How about this idea - pick an herb for the week and encourage general discussion, PLUS have everyone enter as much missing information into the general database, along with comments relevant to their personal experiences. I rather think keeping growing comments and such inside a forum takes away a bit from the database. Kind of a juggling act - but if the first entry for the herb of the week also includes a photo-link to the herb, it would be easy to go directly to the database entry, update appropriately, and still have a lively discussion of the particular herb within the forum.
I would suggest that our moderator be the person to pick the herb of the week, but if we went alphabetically, we could all contribute ideas of which herbs to go with, to give Patti some help. For example, A could be angelica, arnica, artemesia, asarum, asclepia, etc. B could be basil, borage, betony, berberis, etc. I don't think we'll run out of herbs in any hurry.
I believe the reason the other forums have used the fairly new format that Dave created for Flower-of-the-Week was to prevent older entries from popping back to the top of the list once they've moved on. If I am not mistaken, I *think* moderators may be able to close threads? That may well be a good solution to keep the most active herb of the week at the top. Or, could the herb of the week become a stickee, and then be UNstuck?
Yet another idea might be to just open each week to an alphabet letter and have open discussions about the myriad of herbs beginning with each letter. Each herb being its own thread. Lots of options. I do like the idea to explore specific herbs in some sort of fashion, both medicinal and culinary.
