As of today, the most common form in which astronomy communities exist is that of the forum. A 20+ years old concept, that doesn't scale well with massive amount of information, does a terrible job at organizing such information (in fact it barely tries), and presents a series of flaws, that will be explained below.
It's a Questions & Answers site focused on the quality of the content. The allowed subjects of discussion are Astrophotography and Astronomy.
Forums are great for the recreational discussion, but they are terribly dated, as a system, for today's Internet standards. Here's a series of flaws that AstroBin Questions fixes:
It's very difficult to engage in several conversations at the same time in the same post, because the only way to do it is by quoting somebody. Very soon this becomes a mess.
If you post a message asking whether you should use a Solar Filter when observing an eclipse, and I answer "No, don't worry," the only way to invalidate that answer is that other people reply and explain why that's wrong. This doesn't guarantee that somebody will not go on and lose an eye. This is an extreme example: what I'm trying to say is that some post replies might be objectively wrong, and this will worsen the quality of the community.
Whether I'm Mr. Nobody, that just took his first astrophotograph last night, or a semi-professional astrophotographer with 20 years experience, on forums this doesn't matter. My posts or post replies will look the same. This worsens the quality of the community.
If I write like a 7-year-old, nobody can fix it. If I suck at communicating and can't ask my question well, nobody can rephrase it. If I make a lot of typos, nobody can fix them. This is undesirable.
AstroBin Questions addresses all these issues with a community driven, highly interactive, wiki-capable website that you moderate, thanks to a system based on karma points.
Please join, and you can learn and teach about Astrophotography and Astronomy!
AstroBin Questions
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