Online Rosacea Groups - An Editoral by Brady Barrows

There are now a number of Rosacea Online Groups. Yahoo Groups lists over a hundred and forty in October 2008 but most of these groups have less than five members. Below you can see how the number of groups has grown and I have not listed any group less than five members with the exception of my own Rosaceans Forum which I created in September 2008 and later that year dissolved due to some spammers who wreaked havoc with posting numerous spams too difficult and time consuming to remove.

There are however, three online support groups for rosacea that emerge as the top contenders for membership numbers and the three are:

The Rosacea Forum founded (RF) by Warren Stuart
The Yahoo Rosacea Support Group (RS) founded by David Pascoe
Rosacea Support Community (RSC) by David Pascoe

The Rosacea Forum is unique in that it has a feature that shows the total number of ACTIVE members vs the total number of members who by induction are non active which is a cool feature of the vBulletin proprietary software. This is the largest rosacea group with the most members. As of this October 4, 2008 here is the tally:

Rosacea Forum Members: 13,777
Active Members: 562

The active members are about 4%.

One year later on October 21, 2009:
Rosacea Forum Members: 15,675
Active Members: 465
The active members are about 3%.

If you note from the above figures the total membership grew by about 2000 members yet the active members reduced in one year by just less than a hundred from the previous year.

An article in 2008 appearing at the New York Times online edition says that the Yahoo Rosacea Support Group has 8000 members and that the total number of active members in 2008 are 2500 which is 31%. However, one year later in October 2009 the membership had dropped to 7498 which is about five hundred members less than the previous year. This report seems to be a bit exagerated since the posts don't reflect the number asociated with 2500 active members.

If you look at a comparison of the total number of posts using these three groups in 2008:

Rosacea Forum: 80,552 posts
Rosacea Support Group: 108,000 posts (includes RS & RSC)

With the results one year later in 2009:
Rosacea Forum: 103,657 posts
Yahoo Rosacea Support Group: 104,731 posts
Rosacea Support Community: 13,130 posts

Members in 2009
Rosacea Forum (RF): 15,675 members
Yahoo Rosacea Support (RS): 7498
Rosacea Support Community (RSC): 1528

The small percentage of active members (3%) in RF increased the posts in one year by 23,105 posts. RS and RSC combined only increased their posts by 9861 posts with supposedly '2500 active members.' Obvioulsy this simply isn't happening. The conclusion is that the active members in RS & RSC are probably very small indeed. Apparently membership is basically made up of non active and non rosacean members. Who knows how many of the members are spammers and trollers who join to see what opportunities there are for them to do their nasty evil deeds like posting spam, collecting email addresses, and putting nasty uploads into the database to launch viral junk throughout the internet using these forums as a base?

The Rosacea Forum began in 2004 while the Yahoo Rosacea Support Group began in November 1998. That means that in about four years the Rosacea Forum has 74% of the number of posts that the Rosacea Support Group and the Rosacea Support Community has received in 10 years combined as of October 2008.

In October 2009 the total posts for RF is 103,657 while the combined posts for RS and RSC totaled 117,861. It is of note that the members of RS and RSC are probably the same members, not to mention that many of the active members are members of all three groups. In one year RF has closed the gap to 87% of the posts of RS and RSC combined.

As you can see from the number of posts and the increase of members the Rosacea Forum will in time have more posts than the combined Rosacea Support Group and the Rosacea Support Community. The number of members of the Rosacea Forum exceeded the Rosacea Support Group at Yahoo sometime in 2007. David Pascoe then created the Rosacea Support Community which imitated the same php forum format as the Rosacea Forum created by Warren Stuart. The php forum has proved more popular than the yahoo groups format and all you have to do is see the difference in formats is see that the yahoo format doesn't have the ability to search through categories which is why the php boards are superior to find what topics you are interested in. The yahoo search feature is the only way to find what you are looking for and it proves to be a difficult search.

Why are there so few active members at the Rosacea Forum and according to the New York Times the Rosacea Support Group has 2500 active members? There is no way to prove the number of active members in a yahoo group. The writer of the article was only guessing and relied on inaccurate statisics that cannot be substantiated. Probably the number of active members is small in RS and RSC and it is difficult to determine how many members are spammers and trollers lurking these rosacea online groups for email addresses and to post spam. It is also difficult if not impossible to prevent spammers and trollers from entering these groups. Some safeguards are in place in these groups, however, spam still gets past the moderators who have to clean up the mess after their dirty work is done, and in some cases, is a massive job to clean up. The Rosacea Support Community remains an open source phpBB group that doesn't have a public notice on how many members are active. Moderators are the chief safeguards in all three forums to keep trollers and spammers at bay.

What rosacea support group would be the safest group to join that protects it members from allowing their email address to be given out to spammers, trollers and the like? What group does the most security to keep spammers and trollers out?

The RRDi Members forum is the safest place since the identity of the member, an address and phone number is required to join. This reduces the number of spammers and trollers to almost nil since they will not give out personal contact info.

Members in RRDi Forum Oct. 2009: 581
powered by Invision Power Board

In the past few years there has proved to be a decrease in the number of posts compared to previous years. This may be attributed to the popularity of You Tube, My Space, Facebook and that online boards in general have lost the internet appeal it once had. As you can see from the list of numerous online rosacea groups the number of groups keep growing yet the posts are becoming less while the active members are shrinking. Nevertheless, these two groups, the Rosacea Forum created by Warren Stuart and the Rosacea Support Group (and Community) created by David Pascoe have the most activity of any of the numerous rosacea online groups. However, the indications are that only a limited number of members of these groups, of which many are members in all three, are actually active members while the vast majority are inactive, and probably a signifcant number of these members are hiding the fact that they are trolls and spammers trying to cause problems for real members.

The other item of note is the trend of these groups to increase members yet activity is less in these groups as shown in comparing my report figures from October 2008 with October 2009.