New Author Forums

[Dave]

Two new forums have been created in Books:

For Neal Stephenson and David Weber

More may follow, if you use them....

[J-Sun]

I'm aware of the rules (though these seem to barely qualify and though it amazes me that it would be pushing it for a Baxter forum and Hamilton isn't even really close) but why doesn't Alastair Reynolds not have one? I get 5-7 threads posted in in the past six months or so and up to 27 threads with his name in them, possibly more that are about his works but don't have his name.

(Not promoting these guys as huge fans - I like some of their stuff in varying degrees but I'm not personally invested in their having forums - but just because I'm surprised they don't have forums and at least Reynolds seems to qualify before Stephenson and Weber.)

Either way - thanks for the news and I imagine the Stephenson and Weber fans are happy.

[Dave]

I was going to ask could you copy and post those Alastair Reynolds threads links here for me, but I see you have done that already.

I've just spent the best part of the day cleaning up the General Books forum of redirected posts, Book Search posts, and posts for authors who already had their own forums. I was amazed at the number of posts for some authors who didn't have a forum - David Weber was one, and in the past his fans have asked for a forum before - but there are others who have more than the "5 threads" the forum description requires. I actually didn't see that Alastair Reynolds had that many but you have just convinced me.

One thing I've found is that the forum search function is pretty useless and doesn't find the threads that already exist. It only goes back 4 pages and there are so many generic "best of 2012" threads that popular authors threads don't show up.

In any case, many of the threads I was looking at were over 5 years old. I'd only make a new forum if there was some current interest - which there is for Neal Stephenson. There are other authors we also are considering now.

What we don't want is a lot of empty forums with no-one posting in them. If there is a genuine interest then I'll create the forum. Some of those threads you showed are from the review forum, but I'll make the Alastair Reynolds forum tonight.

[J-Sun]

Actually, looking closer, a couple are also referring to Firefly's Malcolm Reynolds but I figured they weren't all relevant. I always wondered if there was a special "mod search" or something that you use to create new subforums because I have a hard time with the search function, too, but I guess there isn't. Anyway - I understand about the uselessness of "ghost subforums" and hope these work well.