New Year - New LUG Plans
And here we are—a new year, a new blog entry!
Last year was an eventful one for the long-running Logic Users Group. It evolved from being an email list with an attached, semi-functional web forum, to a fully featured web community, still retaining it's roots with an attached mailing list. This transition was not without it's hiccups, but overall, it was far smoother than we had anticipated.
The LUG email list had amassed some 23,000 members, but as we know, people very often sign up, then go to "no mail" and simply lose interest over the years. We'd calculated the number of active posters and participants, based on Yahoo's metrics, at closer to 2300. And here we are, less than a year later, with over 3500 members signed up on the LUG web community, nearly all of whom have logged in with some regularity, if not regularly posted. Some of that new activity can be directly attributed to the release of Logic 9 in that time. However, clearly the Logic user community has been taking advantage of our new home, which is exactly what we administrators were hoping for!
So the question now is, what next? How can we build on what we have, and make the LUG a more vibrant community—a place that Logic users congregate online to share ideas, tips and tricks, output, gear, projects, and more. A place to both make music connections, and perhaps even friends. (Apologies if that sounds a bit touchy-feely for "just" a web forum about using software to some of you, but I've made some great friends from the LUG over the years!)
From a technical point of view, we can build on what we have. The vBulletin software we're using for our forums has been updated and as time progresses, we shall update our board to this new version. As with nearly everything in the web these days, this includes not only more forum-specific features, but social-networking style functions. We're not sure yet which ones would be of interest and value to the LUG members, so we'll be looking for lots of feedback from the membership on what you'd like to see.
From a content point of view, we'd love to know what you'd like to see. What sort of articles, reviews, peer-to-peer communication features, and so on would you like to see? I'll start a thread in the Discuss the LUG Site forum specifically relating to this blog, but we're always interested in hearing about your ideas. As we've written repeatedly, all of the administrative team are volunteers, we do this at our own expense (both time and money) because we love the community. We want to make this something that every participant can both enjoy and have a stake in, so please don't hesitate to let us know your thoughts!
Have a great new year, and lets make this the best year for the LUG yet!
Orren Merton
Logic Samurai