Discussions

It really is hard to believe, but the clock will soon strike midnight on the first year of this decade. On top of being a significant news year for Brandon and Western Manitoba it's been a year of marked growth for eBrandon, with approximately 50% higher traffic now than what it had been seeing at the start of the year. Of course you can't have that kind of a traffic jump without tens of thousands of new classified ads and of course countless interesting and at times engaging discussion threads. To give us a chance to look back on 2010, over the next six days I'll share links and commentary on five top threads that were started during this calendar year, beginning with threads #26-30 today and culminating with threads 1-5 on December 31.  
 
Compared to previous years, the formula used to determine the top threads has been refined for 2010. Whereas in the past we simply ranked the threads with the most views, it became obvious that some low participation threads were able to sneak up the list simply because of high search engine positioning. To come up with a more realistic reflection of what threads truly were tops for the year, rankings were based on a combination of their rating on how many times they were viewed as well as their rating based on how many different replies they received. The list you'll see is a completely objective, no-nonsense list. It would be convenient for me as site owner to pick the most politically correct or PR-friendly threads as possible, but that would totally defeat the purpose of releasing a list that tells us what the people of Western Manitoba as a collective found to be the top topics of the year.  
 
As you read, you might eventually come to the same conclusion that I have..... that this is an awfully difficult site to peg! You might see threads to do with current events in Brandon, threads to do with other Westman towns, informational threads, controversial threads, entertaining threads, threads that are interesting to guys, threads that are interesting to ladies, and all things in between. By the time it's all done, we'll have had a chance to reflect on the potpourri of threads that helped make up 2010.  
 
As this thread evolves, feel free to post your thoughts on the threads mentioned along with what you think the top 5 and eventually top 1 will be...