We have created a Facebook page for RYPN to help expand our reach into the world of Facebook. Our goal with the Forum is to promote networking among rail preservationists and to spread knowledge and information about our industry. With the increasing number of preservationists on Facebook it is important that we can reach them too.

While the Forum is the ideal location for long form discussions that are archived and searchable, the Facebook page may be a good place to post short updates about events taking place or work being done in your daily lives as rail preservationists.

We have never tried this before so lets give it a try and see how well it works!

https://www.facebook.com/railwaypreservationnews

Bad idea.

I don't think it's a bad idea at all. It extends RYPN's (as well as rail preservation's) reach into the community in general instead of residing solely in a dusty little corner of the internet inhabited by the few interested diehards. Though I don't have a personal Facebook page cuz I care not for what Joe Average had for lunch or to waste time commenting on cute kitten images, for any legit organization it's almost a must-have as a promotional tool. As Rick said, let's see how it pans out.

You might want to add that you don't have to have to have a Facebook logon to view the Facebook page. If you want to comment, like on this forum, then you will need a sign-on.

I also think that this is a good idea. For better or for worse, having a Facebook presence is necessary for a preservation group to get its message out.

I think that, potentially, it could reduce participation on the forum even further. If you take away all of the "juicy" parts, what are you left with?

FB is good for the big picture. Kinda like a short news blurb with the full story at 11. Except direct them to RYPN. The Interchange is where the details reside. Think of it as advertising what is here.

The world is ending, the sky is falling, and I'm looking forward to it being documented on Facebook now too :-)

This may help explain the popularity of Facebook.

While I realize that you moderators are doing what you think is best, and have not only valid reasons, but a fair amount of support from our members for taking this action, I must say frankly that I am having NO difficulty containing my enthusiasm.

So far RyPN has turned out to be just about the only place on the web NOT screwed up by booby trapped software, non stop ads, and information harvesting. I DO hope that our esteemed moderators have cooked up some kind of firewall to protect those of us who had lives before mark suckerberg was born, from all these forms of cyber sewage which ooze from sitonmyfacebook. I'd hate to have to quit RyPN just to get away from it....

Sammy,
Facebook is a totally separate thing unto to itself. It can't crawl over here and do nefarious things so worry not. The RYPN Facebook page is a free, public page and you don't need an account to view. It can't get your data unless you have an account and you let it do so.

Funny how I'm defending this. I'm not what you call of fan of Facebook in any way, shape or form.

Oh, no.

I dislike the idea of having to go to facebook every day just to make sure I don't miss anything RYPN.

Because this is just what I did two minutes ago. Did you do it too?

Mike

The RYPN Facebook page is becoming an aggregator of rail preservation news stories found on various museum and organization Facebook pages. Since most of that content never makes it to here, you can better follow along what is going on in the world of preservation by visiting both this forum and the RYPN Facebook page.

I thought that is the purpose of the "Flimsies" board.

The interesting thing about the RYPN page is that railway preservation news is, well, preserved. You can search the archives. It is all there.

Nada on this FB stuff. There are many people who live in the temporal realm of the instant social media and it suits their short attention span well. As far as archives, misremembering the past may be good enough for them.

I wish there was just a way to automatically port over news from that media to this one so that it is not lost, even if it were a monthly summary of stuff that transpired. Then I would feel more OK about having a lesser quality forum duplicating this one- perhaps a forum that may (or may not) be more active. And that is about all I have to contribute to this thread.

Rick has been a big proponent of FB when frequently others did not. Now you forced it on the community. Please make it work somehow for all of us. It would be sad if this good forum suffered because of your change (however this may have been ultimately your goal?).