I think it's time to embrace social media, but let's keep this forum alive as well. There's an invaluable wealth of knowledge that has accumulated here over the years. It needs to be preserved and archived like the Stormtrack print magazines.
Over the past few days I've been discussing with some of the staff and other chasers about implementing an actively edited Stormtrack Facebook page. I think it's long overdue, and I think we can address several of the concerns that people have including the issues that Dan brings up.
There's always been a centralized hub of storm chaser communication. It started with the print magazine and has progressed in various digital forms such as mailing lists like WX-Chase and forums like this one. The format has changed several times, but there's always been a hot spot of discussion for what is currently happening in chasing. That is until now. That hub is gone, and the storm chasing community has been broken up into splintered fragments strewn across social media. If you aren't following the right people, aren't in the right friends circles or cliques, you lose out on what’s happening.
Let's try to bring that hub back and let's embrace social media, which is where all of the chaser traffic has migrated. A Facebook page could be a great way to provide real time news and photo sharing from all corners of the chaser community, and I think it's possible to get closer to Stormtrack's roots as a print magazine in the process. Dan expressed concerns about the quality of content on Facebook. A Facebook page would allow a group of editors, not unlike those of a magazine, to pick which content gets published to the page. Stormtrack editors could corral high quality content from chasers and meteorologists that is posted to the news feed and then share it to the Stormtrack page. Readers would be free to comment on the shares or start their own discussions as well, but editor selected shares allow the content of the page to remain high. The key is to maintain a good sized group of active chasers from diverse backgrounds and social circles as editors so that we get a steady stream of posts from across social media.
One huge advantage the forum has over Facebook is the organization of posts into sub forums and threads that are sorted and searchable. We'll sorely miss that organization, but I think there are ways to provide some order to the chaos of social media. The timeline feature allows you to view posts from specific points in time. Editors could also use hash tags when they share posts to group posts by topic. The Stormtrack Facebook page will become a sprawling list of various topics with multiple concurrent threads going for the same event, but by selecting a hash tag you could get all the posts from that topic. On the forum we have tightly regulated FCST threads in the Target Area, while on Facebook posts of greatly varying quality about upcoming setups are strewn randomly across the news feed. Editors could hand pick insightful and informative posts about setups and tag them with something like #forecast-2015-03-28. Readers can then click those tags to get all forecasts for that event. Anytime an editor sees an account or photo from an event, they could share it with #reports-yyyy-mm-dd and then you've got all photos and accounts in one spot.
The page would also provide several advantages over the forums. Moderating would be at a minimum as editors are selecting what gets shared to the page. Readers are then free to hide or block content or people they don't wish to see. Participation from chasers isn't even explicitly required as the editors can simply share people's public posts, which eliminates the need to maintain an active members list, only a group of active editors that can be refreshed.
I'm interested in any comments, concerns, suggestions, or criticisms for the Facebook page. I'd also like to hear from folks who are both active chasers and forum participants who'd like to be editors for the page. It's important that we maintain this forum, but it's time to extend the conversation to social media.
