So you may recall I mentioned Mudflats the other day. It’s been a cool place to hang out since the end of August, when Governor Sarah Palin from Alaska was chosen to be the running mate for John “I tell lies more often than the truth” McCain.
WordPress.com isn’t exactly supportive of a site that finds itself as popular as Mudflats. When you have comments threads which are over 1,000 posts long and no way to subscribe to comments or even have the site remember where you were at when you hit shift and reload… there was a couple of weeks there where I had to copy the name of the last commentor and then hit find in page.
Eventually I got in touch with AKMuckraker and offered to host a blog and forum for her, for free. And that was because I truly believe in the community that has grown up there.
When Sephy and I set up Aussie Bloggers originally, I believe it took us two weeks. We set up The Mudflats Forums in two days. It would have been even quicker if we had installed the same version of Tiny Portal as we use on Aussie Bloggers, but for some reason it refused to install for us, so we had to go with the latest release and they’d changed some fairly important stuff.
So given Mudflats on wordpress.com was the number one site, I was expecting a busy few days once the forums were live – especially as we had no moderators at all when we opened. It was just Sephyroth and I (and AKMuckraker but of course she is very busy with the blog and Admin-ing a forum is a bit of a learning curve at the best of times!) and we intended to add moderators during the first day. I had a list of names that had stood out while reading the comments area. By the end of the first day I believe we were up to 7 mods. We now have 15 and we could do with at least another 7. A huge thanks to all those who are helping out with Modly duties. ;)
We had absolutely no idea just how busy it would be. On the first day the forums were open, over 550 people registered. There were hundreds of posts – so many I could not read them all, and I am a quick reader.. :) That night my sleep was broken into one hour chunks, worrying that things would go haywire while I slept, I kept waking up – and so I got up to check on things.
There’s currently – as I type this – 778 members. It is a wonderful community. And it has Moose. Drop by and check it out. If you’re interested in the election, it is the place to be for the next 42 days. I’ll be there, and I won’t be getting a huge amount of sleep – there’s a lot to do! ;)
And I must give a massive amount of thanks to Sephyroth for helping me out with this. I couldn’t have done it on my own. And he found the great moose pic. :)
Looks great (and huge *boggle*)
Had a quick look at Mudflats, have to go back to it in instalments. It’s big.
Snoskred and Sephyroth,
I cannot ever thank you enough for all you’ve done for Mudflats! I owe you a huge debt of gratitude for your time, talent, and lack of sleep!! I love the forums and I can’t wait until I actually have time to hang out there for a while!
Great community indeed. Thanks for efforts putting it online and keeping it alive.
Hey there! I blog some and read A LOT over at Mudflats. Do they still need moderators? Willing to help if ya’ll need!!!
Most Sincerely,
Laura Lee