Gordon Barlow

The Caribbean is a wonderfully varied place - every island has its own unique charm - so it's puzzling that the region plays such a small part in BE's forums. Why is that?

A few years ago (2021) I began "The old-codgers' thread" here. Seems attractive enough, you'd think; but it received a mere 54 posts in three months, then died. Plop. 28 of those 54 were mine (!), and there were exactly two other posters! Why so few, on such a broad topic? Why the reticence? And, except for 121 posts about the Coronavirus in 2020/21, the 54 posts were the highest total in the Caribbean forum since 2009!

Every once in a while somebody deplores the gradual decline of the BE site numbers, and sadly the Rules do discourage enquiries from the floor as to why the decline exists and how it might be reversed. Nevertheless, it's a ridiculous situation. Jamaica, Trinidad, Curacao, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico... those have always been interesting places for expat residents and visitors. I have to ask again: why the reticence?

christmasoompa

Gordon, it's been repeatedly explained to you that this is not the case. There is no site rule stopping you from asking about why the forum activity has declined over the years. You can check them carefully yourself here - https://britishexpats.com/forum/site...-rules-947443/

But as previously discussed, forums just aren't popular as they once were. Most people just use social media i.e. a Facebook group instead. Discussion groups are going the same way as CD's and paper books (the latter much to my dismay, I may well be the last person standing in our local library). The countries you've mentioned are likely to have very few British expats in them, and even less that are still using online discussion forums.

If your threads are interesting to others, then they will still comment on them - you can see from the forums that some threads do still get quite a lot of responses. Nowhere near what it was 10 years ago of course, but still enough to just about keep things ticking along for now.

Gordon Barlow

It would be interesting to be told how many Caribbean-region islands have been visited by Caribbean-region expat residents. We who do live here don't usually miss the opportunity to check out other islands, and we quickly discover how different they are. Even islands in the same territory are different. When we lived in the Bahamas we spent weekends on other Bahamian islands, and many of our friends did too. I've never been to Tobago, but I know that it's nothing like Trinidad because friends have told me. Turks & Caicos islands have their stark differences, as do the three Cayman islands. Actually, I only visited Trinidad by accident - the plane was headed for Barbados but an engine blew up or something, and we were diverted to where there was a spare engine. Which there wasn't. Sigh... it's a long story!