I discovered a French hikikomori forum.
I'm not sure whether the board is French-Canadian or French from France; if it's French-Canadian, I may sign up since the majority of people from Canada who speak French can also speak (at least some) English. People from France tend to be far less fluent in English than French-Canadians, so there'd be far too large of a communication barrier if I were to sign up -- I wouldn't want to have to rely on Google Translate.I've created an anonymous discussion board on the HikiCulture forums. By anonymous, I mean that non-registered members are able to post to the board. At this point in time, I consider the board to be "experimental" since it's not certain whether I'll keep the board up for very long or not; we'll just have to see how things go.
I will probably only view the board once or twice a week or so to clear spam out (if there's any). If there's too much spam, I'll simply delete the board since I don't want to create too much trouble for myself and staff; it would not be worth it to put so much effort in maintaining a spam board.Perhaps if we start getting some anonymous people posting on HikiCulture, they'll eventually decide to sign up to the site.For the record, I personally despise anonymous boards (as is shown in this blog-post) and avoid them like the plague, but some people seem to like them. Here's the link to the Anonymous Board on the HikiCulture forums; feel free to post.During the past couple days, I've been trying to find online discussion boards that deal with the topic of the hikikomori phenomenon and reclusiveness in general.
So far, the only discussion boards I know of (besides HikiCulture) that deal with the topic of reclusiveness are Hikikomori Forum, AnonIB hikikomori board (also known as /hikikomori/), and ALonelyLife. Hikikomori Forum is dead; the administrator there doesn't even bother to sign into the site more than once or twice a month or so (if that), and AnonIB just isn't my kind of discussion board (read this blog-post of mine to find out why). The only worthy alternative to HikiCulture that I know of at this point in time is ALonelyLife. If you know of any similar boards to HikiCulture, please leave a comment to the same blog-entry as this one on my WordPress blog; I allow comments on WordPress.After constantly having students signing up to the HikiCulture forums out of complete self-interest asking the members of my forum if they could answer questions for them about the hikikomori phenomenon, I felt that it was due time to revise the HikiCulture rules.
First of all, it poses a great danger to the members of my community when these people sign up to my community asking the members to get in touch with them by email, standard mail and the telephone. Some people have even asked if they could videotape the members of my forum. Even if these people who are signing up to ask questions don't have anything bad in mind, I still don't like it because these people are signing up to the HikiCulture forums out of complete self-interest -- they ask their questions, then bugger off. I initially posted a list of rules in the early days of HikiCulture, but lots of the them were quite silly, so I figured it would be best to delete the old list of rules and create new revised ones (most of the rules are similar to rules from the original list I had.) Anyway, here's the list:
HikiCulture has been mentioned on quite a few sites; I've seen quite a few mentions ever since the forum received lots of traffic in late October.
Here are three mentions out of the many I've already seen: http://twowheeledmadwoman.blogspot.com/2009/11/forum-for-reclusive-people.htmlHere's the latest batch of HikiCulture members I've given VIP status to:
GlassesI've made the user Mikan a HikiCulture moderator as I feel she will do a great job of moderating.
Mikan is a relatively new forum-user, but I can already tell that she'll make a great staff-member. Congrats Mikan.I will start off by saying that I am impressed by how active HikiCulture has become, and how much it has grown since creating it in late July of this year (2009). I initially wasn't sure if the forum would ever get more than twenty members (if that). Secondly, I want to say that the amount of new posts being contributed to the site (on most days) is quite impressive, to say the least.
There is one slight "problem" though - there are far too few threads being created.Some of the HikiCulture boards have less than ten threads in them. Lots of guests who visit this site probably think that the place is somewhat inactive, or doesn't have much to offer when they see that the place has so few threads to discuss things in, thus preventing them from registering.If every member could create a couple threads a week, or even a new thread a day (some people on the forums I'm on do this), HikiCulture would really have a lot more to offer and would not feel so banal. Some members have been fine when it comes to creating new threads, but many have created hardly any, or simply no threads at all -- I am not sure if there's a reason for this, but it's a shame.Don't be shy to create new threads; doing so will help make HikiCulture a better place with much more to offer.Here's a recluse/hikikomori survey I've created using PollDaddy:
Click here to take the survey.
