Great Western Coffee Shop

When Lee and I started this forum in February 2007, we would have been surprised to see it last for very long.   When social media such as Facebook took the lion's share of online chatting and blogging over,  we would not have been surpassed to see it fading away.  And when I coded the "like" button into the application, I expected to see a significant drop in the number of posts.  Yet we have just completed a month (July 2017 if anyone looks back at the history) with over 2,135 posts and 10,000 different real users (as opposed to automaton) in 28,559 sessions, each session averaging 6 pages long.   Some 96% of those visits (27264) are from the UK, with a further 222 being unidentified (and almost certainly from the UK?); then 151 from USA, next ranking being France, Germany and Spain.  Our new chat facility flags up origin country too, and I found myself chatting with a week established member with an African flag - he was away there for a few days, but still with us.

If you would like a comparative figure to set the above in context, it's the first time the number of posts has exceeded 2,000 in a calendar month since December 2014, and 5th highest number of posts in the last 5 years. You have to look back to the last decade to find monthly messages in excess of 2,400; our historic peak was 3626 (we had 3 months in 2008 in excess of 3,000) - looking back, we dropped from that because we didn't (and don't) look to provide a Rail UK forums ( http://www.railforums.co.uk ) or Wnxx ( https://www.wnxxforum.co.uk/index.php ) forum equivalent where - to this day - you'll find many of our early joiners.

So - why are we still here, why are the numbers doing well, and where do we go from here?

We are still here and with numbers doing so well, I would suggest ...

* Because we have a great team of admins and moderators ( a team of 10 active people ) who give of their time to help keep this a friendly, welcoming place. Every one does a fantastic job, and the team works together well too to ensure a consistency about how we handle the very few issues that arise.

* Because we have a fantastic membership.  Correspondences range from newcomer's requests for advice (and requests from us older hand for out-of-area stuff too) though wide ranges of opinion always politely expressed to technical answers where I have a big "thank you" to those who know 'a bit' in answering and providing background in a friendly and down to earth manor that us passengers can understand and appreciate

* Because there are still things to talk about. Forums and blogs about specific subjects tend to go away when the subject goes away, or when everything has been talked about and out.   That's not really happened here; on a personal note, I'm delighted at much that has progressed but there are still things to do and work through.  In 2007, we had 2 trains calling at Melksham on a Sunday.  Last Sunday, it was supposed to be 13, but 4 were cancelled (and my cancellation concern threshold is over 5 in any 4 week period). We have overcrowding issues where we had undercrowding in 2007 ... :D

Where do we go from here?

"If in ain't bust, don't fix it". But yet we need to keep watch with the times, examine opportunities and take them if we deem them appropriate.  And we need to watch the scalability of our algorithms and structure, and the longevity of our server and software.

You'll have seen "ask a fellow passenger" on you visits (and may have turned it OFF.).   You'll have seen Chris starting to split our "wider" board between UK and overseas in order to help categorise and navigate a huge resource (I have yet to see what he'll do with Eurostar posts  ;D ).  But I'm not going beyond what you've seen and speculating on further tunings and adjustments.  Remember, "if in ain't bust, don't fix it" is where we start - we ain't going to be busting anything, but we would love to be able to ... [to be filled in later] ... to be around in another n years time and just as strong.