5,000 posts + Membership stats

[John Ashworth]

There are now 5,000 posts on our forum, about 5 weeks after reaching 4,000.

Our overall average is just over 11 posts per day, but in the last month we have averaged nearer 30 posts per day.

We have 135 forum members. March 2008 was a particularly good month, with 18 new members joining. February wasn't bad with nine.

31 members have posted on the forum (around 23% of the total membership).

More than 98% of the posts are by 10% of the members.

Of the top 10 posters, 7 are members of the FOTR Board, one is a FOTR member, and two are not connected with FOTR except via the forum.

The FOTR Board uses a private section of the forum for much of its business, and there is another private section for FOTR club members which includes most of our operational information (train details, crew rosters, train documents, YQs, training material, etc) and FOTR's newsletters. John A and Kevin W-S have posted disproportionately as they post a lot of FOTR's administrative and operational information, as well as forum administration. They also post information and pictures e-mailed to them by other members who have not got the patience, broadband connection or familiarity with the system to post themselves. Not much we can do about those first two constraints, but you only get familiar with the system if you use it!

Attached is a graph showing number of posts. Hopefully Kevin will add some more graphs.

[Tom Macrery]

Congrats on the milestone, and many thanks to John and Kevin for the dedication, hard work and especially all the interesting postings!

[Kevin Wilson-Smith]

Well, here are the updated membership stats - and interesting they are too!

18 new members last month - the highest in a month to date.

The cumulative graph shows the membership trend over time. It works by adding up the members from the previous month. Makes sense?

Say the figures are 4, 2, 3, 3 for each month - then the graph would read 4 (for month 1), 6 (month 1 = month 2), 9 (month 1 + 2 + 3) etc.

[Kevin Wilson-Smith]

Number of topics now stand at 1,800 +, with over 2,000 attachements.

[Nathan Berelowitz]

Xcellent news and maybe one day I will work out how to size up photos for the forum!! Never mind, gives John A a sneak preview and censors scissors!