25,000 messages on FOTR Forum

[John Ashworth]

This evening the 25,000th message was posted to the FOTR Forum.

We have 635 members who have posted 12,606 attachments on 7,618 different topics.

About 24% of our members have posted at least once to the forum, with just over 10% in double figures or more. A little over 3% are really active having posted hundreds or even thousands of messages.

Keep posting!

[Kevin Wilson-Smith]

And we never thought we would make this!

[Andreas Umnus]

And we never thought we would make this!

Why not?

Okay, here is not the activity on the forum like it is on "Drehscheibe-Online" in Germany, but the mood
in your forum is much better.

[John Ashworth]

Thanks, Andreas. We definitely try to maintain this as a friendly forum. It appears to be self-moderating, as we rarely have to use our powers as moderators and administrators to keep it friendly. We seem just to have a friendly bunch of members!

The number of posts per day has reduced a bit over the last year or so, but the number of members is increasing steadily. Since I made that post above just 6 weeks ago, it has increased by 28 to 663.

[Steve Appleton]

Thanks Andreas for your good comments.

Congratulations all round and a special thanks to John Ashworth and Kevin Wilson-Smith for punting forum content heavily in the early days to make it viable until it was "mature enough" to take on a life of its own. I think the decision to insist on forum members registering with their real names has helped in no small way to ensure the good attitude on this forum, its quality and authenticity, and the almost total lack of "spam" and "flame wars".

This forum was established to fulfill some of FOTR's objectives, viz:
"11.3 To create suitable opportunities for persons interested in the aforementioned objects to meet on a social or
other basis, to get to know each other and to stimulate interest by way of discussion, debates and research into
locomotives and other historic railway artifacts and operations.
11.4 To facilitate the exchange of ideas and act as a clearing house for ideas, priorities and problems in the
field of locomotives, railway artifacts and the operation of railways and anything directly or indirectly relevant
thereto."

I think this forum has achieved its intended purpose "cum laude".

I am proud of what we have achieved, pleased that we have been able to provide such a great platform for SA railway enthusiasts. I wish this forum well into the future. Onwards with the next 25 000 messages.

[Adelbert Stigling]

More than a third of those messages came from John, with some interesting stuff, thank you. Would like to see you get to the 50% mark.
Regards.

[John Ashworth]

Thanks, Adelbert. I'm sometimes embarrassed at how many posts I make, but a lot of them are made on behalf of other members who send me pictures and other stuff and ask me to post for them. The day Nathan learns to post pictures to the forum my posting rate will drop off sharply! I also post a lot of administrative stuff, and a lot of FOTR's internal stuff, both of which appear in parts of the forum which are not visible to ordinary members. These posts can run into hundreds each year.

However on my own behalf I like to post anything that comes my way on African railways, particularly Kenya and Sudan, plus a fair bit on UK railways too. Part of my "real" job involves surfing the web every day and looking at various news media, so I often turn up interesting rail-related snippets by chance, which I also post to our forum.