How do you feel about "closed" forums?

[glohworm]

What I mean is; a year ago I found a forum in England where I was one of two Yanks! It was really very nice to mix with the Brits and a couple of Canucks to boot! It was an open forum at the time and many people "browsed as guests". The point was, everyday, new people were coming on board and giving their opinions about all manner of things, which I thought was great. Then, all of a sudden, they closed the forum down and invited only twenty people, out of two hundred or so, to join their exclusive club! I was one of the twenty, don't laugh, please! I was given an exclusive password, etc. What bothered me more than anything was the fact that I was talking to 19 other people, 19 other really nice, smart individuals, but that was all there was ever going to be! I couldn't deal with that.

It was like a closed society and I had bad feelings about it. I just signed off and never went back. I still have the password to the site and maybe I'll try to go back, if they'll have me. I miss them.

[jman01pa]

They are fine for a select group of people with a specific agenda but that is it.

An open forum allows for all to contribute their thoughts and ideas no matter who there are and where they are from.

Jay

[vass0922]

What happens when you drop out?
How do they get somebody else in to take the place?

Seems like it would die out after awhile, and get boring.

[OuTpaTienT]

I find that very strange. To intentionally cut off everyone except for a small elite group. Odd behavior.

I happen to hangout at a board that is also just a small group of people. Only about 12-15 of us there and maybe only 8-10 of us post on a regular (daily) basis. But we are by no means some self-proclaimed elitists, we were simply the remnants of a gaming forum that existed long ago for the game Hexen II. We became pretty good friends during that time and when the official forum shutdown one of the guys volunteered to host a forum where we could continue to talk. It's been going on for about 5 years or so now and we've all become pretty good friends and shared quite a lot of life's experiences through our discussions. But even now the board is not closed to outsiders. It's simply in a little "hole-in-the-wall" URL that people don't every run into. But when the occasional outsider does find their way in we don't intentionally chase them away or anything (although that can unintentionally happen).

We've shared quite a lot though our discussions. I've seen one of them go through a divorce, one have his second daughter, one young pup go from being a long haired kid to short haired happily employed maturing individual, one discover he has diabetes, one go from being a lewd womanizer to now being in a committed relationship with a woman that doesn't believe in sex before marriage, one relate to us the experience of living with a very rare and rather unusual disease, and on and on. It's been quite a rewarding experience knowing these guys.

So I say if you truly like the other people and value them then you should stick around. But OTOH if you feel their self-imposed group limit was merely a show of elitism then maybe you're better off without them. Only you can really know the answer.

We have a closed professional forum, but it has over 150 members.

And I am the members of 2 closed professional forums in the UK (both have a couple of hundred members)..

These are closed mainly to keep the trade reps and their spam out.

They serve their purpose and work well. We add members by invitation only.

They all started from Majordomo email-only discussion groups and graduated to webbased groups.

But I would think a closed general forum would be bizarre. IMO, anyway.

Cheers
Mick

[TheBurningCat]

I was part of a closed forum for my year level at school for a bit but it got shut down!

[Epidemic]

If I was the last one in that forum I think I could keep it going.

I love to read what I type

I could even spawn my own controvesy

[Jonty]

Some of my best conversations I have had were with myself.

[Theophylact]

Reminds me of the club in Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson that was so very exclusive that for several years it had no members at all.

Seriously, it sounds like a bad idea to me.

[skuz]

Always talking to the same people about the same subjects can get boring. You need new faces to freshen things up or shake the house.