Amazon shows 145 customer reviews of Sam Sheridan's book. It would be good if someone could invite Mr. Sheridan to join this forum (a) and (b) help to build it up.
The challenge for anyone trying to create a viable community on the Internet is providing a vehicle for the varying needs and interests of potential participants.
A "customer" coming to this (or any) forum has needs which might be met in part through connections made through a forum.
However, some visitors are motivated by curiosity without much depth.
A strength of THIS forum is its disciplined management.
A weakness may be the lack of email notification of responses to posts. It is necessary to return to the forum to find out if anyone has responded to a post, and with the competition from the rest of the Internet for each person's time, it is entirely possible that a poster may never return to the forum to find out what happened.
Worse, the poster may return and find that no one has responded.
A potential remedy for this weakness is a system of notification when updates occur on the forum.
Rumor has it that the forum software allows notification of changes in topic groups, but that feature may be turned off.
Yes, a notification system - thats a good idea. Perhaps it could arranged.
I've also just ordered the Disaster Diaries. I'll let you know hat I think when I've read it!