Online Rosacea Groups - An Editorial by Brady Barrows

There are now a number of Rosacea Online Groups. I have been following these groups since 1999 and in the past few years or so things have changed. Apparently most rosaceans are now using the social network sites, YouTube, etc., and have cooled off from posting in these online rosacea group sites since the number of posts has been reduced and seems to be the general trend. I have a couple of yahoo groups myself but very little activity in the past few years.

Yahoo Groups lists over a hundred and forty in October 2008 but most of these groups have less than five members. Below you can see how the number of groups has grown and I have not listed any group less than five members with the exception of my own Rosaceans Forum (a php open source forum) which I created in September 2008 and later that year dissolved due to some spammers who wreaked havoc with posting numerous spams too difficult and time consuming to remove.

There are however, three online support groups for rosacea that emerge as the top contenders for membership numbers and the three are:

The Rosacea Forum founded (RF) by Warren Stuart
The Yahoo Rosacea Support Group (RS) founded by David Pascoe
Rosacea Support Community (RSC) by David Pascoe.

The Rosacea Forum is unique in that it has a feature that shows the total number of ACTIVE members vs the total number of members who by induction are non active which is a cool feature of the vBulletin proprietary software. This is the largest rosacea group with the most members. I have been keeping some statistics following these three major rosacea groups beginning in October 2008. I have also added the RRDi Member Forum into these statistics for comparison since this group is steadily growing.

If you are interested in these statistics click here.

For more details on this subject click here.