Please quickly say what you think of libcom.org

i for one think it is a great resource but the boards are quite cliquey but fun.

succinct enough i hope 8)

Since I joined libcom I have become everything I used to hate. So that's communism 1-0 monotheism.

I was never a fundamentalist. Stop making racist assumptions.

I was a "didn't really give a shit" kind of Muslim. I'm an atheist now.

But they're the worst bit!

Admin - two subsequent posts with off-topic insults deleted

I'm a very big fan - in most respects it's the best lefty site I know. I think it should be pushed more by everyone using it.

Some stickers and posters throughout every town would be good, as well as flier, business cards and an update list of email addresses - not just anarchos - to post to whenever some bit of new content is added. With shit like that you'll get to a critical mass and you'll then get snowballing as people forward your updates - we could spider these to our autonomy updates BTW if youse want?

I see no practical reason why you can't get millions of Britains reading and contributing libcom. once you've got even a fraction of that you can start to really leverage it, in a way that no other political force in Britain has yet cottoned onto. Now is the time for it as well as print media continues to decline.

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In order to get there I'd suggest a few changes, altho these are just constructive, youse are doing a really good job.

The forums need to be made expressly clear that these are for 'libertarian community organising people', and that there is a 'site users forum' as well. That way you'd have two boards. One with the current thought/organise/intro thought and regional forums, and quite another with general and all the stuff that's usually in that alongside other 'user forum' catagories that your granny might want to post to. It's also necessary to deal with the antisocial crap in a far more judicious manner - open board rules should displayed as a sticky at the top of the index. These rules can be decided by votes on the forums if you like, and reveiewed at regular intervals. Once in place any infringement of the rules can be dealt with more effectively and people overstepping the mark can be banned or given restricted access. The present system of self-censorship and confused admin responses is not working as the idiots are still happily derailing good organising threads with in-jokes and sententious posturing.

I think it also needs to lose all the black and red stars and so on - it should be less clear that it's about communism, while at the same time making it more and more clear if you know what I mean - the everyday manifesto will help.

It should have regional news sections, altho that's not you guys' fault. We will send you the next edition of the Burgh Angel. In these sections you can push the class struggle but in a way that doesn't make it seem you're about ANARCHIST COMMUNISM OR DEATH!

Of course I jizzim my pants alongside everyone else who uses these forums at the mo, to see coverage of international strikes but to the average person covering such mega-news sets off the 'red-under-the-bed' sensor in a way that news of a huge demonstration in Kilmarnock to save a local hospital just doesn't. Libcom really could do both very effectively as youse are all very competant and sensible.

Yeah as far as I know we have no e-mail announcements list at all, and rarely post messages about the site elsewhere, this is definitely something we should consider. It's a little tricky since we don't have a publishing schedule for any of the site sections, but we could consider doing something monthly with highlights of what's been going on.

Off-line promotion is a good idea as well, we've had one or two ideas which haven't got anywhere yet.

I hardly ever do moderating on the forums unless something particularly pisses me off - pretty much use them as a consumer rather than a site admin. Splitting or re-organising the forums is a good idea I think.

tbh I don't think the majority of people know that red and black stars are about communism, the site design's changing fairly quickly at the moment, with my personal favourite being /news in terms of how it looks. Design stuff isn't my strong point though.

thanks!

a bit like this one http://libcom.org/news/article.php/ayr-protest-280206

I'm responsible for at least some of the international strikes coverage - I always do UK/European news in that order but without access to every local paper in the country it's very difficult to keep it both frequently updated and not looking too leftie wank fest. We've stuck pretty strictly to reporting actual struggles going on when it's international news (as opposed to the constant comment on big events I see on a lot of other left sites which often eclipses any news at all), and I think it's worth having, but it needs to be balanced with much, much more news from here.

Stuff like this: http://libcom.org/news/article.php?story=dinner-ladies-strike-hackney-160206

and this: http://libcom.org/news/article.php/pub-regulars-somerstown-150206

Is what I'd like loads of, but the only way it'll happen is if we have maybe a dozen people 'round the country sending stuff in that they find (and if it has to be two sentences then a cut and paste from the local paper then that's fine, we can always edit/augment where possible).

The dinner lady one I saw in my local paper, found another article elsewhere and reworked - took about 10-15 minutes. Given that there's hundreds of llocal papers across the country with things like this going on nearly every week, that's a massive source of news about existing small scale struggles that's ignored entirely by just about everyone. The quality of reporting is often so bad that even a bit of local knowledge/background could also make it far better reported as well.

There is sometimes a problem with a lack of feedback from libcom editors.

For example last year I typed up the old "Working Class Heroes" pamphlet on Eddy Horner and submited it, half knowing there was no way Jack would ever allow such an article to go on.

I never heard a sausage, cannot see the article anywhere, so assume it got pulled?