Grandarog and MartinR, I agree with everything you've stated.
To be fair, it was much the same on the old Forum, with hundreds of members but only a dozen or so regular contributors. I'm not going to complain about the lack of participation and to be honest, Guess the Place keeps people interested. I'm sure I'm not alone in only contributing to subjects I'm interested in, in my case, the "Nelson's Navy" era. The old Forum had a lot of stuff around social and military history, fortifications and stuff, though there was some stuff about the Dark Ages and the period of the Roman occupation. Most of our nation's wars have historically been fought against our continental neighbours and Kent was on the front line in those wars, so it makes sense for Military and Naval history to feature strongly in the overall story of our County. The English Civil Wars are another era which interests me personally, but our County really only featured in the second of the three civil wars fought in the mid-1600s.
All contributions are welcome (as long as they're relevant to our County's history) and I particularly welcome people's personal recollections of life in the County. It is that kind of 'Living History' which I find the most fascinating, the minute details which get overlooked when academics write their history books. I look forward to reading more of them.
You may have noticed that I am not a grammar and spelling nazi. I will correct some if they're glaringly bad and I hate the so-called "text talk", but the beauty of reading someone's recollections is to read it in their own words. If spelling and grammar are spot on all the time, I think it can take some of the "personal" out of "personal recollections" and their words seem to lose something as a result. So, don't worry if your spelling and grammar are not inch-perfect, it's the message you're trying to get across which is important, not the layout of the piece.
What I do expect is that if you do publish a piece of research, you've made the effort to get the facts right. I've learned the hard way to use more than one source of reference, because particularly in detailing events which took place hundreds of years ago, the sources do not always agree. And please, do not copy other people's work and claim it as your own. As far as being too busy is concerned, again, don't worry about it. If you want to do the research, do it, but don't rush it, do it at your own pace. I find that the longer the story, the more time it takes. My story about HMS Royal William spanned well over a century and took weeks to research and write up. I've started work on a similarly long story which I'm also expecting to take weeks, possibly months, which I'll be doing in between other stories which take far less time to do. The average time for me to research and write up a Nelson's Navy ship history is about a week and a half and that's not a full-time commitment, that's based on spending an hour or so as and when I can, so the total contiguous time would add up to about ten hours on average. Make your articles as detailed as you want them to be; the whole point of a forum is for other people to fill in the gaps if there are any. So, do not be afraid to ask questions or comment or contribute to someone's post as long as what you put is constructive or adds to it in some way.