To Close or Not to Close?

Users Online in the Last 24 Hours
3 Staff, 11 Members, 178 Guests.
TermiteHunter, TeamStieney, BigA800, bshreves, robertocache, knitbead, HB31, omaj2, weh114, jbean2921, Cache Addict-Mel, keith713, gbmcache

The GCGC started June 2008.

December, 2009, Facebook hits a major milestone. With 350m registered users and 132m unique monthly users, it becomes the most popular social platform in the world.Jan 25, 2019

In 2020, Facebook continues to grow. Worldwide, over 2.45 BIllion people  log on to Facebook each month in 2020. ... Midway through 2020, the average reach for posts to followers on a Facebook page was down to 5.5% of their Page's followers.Sep 8, 2020

So, we were growing rapidly at the same time.
As for facebook, We have 370 followers with our last post in 2015.  I, as an individual, do not use Facebook. 
We don't even know who "has" the account. There is a staff member that has some control over posting (or something like that, don't really understand or remember)
Sure, we could start anew on Facebook but I don't see how that functionally works for the GCGC.

The contest came about quickly.
You should have recieved an email about it, actually 1 at the beginning of each weeks contest.
Check your profile / notifications / last one in the list if you are not getting them.

Well...I guess that I do view the forum as the GCGC...never thought about it that way though.

The GCGC started as an effort by the founders. There was never any formal organizational structure. No officers or paperwork defining the GCGC.
It was just a group of cachers that came together and started a website that was in the form of the original forum with the founders being the original "Lackey"s.
As individual members faded out others that had been given forum privilages stepped in to fill the voids and granted forum privilages to new Lackeys.
There were no "Lackey" meetings aside from a few at the beginning to get it started. Everything occured on the forum. We had few phones and handheld GPS's were the standard

When the original web admin wanted to "retire" I took it upon myself to takeover as the forum Admin. Without our webmaster I did not have the expertise to run the PHP forum (none of us did) and wanted to save the site and the recurring cost of the web hosting site since that was the primary expense. After about a month of preparation I moved the site to our current host at Proboards and maintained the Domain name. The new site was an improvement with the benefit of no cost.

With no formal documents of whatever they call them organizing the GCGC.
No meetings of officers or members.
No other means of communicating with members...
Yes, this is the GCGC.

Let me ramble on some more.

We do not have 401c status or formal officers.
We have the organizational structure they created. As one steps back another fills the void on their own and interested active members are brought in to maintain the GCGC.

I fail to see how social media sites can do the same things we did in the past and attempt to do now.
We have no meetings or recurring in person activities by staff or members.
I can't imagine how any contest can be managed on Facebook Instagram or Twitter. Promoted, mentioned and commented on, sure.

There are many other Geocaching Clubs around and I was invited to join a group of them elsewhere (for admins of the clubs)
We appear to be somewhat unique in that we are disorganized, uncontrolled and self run.
The others have those formal "documents of confederation" with membership fees for most or all voting members and officers with terms and tax free status.
They have a website introducing officers, activites they are involved in, GC based events and a forum much like ours.
That is when I added the landing page to our forum. I don't updated it with our contests (we have no other activities mostly due to lack of interest in the site in general) I do that in the forum with banners, shouts and boxes on the side.

I don't see an appetite for membership fees and have no interest in going through the documentational effort to formalize our structure in order to gain 401c status.
Our Theme and Relay contests appear to be a little out of the ordinary. Others have contests but they are not like ours and not nearly as frequent even with our lack of interest in most.

When the GCGC first opened. It opened with a Relay. Back then they were actual relays. Find the GCGC relay cache and move it for the next to find. That morphed into something similar to our current contests. The Theme contest promoted hides with a specified style or goal. Those were some great caches out of the norm. rvstauff has been a "Lackey" longer than I have and took on the mantle of GameMaster creating more and more contests. He has formulated the type and style of our contest postings making it easy to participate and understand the rules. We were founded on our GCGC only contests (not listed on GC) that became contests using listing sites that we use primarily today.

So again... YES, THIS FORUM IS THE GCGC



 

Well that feels like an insult, but maybe I'm just reading into it.  If I touched a nerve with my question I'm sorry.  C-ya