[RichardKen]

Hello members of Traders Laboratory,

I am a college student doing a sociology research report on online communities and forums. I have been a viewer of several trading related forums and have been visiting this forum frequently. I would like to receive a few feedbacks from the members of this forum. Upon comparing trading forums, I must say that I am highly impressed with Traders Laboratory. The forum attitude and environment is based on quality content. Many other forums severely lack this attitude. Well established forums have now gone down the drain due to this.

My questions are as follows:

1. What makes a forum special? How did Traders Laboratory establish such a high quality attitude? It seems that every single member contributing offers quality content only.

2. What makes a forum lose its touch? It seems that the majority of trading forums do not attract quality members due to its environment.

3. What made you join this forum or any other forum you currently participate in?

Thank you for spending the time to read this. All comments are welcome.

Richard Ken

[torero]

1. I think the founder actively participates, this makes it stand out from other forums, giving it an authority figure watching and filtering the materials. 2nd, the founder is one of us, another trader, sharing our trials and tribulations like the rest of us. I think if you go to elite trader, who and where is the founder? What do he do now? does he post at all anymore? No one knows who he is. We all can still interact with him with immediacy. Might be the key to keeping quality.
2. I think this answer was from first one as well.
3. I tend to join a few forums just to monitor and feel out the members and the threads that offer rich and useful materials. I found quite a large pool of high quality members here, some know more some know less, but politeness and friendliness was very high, so I stuck around. I may have something to offer but I look to others for things I don't know about.

[TinGull]

Welcome!

1: This forum is special because the members don't have any tolerance for negativity. Soultrader is an active member and absolutely keeps quality control one of his main objectives. He also gets moderators in action who understand the objectives in keeping a certain decorum in this forum.

2: A forum loses its "touch" because the forum administrators don't really care about the quality of material posted. Soul and the mods do a great job at making sure the threads are providing quality information and in a positive manner. We're all here for each other, and that's what a forum is all about. People here recognize the fact that a community is about helping one another. Without that help, there is no community.

3: I joined this forum initially because of information regarding Market Profile. I kept in touch and began moderating this forum because the community feeling is unlike any other forum I've ever frequented...especially trading forums. Many times if you bring an idea to the table that people don't know about they immediately shoot it down. Not here. People are more than willing to learn and are really open to thinking outside the box. It's a wonderful place.

[MrPaul]

Originally Posted by RichardKen »

Hello members of Traders Laboratory,

I am a college student doing a sociology research report on online communities and forums. I have been a viewer of several trading related forums and have been visiting this forum frequently. I would like to receive a few feedbacks from the members of this forum. Upon comparing trading forums, I must say that I am highly impressed with Traders Laboratory. The forum attitude and environment is based on quality content. Many other forums severely lack this attitude. Well established forums have now gone down the drain due to this.

My questions are as follows:

1. What makes a forum special? How did Traders Laboratory establish such a high quality attitude? It seems that every single member contributing offers quality content only.

2. What makes a forum lose its touch? It seems that the majority of trading forums do not attract quality members due to its environment.

3. What made you join this forum or any other forum you currently participate in?

Thank you for spending the time to read this. All comments are welcome.

Richard Ken

Richard,

Firstly welcome to Traders Laboratory!

I'll have to concur with Torero and Tingull on their points and I'll add a couple of my own...

Originally Posted by RichardKen »

1. What makes a forum special? How did Traders Laboratory establish such a high quality attitude? It seems that every single member contributing offers quality content only.

I agree, this forum is one of a kind! What makes it so special is the dedication to quality by it's founder, that same dedication shared by it's moderators, and the appeciation and contribution of quality content from it's users. It's "like attracts like" in action

Originally Posted by RichardKen »

2. What makes a forum lose its touch? It seems that the majority of trading forums do not attract quality members due to its environment.

Simply the opposite of what is actively happening at Traders Laboratory in my opinion. You have Founders with big ego's that rarely participate, lack of quality moderation and users that want to act out at new users and "noobs" who just want a simple question or two answered.

You won't ever see a member of TL! put down another member for asking a "dumb" question or being a little redundant. Everyone is here to help, not act like they are too important.

Eventually a forum structure erodes once the founder skips out, moderation of spamming and disrespectful posting is not enforced, and the user base shrinks to a few whom think they are super-traders.

Originally Posted by RichardKen »

3. What made you join this forum or any other forum you currently participate in?

I joined this forum initially for it's content and will stay to help further the cause.

[Soultrader]

Hello Richard,

Sounds like an interesting research paper you are working on there. I have done extensive research on online communities and forum prior to making this one. Probably the biggest misconception forum owners have is that once its built...its a matter of time before it takes off. This is not true. The majority of forums fail. Similar to the 95% traders failure rate. You can simply check the amount of forums that exist by just googling it. On the other hand I do think forums dedicated to trading is rare. Majority of them are started off with forum owners with the intention of monetizing of them. This is the absolutely wrong approach and I am pretty sure the majority of them are not traders as well.

In the admin world.. they say the first 1000 members is the biggest challenge. However, I did not have that problem with Traders Laboratory at all. We are well on our way to 2,000 within approx 6 months. Now in the information world, content is king. There is alot of websites dedicated to trading but only a few of which I found to be credible. Alot of sites were misleading hence the biggest reason why I decided to launch Traders Laboratory. I wanted to focus on the highest quality educational website for traders. I also get the great opportunity to learn from many other traders here as well.

I think a majority of forums loses its touch simply because the admin or owner loses passion or the genre he started was simply not his specialty. I do love running this website and feel very fortunate to attract a group of friendly and great members from all trading level. We have an excellent group of dedicated moderators as well help keeping the site top notch.

Feel free to email me Richard if you have anymore questions. I will be glad to help you on your paper.

James

[walterw]

Richard: I have been on this forum since november, and let me tell you that the big difference here is that the people who is sharing their aproaches do make a living with it... on other sites some people come with very fantastic aproaches they actually dont trade and they pretend to do a living asking you money for their coaching... here we have real traders with real happy and hard days, but nobody is seeking money compensation for their wisdom... its more trying to get a better edge on real trading thru collaboration... on the other side our profession is one of isolation, more if you are on a country were you are an extraterrestrial criature making american dollars... so here we find some fellow traders where we can share our experiences, thanks again to Soul for his hard work... Richard if you consider to do some trading on your life, here you almooooost got the Holy Grail... jejejejej cheers Walter.

[RichardKen]

Thank you all for your great responses. It has been quite fascinating jumping around from forum to forum asking questions and taking notes. It seems like each forum has their own distinct attitude and environment. Some more friendly than others. The participation by the founder truely does make a difference in many forums I have researched. I do admire the respect members have amongst one another in this forum. I ran across a Forex forum today where a member was complaining at a moderator because the mod had switched his signature to something like "I am a complete noob". Very childish and surprised to see the owner allow such behavior by a moderator. Soultrader, I will be interested in sending you an email. I have a couple questions that I am interested in asking forum owners.

Thank you all for your time.

Regards,

Richard Ken