Strange e-mail

cidchase

Active Member
I got this today:

"Greetings. To all members: You will notice that our membership has been cut in half. The reason for this is simple. We want our content and membership to remain fresh. Member accounts that were inactive for 90 days or more, for the most part, have been deleted. This even included my own wife, and the pastor of our church, so as you can see, I am not playing favorites. LOL. There are some exceptions. If I know you personally and you are an active modeler. If you have contributed to the site with good material. If you are a site sponsor. If you are receiving this message, there is a reason. You are a valuable part of Trackside Modeler. We would like those of you who do not participate as much to try and visit the site more often. Check out our new material. Warren, (Womblenz) is about to undertake a special forum regarding N scale. Knowing his high level of modeling, that should be quite interesting. I also have a surprise or two up my sleeve. Basically what it boils down to is this: We want people with a genuine love and interest for model railroading. This includes members who do not post, but rather just like to look. That's right! Your account will show activity even if you just sign in and look around. That's all there is to it folks! We would rather have a small, dedicated crowd, than a large membership number just to make the membership look falsely inflated. I will be looking at this again in another 90 or so days. There are some great modelers still here, who've not posted a thing. I would like to see their work here. I hope that those of you who are still on the 90 day list now, or close to it, will help support our site by more visits. It is our plan to have the best such site as this on the net. We cannot do it without you. Regards, Rob GearDrivenSteam General Manager, Trackside Modeler http://tracksidemodeler.com/index.php "

Y'all can probably guess my own personal opinion of this message!!
But it's that last sentence that really has me ROFL :D :D
 

Will_annand

Active Member
"We cannot do it without you."
But you just alienated half your users, by saying they are not worthy of being members.

Can you say "oxymoron"?
 

ezdays

Out AZ way
Our policy here is to never remove a member from the roster. Does it inflate our membership numbers? That depends on how you look at it, mainly it is a number that is indicative of all those that have taken the time to register here, but by not deleting them after a certain period of time, we protect their user name and they don't have to re-register. We have many who can't or don't come back for a long time, sometimes a year goes by for a few. We don't know why, sometimes they can be ill, busy moving, working too hard :rolleyes: or maybe they're out of the hobby, but they are all welcome back.

But, so we do keep track of those that do show up regularly, we have two membership numbers displayed at the bottom of the main forum listing page, one is "total" membership, the other is "active" members that have been logged on here in the past 90 days. Right now we have about 6500 members of which around 1400 of them have logged on recently. We are pleased with these numbers, for those that do come back frequently are the ones that make the Gauge as great as it is.:thumb: :thumb:
 
I got it too - and since I'm not, and never have been,anything to do with it - I dumped it straight into the black hole that is marked delete! They obviously have too many members if they can happily junk 50% of them. One of mine currently has 3576, and there is no intention of deleting any of them!
Shortliner(Jack)away up here in the Highlands
 

Ralph

Remember...it's for fun!
I guess every forum is entitled to make its own rules and policies. Like Don said we don't delete members from our roster so if you take a break from us you'll be welcomed back.
Ralph
 

phoneguy

member
I'm not much of a poster more of a lurker. I visit often and have learned much by just reading. Someday soon I hope to get the layout started and maybe than I will post.

Wayne
 

stripes

Member
I got that email also, I post fairly often on a lot of forums, but I know one gentleman that is in the Canadian coast guard, and is a gifted model railroader, but is limited to when he can go to the forums. It does not seem fair to the folks that can not get on often!
David
 

TrainNut

Ditat Deus
Just for the heck of it, I went and looked at the home page of that site. They have 71 members (NOW). If he just cut the members by half, that would mean that they only had 142 to begin with. That's crazy. One of the things I like about The Gauge is the diversity and number of members who can offer a huge pool of resources, comments and answers. It makes me wonder if there is not something else going on and the email you received is his way of justifying it.
 
From what i see he needs to e-mail the ppl he has are had and try to get them to post something. Not a lot going on there in the frist place.
 
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