Hi Paul,

With respect to attendance, in the information section it is stated that all combined spectators viewing from all areas around or near the fireworks site are estimated to be in excess of 500,000 people when the weather is warm. I have a feeling that this figure may have possessed more truth to it in the years prior to 2000, but I still think it may have been exaggerated to some extent. The average presently approximated per display is about 1/2 that figure, but it would certainly be nice if indeed about half a million people attended each performance! Regardless, it is clear that the largest crowd is always on Panzera nights since it is in fact the final display and the level of anticipation that goes along with it. Even though there was the threat of rain, I do strongly believe that even this year this night had the largest audience, possibly closer to 350,000 people as a personal approximation given the time it took for everyone to clear out and the general clusters of people on the streets before hand.

With regards to the competition, I personally think that it's unreasonable to even begin to consider terminating the competition. Not only would the attendance be lower if it were to be "extinguished", but a lot of money would simultaneously be lost (especially with respect to tourism) on La Ronde's part if this were to become a reality, simply due to the relative popularity of the event altogether. Similarly, if the fireworks vanished, so to would La Ronde's popularity, attraction, and therefore of course its attendance. The competition holds a lot of economic value to it, so eliminating it would only do more harm than good and at the same time destroy our city's and province's greatest attraction, not to mention losing the title of the "largest fireworks competition in the world".

But alas, with a new season approaching also brings with it other possibilities, and maybe next season we'll score more posts than that of this year; perhaps this time around was just a temporary drop off and we're very well moving into a recovery stage.

Thankfully we get a decent share of general and news topics to keep things afloat.

Edit-I do intend to keep the site up as long as possible.

That's the spirit.

Trav.

If you think about it, we've still been having a fairly decent amount of posts coming in this past season, even though it was a drop compared to previous years. Also, notice that we've had an increase in topics and posts in the fireworks photography sector, thanks to Rachel. Furthermore, we saw quite a bit of posts in both the news and general sections as well.

I'm fairly certain that because we were short one display this year, besides the influential aspects of the weather, it may have accounted for the number of topics and posts to some extent. Again, let's see what happens next year, and then we can further some conclusion, but I certainly wouldn't throw in the towel just yet.

Best of luck to a more prosperous upcoming year for this forum, as well as a good ending to this year.

Trav.

your forum is too hard too read, not user friendly enough...

i suggested a couple weeks ago that you use phpbb but i dont remember you even replied to my suggestion...
exemple of phpbb forum :
http://www.montreal-subaru-club.com/mscforum/

that's the main reason why i haven't come at all these past few months

Kamuro,

there are a couple of reasons I don't use phpBB. One is that forums using phpBB all look, well phpBB-ish! I agree that phpBB (and postnuke for that matter) forums have a lot of nice features, but they have some downsides too. They are frequently the target of hackers- everyone I know who runs a high-profile phpBB site has had it defaced at least once. phpBB is also more resource hungry than the miniBB software I'm using here - and when I first started this forum I needed something fairly lightweight. Even now, powweb has problems with some of its SQL servers that cause this forum to be much slower than it should be - but that's the SQL side, not the php side.

The main problem now to change to phpBB (or any other software for that matter) is the effort it would require to migrate all the posts and the user accounts. But I haven't ruled it out. The nice thing about miniBB is that it was very easy to integrate the look-and-feel into the rest of the site here through the CSS files I had already set up. If I didn't have a full time intense day job with a lot of travel, I'd consider it more closely - but I'm not fully convinced that people don't participate here because of the forum software itself. I could be wrong though!

Paul.

Here are my thoughts...

First thing is don't let the numbers decieve you. There are in fact thousands who click on the site. If there is a rise on the competition season it means they are interested. For the off season you can bet there are countless choreographers who are reading how previous companies competed so that they too can compete properly, use ideas, or study of what not to do.

This website is in fact a very valuable tool. I remember Paul saying that video could replace his reports and all he'd have to do is sit back and give his opinions. Though I agree I also disagree. Paul has taught many Pyro's the terminologies used in displays. He has to fight and find the words for what he sees in the sky. This is problematic as the world all describes things differently. Though video would give use nuances that Paul might have missed he is in fact writting most of them down which is easier to study (for our own displays) than watching hundreds of hours of video.

I started a website not so long ago called www.PyroPlanet.com I'm very proud to have half the visitors that Paul has on his website yet it's very young. I thought that most of my visitors were robots and spammers and so I put in blocks to keep my numbers 'real'. Well it still got me concerned... until I attend firework conventions. You'd be surprised how many people say "hey I love your website". (when they know it's you that is) Paul has experienced this at every competition he attends, and if he were to travel to USA he'd get it a million times more.

I've talked to fellow Pyro's and some say they are amazed at the amount of time it takes to even write in the forum. They personally don't have time to do so, and no time to read them. (I'm sure if it's about them they would.)

There is many good reports written in the forum.

So my ideas are as follows:

1) Provide a guide on competiting, generally and specifically in La Ronde. Have other writters contribute and make it a collaborative effort. Perhaps start a members only Wiki.

2) Design a Montreal-Fireworks logo and brand the name. Put it on a t-shirt and sell it to 'support the website'. You could have things like "I watched the best competition in the world and all I got was this t-shirt, which I had to pay for!"

3) Invite more writters for other competitions. This may sound easy but in fact no one feels confident to do so. You may find 2 or 3 and that may be enough to open it up to more types of competition.

4) Invite the other reporters on the forum to write their reports side-by-side to Pauls. Use the forum as a place to discuss the displays but keep the reports in the competition page.

5) Create a list of music used in every year of the competition. Perhaps go back and mark off the number of times it was used. Or how many trophies it got. We have enough people on here to make the project happen.

6) Sell seasonal t-shirts of the competition. These can be done digitally through Cafepress (does decent printing as I bought a shirt) It could be made a month in advance so we can all buy our t-shirts and wear them at the competitions. The deal could be if you see someone wearing one say hi to them. Or we could get companies to give us free stuff and anyone wearing the t-shirt would get a freebie (if seen)

7) Cross promote through other websites. Fred and I make sure PyroPlanet competition reports link back to here. There are many other sites.

8) Realize the site is bigger than you think.

9) You can sign up another Sponsor of the site who is not in Canada. That way there are no conflicts.

10) Comment on the above ideas! (I had to make it to 10)

Thanks,

Bill

Nice post, Bill, and great ideas as well. Speaking of videos, I believe Paul mentioned that he would attempt to create an additional section dedicated to any video footage taken by the members here. It would be convenient since it would be easy to retrieve any video at a latter time, while also giving the site an additional appealing look to it with a neat collection/list of videos.

Another idea I had in mind for years now, which brayno touched on to some extent just now, is to create a "guide" or help section to identify fireworks' names, using photos or short amount of video. I've actually already created a thread to ask about certain effects by posting an image, and then having someone identify it for me. The glossary helps up to a point, but I personally think that seeing the effect visually helps much more to enforce the explanations provided in the glossary itself.

Edit-Paul, I never got down to it since you changed the color scheme of the site last year, but if you go to the statistics section, the bars at the bottom representing the numbers for most popular topics, most active registered users, etc., are missing due to the grey background. Just wanted to point it out.

Trav.