Story by Mike Doble – [email protected]
If you haven't ever clicked over to our messageboard – please do! SkiNC / SkiSoutheast.com Messageboard
It's a:
Great place to Ask Questions from frequent skiers and snowboarders in the area.
Great place to share your photos and videos with fellow skiers and snowboarders.
Virtual Ski and Snowboarding Club.
Great place to meet fellow snow loving friends.
Great place to invite people to ski or ride with you.
SNOW is a great attraction to meet and greet new friends!
Whatever it IS, it is invaluable to all that we do around here in SkiSoutheast.com-land. I've and skied with numerous people on the messageboard and MANY of the members of the messageboard have skied or ridden with dozens or even hundreds of fellow members.
If you're a first time visitor to the site and only need a little information about our ski areas, the messageboard is still a great place to LOGIN, JOIN (it's FREE) and ask your questions. If you intend to ski or ride with ANY frequency, then you should pay the messageboard a visit. You don't have to join to read the posts that others are sharing. However to post a question or comment you do have to SIGN UP. Again, it's FREE and there's no obligation other than to simply join in the conversations.
CLEAN, LEAN AND READY FOR THE 2012-2013 SEASON!
As some of our readers will know, we just deleted more than 23000 people from our SkiMail mailing list. In our sixteen previous seasons we really never emailed people except to announce our Ski Summits. We wanted to start with a fresh list of people and have seen our skiMail list grow to the current status of 2800 or so NEW and AVID fans of the website in just the first month! That's impressive if you consider there's little to NO snow on the slopes just yet.
The Messageboard membership was showing more than 4700 members as of this morning, however we have long been aware that SPAMMERS LOVE messageboards and that the vast majority of our messageboard membership were of the SPAM variety ;-(
We also knew that a lot of the messageboard crowd were non-active members so we went through this morning and cleaned out everyone who had not posted in a year or more.
That got us down to 1134 active members of which 58 of those have posted in the last 24 hours. That, my friends, makes this a very active board in the ski-world out there.
The two largest, national ski forums in the land boast about 20,000 members, however those too are gorged with SPAM registerations. Proof of that is as simple as looking at the fact that they are showing one million or so POSTS compared to our 259,535 posts via the most recent version of VBulletin that we took LIVE back in 2003. So we're very happy with our basic one-third the posts of the BIG NATIONAL sites via our "very local/regional" ski site.
Our members are some of the most avid lovers of ALL THINGS SNOW as you'll find anywhere and they are very knowledgeable about nearly any ski or snowboard related question you could ask or want to communicate about.
Many of these members have posted more than 5000 posts over the last nine seasons.
There ARE a couple of other ski and snowboarding forums around the region but there's really no reason to do anywhere else. Most are "ghost towns" comparatively. In fact the second most visited ski related messageboard forum in the region routinely will show 0-3 members and only 20-30 guests visitors online; whereas as of this writing at 2pm on a rainy Monday, December 10th with only Cataloochee and Snowshoe open in the region – we're seeing 13 members and 88 guests.
YOU'RE INVITED!
On behalf of the active messageboard members, our moderators, and those of us here at SkiSoutheast.com, we want to invite you in. Simply CLICK HERE and take a moment to join. It only takes a moment and it's free. Once you register, you will receive a quick email verification and you will be able to post away. …and we really hope that you will.
I think you'll quickly agree that the people on the messageboard are JUST LIKE YOU. They love our ski resorts; they love SNOW and they love to travel. In no time at all we think you'll meet new friends.
Help us GROW our membership to even greater heights. We'll be inviting members to join us for our Ski and Snowboarding Summits this season and you can look for those dates to be finalized THIS WEEK.
If you have any questions about our Forum, email me at: [email protected]