertaining, some quality brainmashing here. Good travel advice.

My criticism: too many folders. Haven't bothered to count them but there must be 25 or 30 folders? Some of them are almost insulting, like the Over 50 folder. No one wants to post in there, it marks you as a geezer who wears socks with sandals and a little fishing sunhat and is totally clueless.

What's the point of an over 50 folder anyway? like those oldster people need special instructions different than any other traveler? Ditch it. Ditto the GLTB folder.

I'd also combine Mt. Kilimajaro and South Africa into Africa. Bali into Asia. The Travel Writing folder takes very few posts. In Other Words is a pretty slow corner.

How about combining Books, Music, and Movies with Photography, Video, and Photo into a Media folder?

Simplify.

I love pretty much everything about bootsnall. however, i think it would be great if all the employees/ceo's and whatnot posted in the forums a bit more. I know you love what you do since ive met you all quite a few times, but i think people who have not met you would enjoy seeing your guys passion for bna and travel all around. so though its a small thing and i know you guys are super busy, i think it could be a good thing to do.

The way it's set up now I really wish the Corporate/Vagabonding section was back in with the Chit-Chat/Travel Games/Main Forum. I feel like it's missing. And I get that it's good to know 'How To Go'. But It could just as easily be in 'Talk About Travel' too.

That's really about it. --Unless you want to send me to Dubai and put me in charge of the ME Section I will happily oblige.