Why a Forum?

Good question.

There are lots of bondage-related groups and “communities” on Yahoo Groups and similar. We’re on quite a few of them, and Convolvulus has its own Yahoo Group.

But - the user interface is a bit clumsy, photos can cause lots of problems, they’re prone to spam and malware like “Grouply”, and there’s little control over appearance and structure. And with adult groups, there’s always the possibility of the host pulling the rug away from under your feet...

What about social networking sites like FetLife and Informed Consent? They have their good points too, but either the interface is too stripped-down (try finding a post you wrote a few months ago on FetLife if you’ve forgotten which group it was and you can’t remember the discussion title!) or over-complicated and annoying (the other one...)

With a modern state-of-art Forum there’s the possibility of total control over appearance and structure at every level from the Site Administrators to Registered Users. It’s easy to follow discussions and to look up posts from long ago. You can do fancy formatting and it’s easy to include URLs and images (and more). And if the content is well-structured it’s easy to keep up with what interests you and to ignore the rest. And there’s Private Messaging and the ability to block posts from people you’d rather not hear from, and lots more customisation. So, as someone harper used to admire in a different field altogether used to say, that’s much much betterer!