Liberal Youth Killed My Internet Community

Many people think posting on internet forums is a deeply lame pastime that only pathetically lonely and sad people take part in. Well that may be true but I still enjoy it. Or in fact I have enjoyed posting on one forum in particular for five long years. In that time there have been complex debates, silly arguments, quizzes and laughs, anger and even tears. I have met many of the members in person and would even be willing to use the word friend to describe some of them.

Finding a good online community is a hard thing to do - most suffer from over trolling and many aren't well looked after enough to be effective long term. But I had found a reasonable, fun, sensible forum where the administrators were nice enough to make me a moderator so I could keep the spam down and enjoy a daily examination of politics with a wide range of reasonable people.

This is all surprising enough but what may surprise some people even more was that it was a Lib Dem forum. Original the forum of LDYS, in recent times they changed their name to Liberal Youth but the forums lived on with many members of the community lifers like me. We had a Lib Con coalition of agreement going on long before it was trendy and the conversations on that forum are the main reason I was very accepting of the coalition as I know how much common ground the two parties really have.

You will notice the lack of hyperlinks on the words Liberal Youth. I see very little point since their website has been down for over a week now. With it the forums are down. It's not the first time there has been a massive disruption to service - last year they were down for almost two months but that was a choice on the part of the people running the show at the time and the website was still running. This time apparently Liberal Youth are having problems with their servers and all their websites and email addresses are down as well. I have been told they have no ETA on when things will be back up.

Frankly this is no way to run a youth politics organisation. I do not know any ISP or hosting company who would cause a weeks disruption and provide no information on what had caused it and when it was going to be fixed. If I had to put up with that sort of service I would sack them off at a moments notice.
Equally if I was running Liberal Youth I would see the value of a vibrant and thriving political youth forum where interested and reasonable people took a regular interest. Sadly it seems every year we are fighting a tougher and tougher battle to keep the thing going with regular service disruptions and almost no support from the Liberal Youth exec themselves.

In my humble opinion Liberal Youth need to pull their finger out - in the meantime I've got an emergency back up going from last year. Feel free to come along and enjoy.