volunteer their time to moderate the forum and keep the site up and running. Initially, Orr ran the day-to-day technical side of the site by himself. Until we reach saturation, we will continue to upgrade and add servers.” Menu changes Now we generate that much new material every day. Our first server had only 100 megabytes of storage available. “I keep thinking our rate of growth will level off, but that hasn't happened yet. “We continue to triple our volume every two years,” Orr says. Untold thousands of others look at the site regularly but do not register, which is required to post messages. Today, the forum has over 14,000 registered users. It is succeeding like we never expected.” We went from 2,000 hits a day to 50,000 in about two days. “Our earliest pitch was no ads, no animations,” he says. Advertisements and graphics on commercial sites took too long to download with the dial-up Internet speeds common at that time, he recalls.

AgTalk got its start in 2000 when Orr and other forum participants found that commercial forums were becoming more difficult to use. The history of ag forums dates to the 1990s, when agricultural magazines and other Internet pioneers began offering Web forums designed for farmers. “On AgTalk, we see people talking, sharing information and making friendships around the country and around the globe.” How it started “What we wanted was a forum for an unfettered exchange of ideas,” says David Orr, the Ohio farmer who, along with several others, spearheaded development of AgTalk. and around the world as they read and contribute posts on topics as varied as the price of seed, the progress of harvest, machinery options and the vagaries of politicians and the policies they propose.Īll this from a forum run by and for farmers that started with a $500 investment and a vision of building a noncommercial online community. But for a growing number of farmers, an online forum called AgTalk is where the action is when it comes to building an online community.Įach day, the AgTalk forum ( ) records hundreds of thousands of “hits” from farmers across the U.S. I hold the same philosophy with my custom spraying business AND online forums.IN THE hyper world of social media, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube get much of the glory. If the farmers vanished tomorrow, the company would die. I told many a farmer that my job was to make as much money for my customers as I could but NOT at the expense of the company and to make as much money for the company as I could but NOT at the expense of the farmer and that, if the company vanished tomorrow the farmers would still do fine. I have ALWAYS held this view and said as much many times when I was buying grain. Without the forums, we would still survive and thrive. Without us these forums would wither and die. They exist because of US, not the other way around. IMO, these forums benefit more from the members than the members benefit from the forums.

It is MY choice as to wether or not I want to be there and support it. BTW, for the record, it is my belief that it is their forum and they are free to run it as they choose. IMO, you are FAR better off not being part of that site but, unfortunately, if you are still a registered user you are a contributing pawn to their ad revenue if my understanding of how these things works is correct. AS near as I can tell, it was never done. The problem, (for me) is that I wanted my 'membership' and everything in my profile 'expunged' from the site as it is my understanding that these forums get ad revenue based on total membership and I did NOT want to contribute to those numbers. The mod posted a counter 'rant' and said that he/she was tired of this particular subject being brought up and, after giving his/her counter view, blocked the thread. In my case, it wasn't even a post that I made that was the final straw, it was something someone else posted, nothing offensive or anything like that but a topic that the mod disagreed with. It would appear you have been one of those 'victims'. I left Agtalk (voluntarily) because I did not like the douche bag moderator and the fact that he/she would delete/ block and ban peoples posts simply because he/she did not agree with or like what they were posting.

Ag talk forum