Our user is a relative newcomer to gardening and is seeking others with similar interests. She is computer literate and finds that she learns new software programs easily in her work. She would like to locate a user-friendly forum where she can get answers to simple gardening questions and will be able to gain from the experiences of others. In order to select the appropriate forum for this user an online discussion forum and two network newsgroups will be explored.
Davesgarden is a comprehensive garden-themed site based on discussion forums and operates much as one would expect of an "offline" community gardening club. Designed, maintained, and funded entirely by Dave Whitinger and his wife, the site offers 55 forums and currently boasts almost 3,000 registered users. The site is free to the public and displays no advertisements. Members are encouraged to contribute to the searchable, online plant database, participate in "irc" formatted live chats via a windows interface, and utilize personlized "trading list" pages where users maintain a list of desired plants and indicate the plants that they are willing to share. davesgarden has been online for almost two years.
Rec.gardens and triangle.gardens are both networked newsgroups for recreational gardeners with rec.gardens having members from all over the world and triangle.gardens based in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. Both of these newsgroups offer the same sort of basic content that the web-based forum did-- one can post a question regarding proper fertilization of tomato plants and will likely receive an adequate answer on either forum. A user can easily subscribe to both of these newsgroups and view them with any number of newsreaders. Rec.gardens has been in existence for ten years and has considerably more traffic than triangle.gardens.
The information contained within the forums located at Davesgarden is publicly accessible, however, in order to take full advantage of the site's resources one does need to register. Registration requires that the user supply a valid email address and specify a username or "screen name". An initial message is sent to verify the email address, confirm the username and direct the user back to the site to log in and complete the registration process. The user is now able to post to forums, utilize her personalized home page and make entries to her garden journal which she can elect to make public.
Forums cover gardening topics from general gardening, Farm Life, UK gardening, heirloom vegetables and water gardens to bonsai. "Watch this thread" enables responses to a post to be emailed directly to the address provided at registration. In the way of introduction to the site, a "Tour" is offered with hyperlinked paragraph-format descriptions of each section and a link to "Help" is available from all pages. Messages are organized by thread and the main forum page permits user to see which forums have recent posts (usually they all do), who posted last, and the date of the last post. Each thread is displayed in a tabular format that enables the reader to simply scroll down to view the next post. New posts or replies to existing threads are typed and submitted from a window. "Next Page" and "Previous Page" links enable paging through previous messages, archives are also accessible via the search function. Three months worth of previous postings are currently available.
Regarding moderating/ banning users, Dave states in the online Help, "There are no garden police here. You will not be banned unless you are doing evil and illegal things. You won't be banned for being a newbie or doing something wrong or posting something silly. People have the right to build their own reputation as they see fit. People who contribute positive things to the site will have a good reputation. People who do stupid things will get a bad reputation. It's not up to me to decide who gets a good or bad reputation - that's entirely up to YOU!" This self-moderation seems to work well at davesgarden in that rarely is an unwanted post seen and the overall tone is one of friendship and conviviality. Because members' email addresses are not readily accessible to either other members or automated "miners", spamming does not appear to be problem. From within davesgarden it is possible to email other members from their homepages without actually possessing their external address; the system sends the message to the address provided at registration. The Davesgarden Mission states that this forum is designed to "nurture and support an online community of gardeners…" and it does that. In the course of this research many types of interchange have been seen, from gardeners obtaining advice on spotty tomatoes and trading for exotic plants to receiving the prayers and support of fellow gardeners when a child is ill.
In this study, the newsgroups were viewed with both Netscape News and Tin. The Tin commands are more cumbersome to learn at first and the text-based interface is not as aesthetically pleasing as Netscape's windows-based interface. Netscape has integrated Newsreader into the Messenger module and it behaves like a windows-based email reader.
New user instruction is available via the "/help" command in Tin and via the Help menu in Netscape. Both offer basic instruction regarding navigation and use of the newsreaders including basic subscription and posting. Both readers automatically thread posts, Netscape offers collapsible threads and displays a spool icon to the left of the initial post to indicate that there are follow-up posts. Tin indicates a thread with a "+" notation and the reader can easily move from within one post to the next in the thread in Tin or Netscape simply by hitting the spacebar. A review of ninety days worth of posts on both groups yielded no newsgroup instruction to new users (this included over 10,000 messages on rec.gardens & 670 on triangle.gardens).
As with the forums at Davesgarden, the newsgroups were not moderated. However, with the newsgroups a fair amount of cross-posting and spamming is seen and users' email addresses are readily available. The tone of the newsgroups is somewhat different from that of the davesgarden forums, John Moore, a subscriber to rec.gardens, describes it as "a tumultuous, sometimes vitriolic, but mostly friendly world." After only a short experience with the newsgroups a user adds new terms to her vocabulary, among these are: newbie, flame, spam, and kill-lists. Newbies, new users, are not always held in the highest regard, primarily because each newbie seems to naively make the same inquiries upon joining. Flaming refers to the epithets often exchanged between two or more members; a general rule is that the longest threads are rarely seen where an in-depth discussion of the topic at hand, say Japanese beetle remedies, has developed, rather, this is usually the result of the beetle discussion taking an ugly turn and the flames inevitably ensue. Spamming is either completely irrelevant posting, usually commercial or pornographic in nature, or the unwanted messages that result from having ones address automatically "mined". Various anti-spamming techniques are employed on these groups, including inserting additional characters in an email address to be removed by a legitimate correspondent and writing out ones email "longhand" to later be transposed by a legitimate correspondent. (i.e. johnsmith88@somewhere88.net88 and johnsmithatsomewheredotnet) Kill-lists were never satisfactorily defined but instructions for blocking senders were posted-- this appears to work only in windows-based email type readers like Netscape and MS Outlook.
The primary differences in experience with between the online forum and newsgroups appear to relate to interface type and bandwidth. The newsgroups are leaner on style and certainly lack the additional conveniences made possible by the web-based environment but would probably be best suited to a user seeking a relatively simple interface. Because newsgroup messages can be downloaded to the user's local machine, it is possible to have them accessible off-line. For the user without bandwidth concerns and plenty of time to participate, the user-friendliness and added features of the online forum and the community found at Davesgarden specifically is a good fit. Another plus for the online forum is that it is accessible with any internet browser and no specialized software is needed. In conclusion both types of forums would most likely provide our user with adequate answers to her gardening queries.
