Upwards and onwards - the future is bright!

Good news everyone. At this stage, we seem to be in a good position to start our own forum at no cost and with the help of our own 'Webmaster' - hope he doesn't mind me using that term, and just laughs at my over exuberance! His name here will be TheMacOne.

Chocolate Cookie is about to come on board as a contributor here. She has been working behind the scenes to make this happen, and I cannot thank her and her partner enough for their commitment and assistance.

Coby is also coming on board the blog as a contributor so you may see some posts from her as well.

We expect to be able to have our own forum up and running very soon, so at this stage I am just adding a few contributors to the blog to help us get the new forum going.

We need a new forum name so any suggestions much appreciated.

Please put your hand up now too if you are able to be a volunteer moderator, so we can make sure this aspect will be covered. To start with, we will have to just jump on as and when we can to moderate. I trust that the ex-N.com forummers will behave themselves and our moderating will mostly be targeted on any new members, so this means we all need to look after the forum and report any concerns so the moderators can take appropriate action.

We need to consider the terms and conditions we want on our forum.

Keep any comments and suggestions coming please. Your input is the driving force here.

How would you like our forum to be set up?

Please let us know what you would like to see in our new forum.

Do you want different topics. For example, recipe swap, kitchen help, travel, gardening, cookalong, cookbook book club, general chit chat.

Or do you just want the one section like was on N.com.

I am a fan of sections so it is easier to find the thread you are looking for, plus will have to see if we can add a search option as well.

We are able to set up our own forum, and at the moment the 'partial moderation' style of forum is the popular choice in the poll on this blog. This is much easier to handle with volunteer moderators (that's you guys - whoever is willing to put up their hand to help out), we would need to do some sort of roster I think so the forum is covered 24/7 due to us being all over the world.

After seeing the changes to N.com and realising our forum has had an untimely and sudden demise (I was hoping for a miracle!), we need to find an alternative way of communication. I am not a fan of the Nigella FB page - too many silly people on there for me, and could you imagine if the Nigella-body-lovers got involved in our threads. There is the Nigella Friends page which us FB users are finding great to keep in contact with each other but the discussions thread is not really like a forum or as user friendly as I imagine many of us would like. And of course there are the non-FB users to consider, which is my main reason for starting this blog in the first place.

Anyway I need your input. Let me know your thoughts.

Do we want to start our own forum?

Yes we can! Well, if you would like to. I have had a very generous offer from another forummer to assist in starting up our own forum. I like the idea as it means people that do not want to be on Facebook, can still be involved in our old Nigella.com community of forummers.

There are of course concerns about how we would moderate our own forum. There are a few options.

1. Fully moderated: like the Nigella.com site did. This would need a group of forummers that would be willing to be moderators and to devote time to such a task on a regular basis. I do not see any need for posts to be changed though. They would only not be posted if they were unsuitable under the terms and conditions we set up. 
2. Initially moderated: first say 20 posts are fully moderated and then the forummer becomes an approved member and no moderation is required. However, if they make an unsuitable post (against the terms and conditions of the forum) the post would be removed and they would become unapproved and subject to moderation for say 20 posts again. (There would need to be a report ability so the moderators can be made aware of a transgression).
3. Partially moderated: a report mechanism so forummers can report an unsuitable post, and it would be removed if it was deemed to not meet the terms and conditions of the forum.

Please note: current Nigella.com forummers moving over would already be considered 'approved members' if we went with Option 2. Also any option chosen would be fully disclosed in the conditions of using the forum. 

Please let me know your thoughts on how these scenarios could work and any concerns you have. Also, of course I need to know if you would like our own forum. Plus please vote on the poll down the right side of this page.