Thoughts on life, love and faith by Plasticmind.

We all love attention, admit it. That little rush you get when you see 20 comments on a single post sort of makes life feel ok again.

But that's not what this post is about. As much as I like shameless self-promotion, that's not what I'm looking for commments about.

It's about my forums. Let's not dance around the issue like we're at a White House press conference, let's just say it. They're not pretty. In fact, they're barely usable. They're like tamagotchi's. They were hot in their prime but have since fizzled. Some of you may have even noticed the subtle disappearance of the recent topics on my sidebar. I couldn't take the daily reminder of how little they were visited or how poorly they functioned.

So I'm throwing the question out there for some feedback. Here are my options:

1. Kill my forums. Just take them out back and shoot them. They'll disappear from my menu bar forever.

2. Revamp my forums. As much as it pains me, I'd probably just take a vanilla template from the forum software and focus less on wowing people with my graphics and more on making them a place for connecting.

3. Start fresh. Setup forums at www.cardboardwhite.com

I've been leaning towards a mix of 1 and 3. I don't want to give up on forums altogether, especially with this growing community of friends. Try as I might, I can never really keep up as I'd like to. The closest I've come is by using Vienna to subscribe to everyone's RSS feed. But that doesn't let me know when people have responded to my comments, so often I miss out on great discussions and don't get inside jokes. Forums help faciliate discussion, which is really what our blogs are about anyhow.

Of course, there's the issue of identity and control. If you're posting at cardboardwhite.com, it's not on your site, and that might be a big deal for some--which is why I'm asking everyone to weigh in on this.

Thanks!

(I love exclamation points!!!)