The purpose of the New Zealand Beekeepers community is to bring New Zealand beekeepers together with a national online presence. Whatever your beekeeping background, you will be made welcome with an ethos that is geared towards inclusion, education and learning. Whether you are commercial, hobbyist or just interested in bees and beekeeping, it is important that you feel able to raise questions and make a contribution.
To that end, it is important for us all to be aware that some people may feel that a forum is complicated to use, some may feel that their style of beekeeping is seen as different or controversial or there may be others who find joining an established group a little daunting and I’d like to help those groups feel more able to participate.
What I’ve done is to introduce a topic prefix. You can see it in the topic Topic “safety net” scheme for new members as a little orange marker with the letters NZBF: This is available to everyone to use, when starting a new topic. If you are confident in your beekeeping skills and how to use a forum you probably won’t use it, but if you are unsure or a little daunted then I’d encourage you to give it a try.
What does it do?
First of all it’s your opportunity to participate, but in a way that offers a safety net – to help you learn the ropes and get to grips with things, but it will also:
Act as a marker to staff to keep a close eye on the responses made.
Alert more experienced beekeepers that you may require a selective response to your topic.
Indicate to ALL members that where opinions differ, the discussion is to be constructive and polite (this includes the originator of the topic).
The prefix feature is effective immediately but is on a trial. If its used and it works as intended, it will stay as a feature. So if you’ve joined but not yet posted, visit regularly as a guest but weren’t quite sure, or perhaps you’ve got that nagging newbie question you feel is too obvious to ask, give the topic prefix idea a try.