It is my impression that the virtual Show and Tell board on Turkotek is the place that seems most hospitable to new posters. At least that's where many new posters seem first to appear.

And, although in its early days, the Show and Tell board sometimes drew few posts, more recently it seems to have become quite robust indeed.

So my sense is that it is working well, but in an evaluative salon like this one, it may be especially important to ask questions about things that you think you already know with some confidence.

So we would be interested in thoughts from others about how you feel the Show and Tell board is working.

Thanks,

R. John Howe

Do you want us to show you or tell you?

Curiouser,

-Jerry-

Well, if you had a demonstration you could trot out, that would be interesting but I'd settle for being "told" what folks feel about the operation of the "show and tell" board.

Regards,

R. John Howe

Only slightly truculent note to myself: It's clear that Steve isn't paid enough for his administrative work here, but salon hosts also often have to exert a fair amount of uncompensated effort to retain even a modicum of focus in these discussions. Tendencies toward the tangential abound.

Still, a post is a post, and that's what we're asking for.

Yes, the project is working well.

One problem is that show and tell items that demand research on the part of the public are taken down at the same speed as those items which pose less serious intellectual challenge. The kalamkar that I posted manufactured by 'Meiri Ispahan Persia' might be an example of this. It was on line almost before anyone could drag throught their memories or bookshelves with an answer. I believe that the group of eight might find a solution to this.

Sincerely

Richard Farber

To all concerned well done.

Glenn

My current practice on Show and Tell is to take down a thread that has had no posts for more than a week (sometimes I don't get to it until 10 days, but never less than 7). My observation on other discussion boards is that any topic that has had nothing added to it for the past 5 days or more is unlikely to generate further activity.

Could we archive Show and Tell? We could, but there are two difficulties in doing so:
1. It would occupy a lot of server space, creating a budget problem for us that we are glad to not have.
2. It would increase the workload on your dedicated editor. The reason is that many of the images on Show and Tell are not in our server, but out on the web somewhere, and can be removed any time the person who put them up wants to clean up his server and make more space. That's no problem for boards that will vanish within a month anyway. On Salon boards, I almost always copy images into our server so that they will be in the archives.

How about selecting particularly relevant and interesting Show and Tell topics for archives? That's easy to do, but explaining to some people why their thread isn't one that got selected for this is not something I want to get into.

Anyone who wants to save a thread on his own computer can do so very easily, and I'll be glad to e-mail instructions to anyone who needs them.

Regards,

Steve Price

Thank you all for your useful thoughts here.

Message to those who watch but haven't yet posted: See it hardly hurts at all to do so? Let us hear from you. This little "window" of evaluative opportunity is getting towards its end.

Thought: I too, have regretted losing valuable posts made on our Show and Tell board.

And sometimes a given post doesn't seem "large" enough, somehow, to sustain two weeks of conversation, but I'm still tempted to suggest it as a salon, simply because I think that it deserves archiving.

Not sure what's best here.

I think we have decided that the number of posts generated is not always the best indicater of a salon's value.

Regards,

R. John Howe