Looking at Korat's website scene I see many people now being at the same point I was about three years ago: all those ideas about a Korat expat community working together giving information and advice on one forum shattered by the problem a certain admin has with keeping a community working smoothly. We all know what happened to me: I got banned from the forum I enthusiastically invested a lot of work into, and the reasons for that banning I couldn't agree with. So I opened my own forum with my own concept. Maybe it doesn't have as many contributors in English as I might like but it keeps working smoothly and I can concentrate the administrative work on defeating spammers etc.: I can be liberal.
Now Korat sees the same thing happening over and over again: people who got something to say and having contributed enthusiastically getting banned from that other forum. Instead of signing up under a new nick many people tell themselves "A leopard cannot change its spots", and ask: "so why should I? Should I fight for the "space" I held before or just work on "new space", i. e. get my own forum or blog, where nobody tears me away from my friends due to his misunderstanding of our communication? It has nothing to do with competition, rather supplementation, when I move to a webspace I can control myself.
Now Korat has several forums, websites and also quite a few blogs. Enough? Or too many already? I think it can never happen that we do have enough or even too many unless they'd start to be identical. It's true that many forums tend to be identical to a large degree at the beginning, usually having split off from another forum. But after a while each of them is developing its unique style. So no reason not to open another.
Blog or forum? Actually there isn't much difference, they're both interactive. There are lots of free forums available on the web. Usually the hosts offering them let ads run on them to make money. But you can easily set up your own either at a paid or a free and adfree host. Today with some forum software like phpbb3 or smf2.0 you don't need MySQL databases anymore; you can use SQLite databases not costing extra. Best blog software I know is wordpress, but you need MySQL again. There are others like Flatpress that don't.
Please feel free to ask questions.
I wish success!
