A cordial invite to "GUESTS" but who hesitate to log in....

[usuallylurk]

This board needs conversation to pick up again - at one point a few years back, the nudists, the nude-curious, those with questions, and so forth would step forward - register, and log in and post.

As a longtime member here - I look and on an evening like tonight - I see five members and over 150 "guests" - those who just browse.

Come on in - "wade on in, the water ain't deep". Ask questions. Discuss activities you may have. If you have questions - where to go - how to get started - what happens - what activities do you do while in nudist environs? ASK. We do not bite.

[jasenj]

I suspect many of those "guests" are bots scanning web sites for search engines and such.

There is one other naturist forum I participate in that has a couple dozen regular posters. The conversation veers far and wide, but does come back on track to naturism when appropriate. Other than that, it's pretty slim pickin's.

[atalanta]

Lurk is right - the forum has lost the vibrancy and also the range of discussion subjects that it had a few years ago. Maybe there are many members who, like me, find it not worthwhile to log in as a matter of routine but just scan the recent activity as a guest and only register their presence on the now rather rare occasions where there is something worthy of comment/agreement/disagreement. True, many of the earlier threads descended into political entrenchment so deep as to be worthy of a Democrat/Republican debate and could become rather a turn-off but others tackled serious themes in a challenging and entertaining manner.
As to the reasons it has been lost, I suspect a combination of the information overload we are all subjected to and the rise to dominance of social media such as Facebook and Twitter which I detest and refuse to have anything to do with, although my kids use it all the time.

[natureboy1776]

I agree that most of the guests are probably spiders. But another concern is, how many times have we all read a nudist forum complain when a "noob" posts a question that has been answered a dozen times already without searching first. I like to think that there is a wealth of info being digested quietly. It takes a lot of learning to understand that nudism is not something to be sneaked away and ashamed of. And now with every "big bother" agency and most companies watching ALL web activity for "deviant" behavior.

[usuallylurk]

Well, I don't visit these sites with my work computer....

[dakref]

I am one of those who does not log in unless I have something to say. I noticed a significant dropoff when the site was broke down for quite some time. There have been a few other breakdowns since, but not for as long. I think this may have had something to do with the air running out of this forum.

[Christian]

Automatic login would be cool. I was blocked for a while, couldn't get my password to work, so one of those guests was probably me. Also made it hard to respond to posts.

[atalanta]

I think it is immensely damaging to activity levels if a forum (whatever the nature of the group) goes off-air for an extended period. Many people will just shrug and move on to the next thing. This one was unreachable for around 10 days last month, with no apology or explanation offered as far as I could see. I used to belong to a Spanish-language naturist forum for years which was excellent and very active. At some point it suffered a major attack and was completely down for weeks (or months). I think it did revive briefly, but as a shadow of its former self and eventually just died or was taken down by its owner.

[jasenj]

There are SO MANY options out there. I know of maybe a dozen naturist/nudist forums, and I participate in five or six. It is dizzying the number of nudist special interest forums that are out there. CFF may have been an early mover and attracted a decent number of participants, but other sites have sprung up, and any downtime can drive people to move to another venue. It seems few people want to play in someone else's sandbox; they want to build their own place to hang out.

[dakref]

What are the names of some other good legitimate forums?

[jasenj]

What are the names of some other good legitimate forums?

TrueNudists.com is tolerable. There are quite a few people there who can't separate sex & nudity. But there are some genuine nudists (some who used to be here).
http://www.nudist-resorts.org/ seems legit, but I don't participate there.
http://nudistclubhouse.com/ is legit, but I don't like the way everything is arranged into groups.
http://clothesfreelife.com/ is a good blog aggregation site.
http://netnude.com/mb/ has been around a long time, but the UI is extremely outdated.
http://www.freerangenaturism.com/forum/ is an interesting site.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/naturists is more of a mailing list than a forum, but it has a high signal to noise ratio.

[NorthEastUSA]

you forgot http://naturistfamily.net/forum/

[richinoregon]

I just noticed that I was one of two members and there were 204!!!! "guests." I can't believe that there are that many just checking this site out-I'd have to agree with naturboy1776 that nearly all of them are 'bots.

[nudeyooper]

This is my first time back for a few weeks. Was out of town without computer access then came home to not being able to access the site. I too usually will not log in unless I want to leave a comment.

[Eldernude]

I just checked, There are 5 member(s) and 238 guest(s) online. I just logged in myself after reading this post. I usually don't log in if I'm just doing a quick scan of the topics. But if I have several minutes or see something to comment on I log in. One thing I've done a couple of times is scan very old posts to find a topic to comment on.