• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

New BAR Admins - SuperReaderGirl & Nifty - Saying Hello

SuperReaderGirl

SuperReaderGirl

Forum Owner
Staff member
Hello all! We are Rob & Emily Ludlow and we're the new admins of Book & Reader.

BAR is the perfect melding of our interests. :) Rob has over 10 years of experience owning, managing - and participating - in forums and loves to do so. I’ve been an avid (sometimes ravenous) reader since early childhood. I was also a book blogger for a number of years at www.SuperReaderGirl.com, and have attended Book Expo and BookBloggerCon in New York twice. I love to know the breaking news in the book world, interacting with authors, publishers, and readers alike.

On a personal note, we’ve been together almost 16 years and married for 13.5 of them. We have two daughters (10 & 8) and live in the SF Bay Area where we were both born and raised.

We look forward to helping out with BAR. We hope you’ll feel comfortable sharing your thoughts and suggestions with us on what you like best and what you might like to see changed. We’ll most likely not be able to implement ALL your suggestions, but we’d love to hear them. This forum has a wonderful community and we’re so happy to be a part of it!

:)


upload_2014-2-26_8-47-29-png.11202
 
Hey Everyone!

I wanted to also introduce myself and add to Emily’s comments above. :)

As Em mentioned we’re super excited about joining BAR! The opportunity to become a part of BookAndReader was just perfect since it’s a combo of two things both Em & I are passionate about!

I’ve been running websites for about 16 years (wow, has it really been that long… where does the time go!?!?) and started my first forum back in 2004. I now own a handful of community forums in niches where I have had a very strong interest. Most of my forums are the size of BAR, but I do have one community that is pretty ginormous: www.BackYardChickens.com. Owning BYC has been a really interesting experience and is from where I first got invited to become an author. I co-authored the book “Raising Chickens For Dummies” back in 2009. That book did so well that Wiley invited me to co-author three more related titles: http://www.amazon.com/Rob-Ludlow/e/B002SIQ63W I never thought I’d be a published author, but it’s pretty fun to go into book stores and libraries and have my daughters see a book with their daddy’s name on the cover and their names in the dedication. :D

So, hopefully this gives you an idea of how well BAR matches both of our backgrounds and interests in very exciting ways! We’re humbled by the opportunity to help out and know we’ve got a bit of a learning-curve ahead of us. We thank you in advance for your patience with us as we get our footing and become more familiar with BAR.

Oh, and to reiterate what Em said above: We’ve VERY open to ideas and suggestions on reviving & improving BAR. We’d especially love to get your thoughts and ideas on how to re-engage existing members (active and less-active) and also bring in new members.

With that said, we're not planning to come in and make a ton of changes. I'm glad to see that BAR is already on Xenforo software, which is the same software that I converted my smaller sites to a few months ago... and that was a LOT of work / change with which I'm glad to be done!

Below are the other communities I run. Feel free to visit them to get an idea of my background. You’ll hopefully get a sense that all of them have a very friendly and inviting tone:

www.BackYardChickens.com
www.BackYardHerds.com
www.TheEasyGarden.com
www.SufficientSelf.com
www.PrinterKnowledge.com
www.RemodelForums.com

Again, it's good to be here & we look forward to chatting with y'all!
 
Thank you, SparkChaser, Bob, & regdog! We're happy to be here! Sorry for the delay in replying - we were sleeping! :D
 
Very cool!!! Do you focus mostly on Inkjet or Laser or both? My printer forum was my first forum ever. In college I used to refill ink cartridges and sell them on ebay.
 
Laser, LED, and wax printers, ranging from small monochrome office machines to full on production machines which are nearly professional printing presses. :eek: I provide support on both the hardware and the software of printers.

I don't do anything ink jet at all, I'm afraid.
 
So now that the two of you are a week on, what do you like/dislike about the site?
As owners what do you think should change under your administration?
 
Great question!

I'll let SuperReaderGirl reply about the things we like / don't like, but I just wanted to comment quickly on "change": We didn't take on BAR with any thought to change things. Fortunately the big conversion over a year ago from the previous software to the new platform took care of the vast majority of changes that would have been necessary.

We have received a handful of suggestions via PM and from the other team members about things they feel should be changed, but we're being VERY deliberate and conservative on our reviews of potential changes. If we do end up making any changes, they will be after much discussion and review. If you ask any of the other members or moderators on my other sites you'll often hear them say how much I research, review, discuss, and re-review the pros and cons of various options.

Again, to reiterate, we don't have any big changes planned, but we're always very open to any ideas and suggestions that will make BAR better!
 
Roxbrough said:
So now that the two of you are a week on, what do you like/dislike about the site?
As owners what do you think should change under your administration?
Click to expand...

Nifty said:
Great question!

I'll let SuperReaderGirl reply about the things we like / don't like........we don't have any big changes planned, but we're always very open to any ideas and suggestions that will make BAR better!
Click to expand...

I love interacting with other readers who are passionate about books! I like that I can easily view "recent activity" to see what's new here. I LOVE how welcoming members are to new members in the "Introductions" area. :) I like that there are so many varied interests in book genres. I love that there is an outlet for authors to promote their books. I love the creativity going on in the Writers' Room. I also love hanging out in the "General Chat" section.

I'd like more smilies (we'll be adding some soon). We'll also be starting a newsletter to update members on what's new (new threads, book selections for Book of the Month, polls, etc.) - this might help with the "quiet" aspect, bringing back members who may have joined then forgotten about the forum.

We really don't want to "change" a lot here, just want to help the forum be more robust and successful.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top