FOTR Forum Membership Milestone

[John Ashworth]

Today the FOTR Forum reached another milestone - the number of members, 494, now equals the number of members in our "elder sister" Yahoo group, sar-L, which has been around for 9 years as opposed to the FOTR Forum's three. FOTR is currently gaining between 10 and 20 new members each month.

It's not a competition, of course, and the two sites serve different constituencies in a different format. sar-L concentrates on South African railways, whereas FOTR covers the world, albeit with a strong bias towards South Africa, and ever-increasing coverage of other African railways. sar-L is a "group", with the option of receiving posts by e-mail or viewing them online, whereas FOTR is an online discussion board. But it is encouraging to see the growth, not only in size but also in visibility, credibility and coverage, of the FOTR Forum.

May both FOTR and sar-L continue to go from strength to strength.

[Derek Walker]

It would be interesting to see how many of the members here belong to both. The yahoo group system used to be great, but once there was a problem with your email address you were basically stuffed. How about a poll to find out the demographics and how many members we share?

[John Ashworth]

A lot of people do belong to both - when activating new members we often recognise names from sar-L. Maybe Kevin can set up a poll for us, as you suggest?

Some find the Yahoo group system a bit messy - your inbox gets stuffed full of responses on the same topic and it's often difficult to keep track of them. The advantage of the phpBB discussion board used by FOTR (and Railroad.Net, incidentally) is that you can follow a discussion in chronological order. It also means that you can simply ignore threads (or whole sections of the forum) which don't interest you, whereas with the Yahoo groups it's all or nothing - either you receive all e-mails or none (or I think you can also choose to receive a digest or summary). The forum also allows pictures and other attachments to be posted in threads, rather than having to go to a separate section as in sar-L.

But some people, especially those with slower internet connections, prefer to receive e-mails rather than browse online, so it seems there's still a place for Yahoo and Google groups.

[andy johnson]

I am also a member of both and agree that it gets messy, you can have pages of repeated information because no-one takes the time to delete the previous message. This system seems much better.