Do you read Advanced Aquarist Magazine?

[Terry B]

simonh,
You have a good point about some links going to the wrong forum. About 10 days after the September issue was published I discovered that the link at the end of the article about Beta glucan as an immune system stimulant did not go to the feature article discussion forum. No wonder I didn't get any questions about the article. However, there haven't been any inquiries since the link was fixed either. That got me to thinking that maybe people just are not interested in using an immune system stimulant to help their fish.

Maybe the article was too complex to understand any of it, I don't know. It is really tough to take such a complex subject and make it sound simple. I also noticed that there have been stretches of time when nobody posts in the feature article discussion forum at all. This made me wonder how many people are aware that a discussion forum is available.

The lack of activity in the feature article discussion forum is not something new. Looking back, I discovered that there hasn't been a lot of activity in the feature article discussion forum for most months. I thought that some of you may have an idea that would make the forum more attractive to the readers.

Thanks to everyone that has responded to this thread. I think your feedback is the best way to learn how to improve things. It is unfortunate when anyone asks for a response in the forum and doesn’t get one within a reasonable period of time. I believe that the authors are notified by email when someone posts a comment or question. Personally, I can't change anything other than the articles that I write. Everything else is up to the owner and those that they appoint.
Thanks,
Terry B

 

[jamesw]

Terry,

Thanks for starting this thread, and for the feedback.

I'm not sure that everybody knows this so I'll post here:

We do not pay the Advanced Aquarist authors to answer questions in their Author Forums. Our hope is that they will see interesting questions and want to answer them. But as all of us know, the authors can be very busy people - and some of them spend VERY little time in front of a computer (Scott Michael for example spends MONTHS at a time away in Indonesia). We are like a "regular" magazine, we pay the authors (a lot!) for their excellent articles.

As Shane mentioned - if anyone finds a typo or a bad link in an article, please let us know! We won't be mad (a little embarrassed perhaps), in fact we'll be grateful.

Sincerely,
James Wiseman

 

[liquid]

I believe that the authors are notified by email when someone posts a comment or question.

Actually, there is no way (currently) for the bulletin board software to notify an author that someone has posted in their forum. The newest version of phpBB (our bulletin board software) that's currently being worked on has this option but a stable version of the version has not been released yet.

Shane

 

[hdtran]

My own 2 cents:

Just joined reefs.org, I have read "Advanced Aquarist Online" (AAO); have browsed archived issues of AAO & am looking forward to reading future issues.

As a new reef hobbyist (3 yrs experience w/ FOwLR, n years w/ freshwater fish), I don't actually find the articles difficult, despite the "Advanced" in the title. Now, if you start blathering about measuring expression of genes to environmental stresses via microarrays, or diffusive transport in sandbeds & Stanton numbers, my eyes might start to glaze over :?

Just because we don't ask questions or make comments, that doesn't mean that we don't read the authors' work or that we don't appreciate it! We really do!

Re: HTML vs. PDF: When I write, I convert to PDF & publish as PDF, because it's easier for me to do so (I don't have good web-authoring/hosting tools). But as a reader, I like well-formatted HTML a bit better (I can increase font size without having to scroll horizontally, for example). AAO has nicely formatted HTML.

So, I thank the authors & administrators for their time & effort, and the sponsors for their support of both an excellent website & online journal.

 

[Anonymous]

I love reading Advanced Aquarist. Thanks for the sticky posts reminding us that there's a new issue available. Never posted in the forums - never felt a need to do so.

 

[Anonymous]

I read it most of the time. I have not had a reason to post.

 

[LA-Lawman]

i read every article just about every month.

and refer to archives quite often.