Experiences with joining an Online Community

This week's task was: Join an online community and blog on your experience - so that's what I did.



As I called my blog Fee loves Travelling what could be more fitting than joining an online travel community? So I looked for travel-related online groups and communities which are rather lively and frequented, so that it would be likely to get responses on my post.
After a little looking around I settled for the Lonely Planet Forum which is called Thorn tree travel forum.
As I'm planning on visiting Mexico for a few days after finals I posted in the Mexico branch of the forum. It wasn't that easy to find a topic to write a post on, because the forum's rules state that you should try to not ask about something that has already been discussed. A post has to offer a certain added value to the forum.
Finally I decided on my topic and asked about the Cenotes in Mexico, beautiful sinkholes with fresh water in which you can swim, snorkel and dive:

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa?threadID=2257491

I posted my question on Thursday around 6pm.
I got 5 replies until Saturday, then the thread stayed quiet even with me trying to moderate it. Nevertheless, the thread served its purpose, because I got very helpful suggestions.
And the people replying on my post were very friendly and polite. There were no insults which you can often find in online communities. Therefore, all in all it was a very good and successful experience!