Interest In A Coin From Each Country Forum

The key problem with your theory is that for most countries, there simply aren't enough people on the forum talking about their coins.

At the moment, the attitude of CCF has been that when there's enough discussion about Country X, then Country X gets it's own subforum (like Britain, Canada and Australia currently have). If you've got ideas for particular countries to have their own subforums, then you're welcome to suggest them.

If CCF took an "if you build it they will come" attitude and partitioned the darkside forum up into hundreds of tiny subforums in advance, most of them would be empty, and probably stay empty. I've seen forums like that, and it don't look pretty - miles and miles of scrolling through empty forums, looking for what you want. Not to mention the extra work the mods would have to do when people post coins in the wrong country.

At the moment, the Forum Search function works well enough to find all the threads on coinage of particular countries and collecting themes.

I do not think it makes sense to have a forum for each country. It may make sense to have a forum that is a collection of country or other type threads.

The advantage of country type forum would be that these type of posts would not get lost in a sea of "What is it" or other types of posts. In one forum you would have one thread on each country such as Uruguay or Turkey. You could have separate threads for periods of particular interest such as Meijii Japan or the Third Reich in Germany. You might also have threads on topics such as ships or fish. I can think of several threads that would already are in the World Coins Forum that would be good to have here. You might have threads on time periods such as World War I or the Napoleonic wars. Many of the threads which I have most enjoyed follow these parameters. There would only be one forum added and in the end a few hundred threads on that forum, one for each country. You wouldn't have a thread on a country until someone started a thread on that country. ie. Say they have a nice Mongolian coin they would like people to see. They could start a Mongolian thread and post "Here's my mongolian coin." Another person has five other Mongolian coins and posts them. Pretty soon you have an interesting thread. There is probably not enough interest to have a Mongolian forum. However there may be several people who have a Mongolian coin or too. If someone wants to get more technical within that thread that's all right too.

If someone started a thread in an area that was already covered it would be a relatively simple job to consolidate threads.

The main discipline would be that posts in each thread would have to be related to that country or topic. If one was interested in advice on grading a Japanese coin they could ask a question on the Japanese thread. The threads could get long but one can always go to the end of the thread.

I know that some members already have galleries and pictures posted on the internet. A type collecting forum would be an enhanced way of letting others enjoy your coins.

I don't doubt that you are right. It would be difficult to make such a forum work.

World coin type collectors are a very small market compared to US or domestic coins. That is why there are bargain bins of loose coins. World coin type collection demands an incredible array of knowledge on many fronts. Most dealers do not deal with world coins in more than the most cursory way. Limited interest with a long learning curve make World type collecting unprofitable for most dealers.

You are right. Many won't look up a thread once it is off the first page.

Since there are at least 200 countries a world type collecting forum could easily have a couple of hundred threads it is inevitable that some would not be active all the time. That would be a problem.

I thank you for your hard work and effort to make this site. I don't doubt that I underestimated the work that a forum such as this would entail.

Many of those who collect World coins collect types. There are those who collect one coin from every country, Krause types for every country, animals, a period of time etc. but they approach collecting from a different angle then those who collect every date, mintmark and error of a particular series. There is no site on the internet of which I am aware that has managed to create a forum that does what I proposed.

I suspect it is probably too early for me to even bring up such an idea. I am new and unknown in this community. I could not fully participate. I do not even have a proper Macro camera to take pictures of my own collection in order to fully contribute to such threads.

I floated this as a trial ballon because the threads I described are the types of threads that I most enjoy reading and I would find it useful to have a place I could find information that would help in collecting world types. I would not be surprised if there are others out there who would also find such a forum useful and entertaining. Even so much of what I envision is already being done on this site as well as any site I have seen.

It looks to me as if the trial balloon has spectacularly crashed and burned. Please do not take this as a criticism of this site. I appreciate your efforts.

I am amazed by some of the wonderful answers which come in the forums. There are links to some amazing websites. An answer on dating Thai coins was using a coin I was trying to date just the other day. If this information were organized in a way that one could continue to find and access that information this site would be the best foreign coin reference on the web.

As it stands this site is like a living encyclopedia and perhaps that is for the best.

As I read I suspect that there are some incredible collections out there and it would be interesting to see some of them.

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Since 50% of the posts in the World Coin category are about "what is this coin?"

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Let me look into that. It's possible. If we do this, what's left in the World coin forum may kind of function as a OFEC forum.

I also have an additional idea regarding this that I need to run by the staff. I'll be back.