We've just hit 10,000 members in the last few days. This is a huge milestone for this website. It really doesn't seem that long since we only had a couple of hundred members. That's to all for the great discussions and for helping to build this great community of engineers!
Pretty much 11,000 members now. This is mega! So good that people are really finding their way here now
Over 12,000 now. Over 40,000 members in LinkedIn too! Here's some stats on the LinkedIn group http://www.linkedin.com/groups?groupDashboard=&gid=2666729
I haven't looked for ages, but we have 15,595 members as of today! 71,891 members in the LinkedIn Group. It's a monster!
Hi Everyone, If this Forum does have 21481 members - where is everyone - since I don't appear to see much activity at all. Indeed I rarely see - some of the original contributors (who answered questions) to this Forum these days, and there is just a handful of people still contributing to the answering of current questions - and some "reasonable" questions are never answered - which I assume is because the Forum is not attracting sufficient breadth/depth of experience. I guess it is also disappointing to see questions posted which some people respond to - but the originator of the question never comes back to "close the loop". Surely we need to address these issues - to generate more interest - if this Forum is not to close down all together. Lochnagar.
Hi Lochnagar, I think that there are a lot of issues at play - these forums attract a lot of people who have a single question, and that's the extent of their interest - 'I have a problem, please solve it for me...' I also think that a lot of students sign up but never take part, although I think that the vast majority of 'members' are either concerned with advertising their services or are computer 'trolling' robots. I'm relatively new to this forum, but I certainly echo your sentiments, although with regard to the non response to answers I think you have to just put that down to general ignorance on other peoples part. I do think it could be far more effectively promoted though, and without being at all derogatory towards Gareth, he has intimated that he simply doesn't have the time to do it justice. I fully understand what that feels like... K.I.S.S.
This is the main issue really. I simply have had to take my foot off the gas during the last year or so due to other commitments. Previously I had been doing lots of promoting, and sending out regular newsletters and digests to registered members which generated much more interest and also brought back older members. As for the rather large membership count, I haven't checked for a while, but I will probably need to purge the bots and delete some inactive/unactivated accounts which are likely to be bots anyway