I would say I’m a type b member, and whilst it’s clear that there is a group of members on here who obviously know each other really well, and have become personal friends, I don’t think I’ve seen examples where I felt the “in” crowd were disrespecting the posts of newbies or of other occasional contributors.
Having said that, it’s clearly sensible to explore what might help make the forum better for all the different types of members and I think it’s a great example of what makes this forum work so well that this is being talked about openly.
My two cents on the topic are:
I think it would be worth looking into whether there’s a way of bringing the people who are chatting via What’s App back onto the forum.
For example, is there a way of building in a functionality similar to What’s App as part of the forum, so that if a thread was started and people wanted to take it into a group chat (only visible to those invited) they could.
On the main forum this would mean the final post on that thread was something like “this thread has gone private... click here if you would like to join”... however the key point would be that people would need to access this via the forum, which might prompt them to read the other threads and join in with some of the public, open to all, threads....
I also think the idea of having moderators drawn from both the type (a) and type (b) groups is worth exploring, as this would provide broader perspective, etc.
