Dear All,

First and foremost THANK YOU for being a part of LifeinItaly community and THANK YOU for sharing your stories and contributing your posts!!!

Per Paolo's suggestion I'm helping LifeinItaly to grow. I'm working with Paolo on a Business Plan as well as a few initiatives like a monthly Newsletter.

Could you please help me to collect some information/feedback.

Here are two questions that I have:

1. How did LifeinItaly help you (anything from useful information that you found on the site to a good chat)
2. What LifeinItaly can do for you (provide specific information etc.)

Look forward to hearing from you.

Warm Regards, The Russian.

I like to help, hence LifeinItaly helps me to help.

__________________

1. since I can't go to Italy right now, being in an Italian community is realy nice, I get to chat (when people r online), and also know more about Italy, and the people are o.k. lol
2. I'm thinking may be organize trips to Italy I don't know,

1. The language lessons are of big help to me, and any travel advise is useful because I am planning a trip myself.

2. I don't visit the front page often, just these forums. Maybe I should, but more day to day life-in-Italy news/info would be helpful just to get to know Italy better.

I also think we as members need to remember that this is a forum about Italy and the culture, history, travel, etc, of Italian life and not a generic online social center like myfacebookspace, etc.

There also may be too many Topics in the forums, though I mostly just view "new Posts" so I guess it doesn't matter.

A couple things come to mind to add features to draw people in:

Some type of...group chat schedule with a fluent speaker...you know like every Tuesday at 9pm to 10pm EST The Russian will be online to help you with your learning/homework or something.

And contrary to my statement above, maybe some means by which to match up people to be "pen pals". I guess my thought here is that maybe there is someone trying to learn English willing to trade emails with me trying to learn Italian.

Just my thoughts at 1am in the morning after a long day! Now to post about my meeting with the Italian Consulate!

Agree with Mike_1, the language lessons are definitely a big help, also I like the idea of a monthly newsletter AND the possibility of finding pen pals.

I am interested in the news and do read the front page (as well as looking in on other italian news sites), as the possibility of moving there is becoming more probable.

My problem here is that I don't get to hear the language very often - language lessons on Skype??

I recently got a rude PM saying that this is about Life in Italy and not about me, so I can only semi agree with you on this.

Yes, the board is called Life in Italy and yes you should stick to the topics. However there is a chat a room, an introduction forum, and an off topic forum. I don't understand why it would be a problem to share a little about yourself in those three areas.

The reason I joined was so that I cold hopefully get help with learning Italian which I have, to learn more about Italy, and to meet other people who share a love for Italy. I don't feel like I can share my love of Italy with other people if I don't know anything about them. It would be like talking to a brick wall.

I think what you have to remember Melissa is this: when you choose to publish information on here, you are not choosing who you want to talk to, it is in fact information that is open to the whole of the internet community. I would ask myself if I wish for, sometimes very personal, information about myself to be so available for everyone to read?

Ya, I understand that. I don't post anything I wouldn't want some random person to know.

I don't think this person was trying to point out that fact. In the first message that was sent to me the person said I had too much times on my hands as if he would know my schedual and told me the board wasn't about me. It wasn't the first this person was rude to me, so I told him I wasn't going to stop being myself and that I would have to be kicked off the board is more than several people didn't like it. He claimed that more than several people didn't like it. I asked him to have all those people to PM me about it and I never recieved any other PM's about it. I did write to Paolo about and told me he doesn't mind when people talk about themselves and in the end it's his opinion that matters when it comes to issures like these.

In the second PM the person claimed that being a house wife isn't a job and that I should get off my lazy butt to meet people. The person told me he wasn't being rude but telling me how it was. Unless this person is illegally stalking me he wouldn't know what I do and don't do in my life and even if I'm lazy it's none of his buisness. I'm not married to the person or living off of the person's money.

I told this person if more than several other people really do feel the same way then maybe he everyone one else should just choose not to read my posts. I'm not hurting anyone if I choose to share some information about myself. Now if I were to give names of my family members or friends that would be something else.

I never got upset when a post of mine wasn't responded to and I keep within the subject, so I really didn't understand what the problem was. Especially to the point of being rude.

And for the record....I won't be posting any more threads like "I'm feeling down". I came to my own conclusion that it's better to put that kind of stuff in a blog since I know this isn't a support group. I also happen to put this person on my ignore list so hopefully I don't get anymore PM's from them. The person would have to post something on the board for everyone else to see. This is a postive thing about the internet. You can't really do that in real life.

The board is helping me to learn Italian. I'm learning at an extremely slow pase and I'm not even close to be fluent in it, but the message board is helping me. People writting in both English and Italian is helpful.

I also was able to talk with some people who also share a love for Italy.