Not very useful information for you, but: I participate in three Swedish forums, two general gardening forums but with rose sections, and the Swedish Rose Society Forum. Sweden is a small country so I've met many participants in these forums in real life. I used to frequent the Peter Beales forum but not so much now. I check a German forum quite often, forumplanten.de although my German is not so good as it was. I feel at home there because the roses discussed are very often varieties I grow myself, especially the old roses and species roses. I still miss the old Usenet forum, rec.gardens.roses, the first forum I discovered in 1995 when the web was fairly new. I keep in touch regularly with one former member in Stockholm and we've met IRL about twice a year for the last 18 years. He's a very good source of unusual plants! I try to reciprocate but I don't have too many rarities. There are two absolutely essential sites for Swedish gardeners, Virtuella floran, with all native plants, their habit, spread, etc, and their names in English, German and all Scandinavian languages, very useful for me. The other is SKUD a plant database of every garden plant sold in Sweden, now or formerly. They update all taxonomic information regularly. A godsend when taxonomists are working so hard to change plant names. I also use some specialist databases, Hirsutum for rhododendrons and Clematis on the Web at the U of Hull, and HMF, of course.

A few years back, I opened an account with BlueHost.com and registered www.thekitchengardener.com I deluded myself into thinking that I could earn some ad revenue by posting gardening related content and showing ads through Google AdSense. I posted a series of long articles and had plans to host a discussion forum and even make my own movies. I maintained the site for almost a year, but never got enough hits to earn more than a few measly bucks from Google. It finally dawned on me one day that the basic problem is that the Web is up to its eyeballs in content. Youtube was just taking off at the time, piling massive amounts of video on top of all the other content already available. In order to stand out, you've got to do something really unique, or work like heck to develop your own mountain of content. All's well that ends well though. I registered another domain with BlueHost to start selling custom kitchen knife blocks (woodworking is my OTHER favorite hobby besides gardening!), which so far has been far more lucrative than selling ads on a gardening site. A few months ago I accidentally uploaded my knife block pages to thekitchengardener.com - woops! I haven't even bothered to fix it. :-) Anyway, I'm not trying to discourage you, just sharing my personal experience. If you're looking for a hosting company, I would have no problem recommending BlueHost. They are reasonably priced ($90/year if I remember correctly), offer a lot of extra tools to run scripts, monitor usage, etc. etc. Their tech support department has been helpful on the few times I've needed to contact them. The other nice thing about going with a hosting company is that you get your own email addresses - lots of them! I think I can create like 1,000 email accounts or something crazy like that. I only use 2. :-) For software, I use FrontPage. It took some time to get used to, but I quite like it now. I try to keep my websites simple anyway, so I only use a fraction of what FrontPage can do, but I don't like tedious tasks so using an editor is much more convenient for me than coding HTML by hand. FrontPage has recently been replaced by SharePoint Designer, which I have used once or twice. From what I can see it looks pretty similar to FrontPage. Also note that if you want all the flexibility of a hosted solution but don't want to pay a hosting company, you can host it yourself. Recipe: 1) Download a VMWare virtual appliance containing Apache web server. Also download VMWare Server to run it on. Both are free. 2) Configure your cable modem/DSL router to pass port 80 traffic to your virtual webserver. 3) Register a subdomain with a dynamic DNS provider. Most of them will work with dynamic IP addresses (DHCP), and are usually free. You can alternatively see if you can get a fixed IP address from your ISP (they will probably charge extra for this) and then point your domain to that address. This is all free, but there will be a pretty steep learning curve if you're not technical. -Diggity

I usually frequent the Spanish forum but have not had Internet access for a few weeks so I was horrified to see what has happened there. I too have contacted the admin. people to see what can be done to stop this troll. For anyone who would like to 'talk' gardening in Spanish I suggest you try www.infojardin.com (and just yesterday I was recommending gardenweb there for them to practise English!) Its a very friendly forum and for many members Spanish is second or third language so there are often errors and grammatical mistakes but the main thing is our common interest in growing things so language takes second place. It is a moderated forum but as there is mutual respect among the members it is rare for the moderators to have to act. Basically no-go topics are porn, religion and politics. If there are others here on this forum who could also contact the webmaster re. what is ocurring on the Spanish part I would be most grateful.

Tamara, For your consideration: 1.) Better forum moderation regarding the negative people ranting and making personal attacks. I find myself accessing the site and engaging on GW less often because of this, and I know of others that are doing the same. I am not talking about people attacking me - I am a big boy and can take care of myself - I am talking about people attacking people in general and then good folks feeling they have to defend themselves. Then other people feel obligated to defend the attacker or defend the OP. I get weary of reading an interesting thread only to come across a negative, insulting, or demeaning reply from a jerk. Then the thread goes off-topic and devolves into attack and defense and the whole continuity of the thread is destroyed. Now, I will be the first to state that the problem is not bad here on GW, especially compared to the rest of the web, but it is still annoying and can really ruin the experience. Having a thumbs-down button to hide but not remove unpopular replies in a thread after a certain number of negative votes would be a solution. It is not censorship if users can choose to show the hidden reply so they can read it if they so choose. This allows members to help GW by self-moderating the forums. A thumbs-up button is unnecessary and kind of silly because any post that is not hidden has already been deemed to be acceptable by the readers. IMO thumbs-up buttons are simply meaningless popularity contests. 2.) Continue general cleanup of the site. There are some goofy and outdated things hanging around that are not needed or are not intuitive for most people to use. There are some good features that are simply too hard to locate. 3.) I agree that the search engine could use some updating - not very functional in my experience. Thanks for the nice free gardening web site - I know a site of this age, size, and complexity can be a hard thing to manage and maintain. Lots of legacy code to muddle through in order to make site changes as well, I am sure. -Tom