The greatest thing about bushwalk.com is the people. People who are willing to share, chat and help other walkers. It is this friendly interaction that builds trust, trust allows open interaction, this sharing then breads a true sense of community. Here are six tips to help build the friendliness on our forum.
1) Re-read your post before submitting. Lazy writing makes for hard reading, remember your post will be read by a lot of people for many years, make it easy for them to read and keep it friendly. Assume that each post you write will be the first post a new visitor reads and ask yourself ‘Does this post help build the view of bushwalkers in our community?’
2) Seek first to understand. Try to understand the vibe and don’t get caught up in details. Instead of jumping in with comments like “you will die!!!!”, ask a questions like - “Have you tried walking barefoot in snow on other trips?” You might find out that it was a bad idea or they forgot to say in the trip is planned for summer or maybe they are a very experienced bare foot snow runner.
3) Be the hero and apply first aid. If I break my leg in the bush I know you would drop your pack and grab your first aid kit. Bullying and nasty comments can do incredible damage to people. If you read a post that makes you cringe, then jump in and offer words of encouragement to the recipient quickly. Gently en-courage the poster to edit their post, to make it friendly and helpful. If it is not quickly resolved then press the ‘report post’ button and the moderators will help.
4) Avoid fast pace discussion. Forums are not for live debate. If you find yourself hitting refresh and waiting for a response so you can jump back in - then the debate is probably about to get personal. Take a breath, log off and check back in tomorrow.
5) An argument is not won. I am not sure why people say they ‘won’ an argument, what did they win?? Who decided they ‘won’? If they won, then they should be better off some how, right? The people who ‘win’ arguments are those who come out with a better understanding or with a new friend. The goal of our posts should be to make every reader a winner.
6) Nothing new under the sun. If you have been active on the forum for more than two years or so then you know the frustration of feeling like we are walking around in circles. New members come and want to have the same discussions and debates we finished years ago. It is great that people want to raise these issues, we learnt a lot from them and so should new members. It helps if newer members are mindful of this issue and search the forum for similar threads. It also helps if longer term members are aware of this and stick to threads that interest them and help new members learn through these debates.
7) Be friendly and have fun.
Bushwalk
