Many of you know that I became the owner of www.backyardchickens.com about a year and a half ago. Since that time the new BYC Chicken Forum has grown like crazy. It has been a lot of fun taking what I learned from my very first forum (the one tied to this domain, the Nifty-Stuff Printer Forum) and using that information (along with the help of 13,000 great members and some excellent moderators) to really build up a great community.
Over the past 19 months there have been a lot of requests for different topics to be added to the BYC Forum. Subjects like gardening, sufficient living, etc. Unfortunately these topics are just too grand to be limited to only a few sections on a chicken site (no offense to BYC). For this reason I embarked on creating some new forums that would allow the community to explore these topics in greater detail. Hence the birth of:
http://www.theeasygarden.com/ – The first “sister site” to BYC. Already with almost 1,000 members discussing one of my favorite topics: Gardening!
http://www.backyardcows.com/ – What started out as an April Fool’s joke in 2007 turned out to be something the community was interested in developing. And people thought BackYardChickens was unique! 😉
http://www.sufficientself.com/ – Here is another topic that came up very frequently on BYC and also involves a lot of topics to which I am very interested in discussing: Sufficient Living! Everything from renewable energy and frugal living to financial aptitude and homeschooling.
The audiences of these 4 forums (the three above and http://www.backyardchickens.com/) overlap quite a bit. Many of the same members like to visit all of the forums to learn and share. Interestingly enough, these visitors are very uniquely different from the Nifty-Stuff Printer Forum. Who knows, maybe with time some of the techies in the printer forum will see the light of backyardchickens and at the same time, some of the sufficient living minded people will learn the beauty and joy of refilling printer cartridges! 😀