Looking forward for the Coffee Shop into 2025

And so here we are - the final day of 2024.

The major updates of recent days have gone better than I dared hope - for sure some unplanned consequences but certainly now no need to roll back to where we were last Friday night. "Likes" are a kludge, email notification needs looking at and some of the less used support pages aren't working as they should. However, in my view it is now "fit for purpose" to carry on in the new form into 2025. As I write, 82 members have been logged in during the past 24 hours and as far as I can tell the interaction patterns - posts, votes in polls, etc, remain similar to what I would expect.

"What was all the fuss about?". Good question - but what I have achieved in updating the forum such that it can carry on for a further 5 to 10 years whilst retaining data has defeated a number of other / larger / wider fora. And the "trick" of this is that you - the members - may be asking about the fuss and saying "so what"; that's correct and a sign of success - just as a regular railway passenger really should not be concerned about the operational issues of his/her train- whether it's due for a C5 service is of supreme unimportance, but that service MUST be done and if it isn't we get cancellations with "too many trains due for maintenance". So I'm sitting here rather pleased with how it has gone.

The changes are bedding in. The forum in now accessible at https://www.firstgreatwestern.info rather than http://www.firstgreatwestern.info (which, however, redirects to it). Just one letter "s" and it makes sod all difference to regular members. To newcomers and occasional visitors, it's huge. It takes reduces the big sign that all you regulars have learned to bypass over recent years that says "this site may not be safe" and helps encourage newcomers to join in - our membership has got notably more mature over the years as very few have dared pass that sign (and, yes, things have moved on through social media too, so it is not JUST and https issue).

The "BEWARE" sign has not only frightened off newcomers, but has also seeded doubts about the safety of our site with search engines such as Google. And so there have been very few recommendations to people who don't know us to come our way. Google has been crawling - updating at a typical rate of 3000 to 4000 pages a day. That sounds like a lot - but now that the warning sign is taken down, it has upped the crawl rate and is busy exploring our archive. Rather than a few thousand pages each day, in the last 24 hours it read 211,640 pages - a 50 fold increase in accesses to the forum. And Google is not alone in that increased activity. As a result, the forum has been a little slower in responding than is usual; I believe due to traffic levels and not to the new structure.

Being indexed by search engines is a marketing investment, and as that investment is costing no more than a slight laggy-ness in performance, I am not throttling back the rate at which we accept requests. Rather continuing to answer at what is still an excellent (though not lightning fast) rate, and asking members to accept the sight performance drop for a while. I am monitoring the performance of both the receptionist server and the worker behind it, and will adjust in due course and as I feel appropriate.

My fellow admins and moderators have expressed a personal concern that I should ease up a bit on looking at some of the stuff I have been doing. I read that as a concern for my mental state, my marriage, and also my ability to annoy the bahjeebers off members with changes and posts. I do intend - having flooded with activity over the past few days - to ease up. My high posting rate has partly been to test out the code and to try and spot subtle clues to issues that arise visibly or in the background logs, and partly for my use to put into words what's seen by the user - explaining because it helps me check the sanity of what I have been doing. Lisa and I are an odd couple in many ways, each of us accepting of the other having a splurge of research in our own worlds. But, yes, we are probably going to pop round to Mike S's in Bowerhill this evening to help see out the old, even if we wend our way home and are asleep before the new arrives. And come 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 7th and 9th January we have other things in our diaries which are not Coffee Shop related.

Thank you for all your contributions to the Coffee Shop in 2024; I look forward to reading more, and continuing to enjoy member's company through 2025 and beyond, on a forum that I fully expect to outlast at least a further few Secretaries of State for Transport.

Edit - just a couple of typo corrections and clarifiactions.