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Expatriate Exodus
It was like heading down to your favourite local (pub) for a quick pint after work and finding they bricked in the windows, ripped out the carpet, tore out the oak bar, knocked the legs off all the chairs, turned off the heat and ale was boiling in a cauldron in the middle of the room stirred by a grinning gap-toothed webmaster whistling out of key.
Our web community, our online forum, our lifeline was ‘changed’ overnight and there we were… walking around looking at the makeover from hell - at a new Content Management System that completely downgraded the web community we called home. On top of that; a quarter million posts from the old forums were gone.
Our writing was gone… Our thoughts, our dreams, our fights, our passion, our ideas – our digital cuneiform as a community was torn away and buried from one day to the next with no consultation or discussion with us. We – the hit count, the customers and the backbone - who gave the numbers to the suits to sell advertising space to the media buyers.
Wrong… it was absolutely wrong.
To understand the uniqueness of an expatriate community, you have to understand what it is like to be a stranger in a strange land. Those of us who work overseas in foreign lands are often lonely individuals… whether sent over by a company, or displaced due to a partner/marriage – expatriates are generally isolated and inhibited by, not only cultural barriers, but often linguistic barriers as well.
Expatriates are a unique form of internet animal and our tribe is intense - as we face the trials of living life away from comforts unperceived by those who dwell in the lands of their birth.
Expatica’s forums were more than just another bulletin board on the internet to many of us. It was our contact, our otherworld where we could almost be at home again; enjoying the wit at the pub with mates, discussing familiar and new music, sharing our experiences raising children in far off lands, picking up other expats, meeting for a drinks after work, et al.
And it was taken away from us with impunity and corporate ignorance on an unfathomable scale. The collective voices of discontent were echoing in emptied forums as we looked at the most inept and completely misguided attempt at gentrification ever seen in an online community.
And so we decided to act. A phpBB community was merely a click away on a text link that said setup BB on the control panel of the sunny site housed in the United States on November 15, 2003. And our protest board, Ex-expatica was formed on the fly - in a subfolder of caribsailing.com. It did not cost a dime to set up.
We started off as a small group of bulletin board refugees who wanted to lobby to get our old board back, or at least a more functional version of the new board Expatica had moved too. But they ignored us. Petty staff members even came over and taunted us in our newfound home.
So, we were unsuccessful in swaying the marketing behemoth. However, we soon realized that we had built something entirely better.
Our anger was mollified as we started to realize that we really did have a home – one with perks we never even had before… the ability to add images, to change the colour and size of text to emphasise points of content more visually. We soon discovered MODs and began adding in more toys like advanced BBCode buttons which could create instant google, translation, dictionary or thesaurus links and we even put in a photo album so we could ‘see’ who we are sharing our online lives with.
We also polled our users for a new name, and one was chosen from among 15 nominations and ExpatForums.org was born! We also chose Expathos.com to form an expatriate portal later on at some point and augment the forum community we were building.
Some of the key debates we had as a young community involved freedom of speech, whether or not to use moderators, and how to guarantee an unbiased forum which would be open to members of all political hues, what kind of rules to have, etc. In the end it was decided that we would have certain areas which would have minimal restrictions, while others would be more carefully monitored.
Because our former abode at Expatica was completely unmonitored, we decided to preserve certain areas of this site as "Free-Speech" zones, where little or no moderation takes place. We became used to it at our old home and still enjoy free expression today.
Today, just over four months since the board was created, our community still makes many key decisions via polling and user suggestions, allowing membership input into the growth and direction of the website. Expatforums.org is maturing as a community and the dust has settled. We past over 75,000 posts in a little over two months and in February alone we had over a half a million page views. Members, professionals and expatriates – who live all over Europe, are coming together to help build Expathos.com which will be a release valve and a showcase for overseas writers… as well as functioning as a portal for the expatriate community in general.
Exodus… we have taken control of our own destiny.
Expat Forums is an non-profit website developed through the hard work of several individuals who, in true cooperation, came together to build a genuine community online. Our intention was to create a place where expats and expat wannabees could come together to share ideas and information, help one another to succeed, and build friendships along the way.
Although we are focused on the expatriate community, we are open to everyone. Anyone with an interest in living and working abroad, or simply a lust for travel and new places, will find a home here. We have a number of members who are currently living the dream, as well as many who are not currently working abroad, but intend to someday. There are also others who have since returned home, as well as travellers who are on the road and find this site useful for information on places to visit. Many of us travelled for a while before settling down as expatriates, and some still travel for business. Travel is a recurrent theme around here.
Dutchdemocrat
Proprietor
www.expatforums.org
www.expathos.com (contruction)
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