That is a wonderful phrase. I think English would do well to adopt a sentiment like that.
I can only imagine what this site was like in it’s heyday (I’ve only been here for a couple of years now), but looking at historical posts I can certainly imagine the rich contributions that the regular members made. While I imagine that a few members have moved on to Facebook-groups or other social-media platforms, I suspect that most of those original posters have dropped off the posting radar due to a lack of time to post (or worse still, time to photograph!).
The big shame is that their illustrious mantle isn’t being taken up by a new generation, and that is probably due to the simple fact that searching the web for sites like this one are not as easy as it used to be. (And that’s assuming that a new generation even knows to search for such a forum. … and I suppose knows what a forum is for that matter…) This forum certainly doesn’t employ the fancy search-engine optimization techniques used by the big players.
Oh, and thanks for the thumbs up on the revamping of the site. I know it was a bit of a change out of the blue, but I suspected that the old look would probably seem dated, and would be a potential turn-off for newcomers. Moreover, since the site needed to be migrated to a new server anyway, changing the look was really not much extra work.
To hopefully answer some of the other queries:
‘it is weird that the moderators are the same’
- Well their accounts still exist, and I tried not to change the moderating assignments (except for those who asked to be removed), but really, none of the mods have been active in over a year, some longer. So there hasn’t been much moderation, except when I happen to notice a spam post coming in. And really, you guys don’t really need much moderation, you generally all get along pretty well. ;-P
‘I notice that the administrators have changed’
- Yup. I took over from Andy when he posted that he was planning on shutting down the server because his health was preventing him from keeping it running.
‘Most online ever was only yesterday’
- Sadly I suspect that a lot of those daily visits are bots crawling the site, rather than real users, because the number is roughly the same from day to day, which would be unusual for real people. - In fact, in the last year the number of fake-user signups have increased really dramatically (187 pending ‘new users’ today alone as of writing this!). I have actually had to disable automatic acceptance of new users because The Bots are becoming too smart, and can bypass the CAPTCHA and bird-related questions with ease these days. Now I have to manually review each ‘new user’ to see if their email is already in a database of spam emails, and if their IP makes sense.
