Quote from: soopahfly on November 20, 2011, 15:23:16 PM

I've not seen Jim for years

Makes two of us.  His parents live in France but I don't think he is there much.
Will probably give them a call closer to xmas so I find out the latest I'll let you know.

btw that avatar is soooooooooooo wrong!

Sorry to hear Serious is not around. 

I'm surprised to see speakers corner is a graveyard.

We haven't have the likes of you and Jim to keep it occupied with fresh topics sadly. I'd also be interested to hear how he is (and if he's still growing those tasty tomatoes)

Not even a "goodbye folks" from Serious either, even to the Mods, its quite sad. But then having said that, most people that left have slinked off quietly.

Unfortunately it's the way the forum is going, if you look at the top 10 posters of all time, 3 of those have disappeared, I'm not sure if there is an easy way to check, but how many people have posted in the last month.

It'd only take a couple more key people to leave and I think it'll get very quiet on here, it's not like our efforts to bring in more people have been fruitful, the HTPC guide is one of our largest traffic drivers and is getting on for near 10k visits, the number of members it's created is still relatively few.

The people who post on here regularly, pretty much all know each other in real life I think? I'm one of the exceptions to this, although did know some people back in the day, both of them have since stopped posting..

I'm an exception also as i live the furthest down the country, but i have met Nige and Knighty and we have slept in each others beds on regular occasions.   

I've met a few more people too who i've sold stuff too!

People as Top posters who are not around are..
maximusotter - Who has never posted since we been on the PHP forums.
Serious - Not posted since March
M3ta7h3ad - Not posted since being on these forums
Beaker - Not posted since July
redneck - Never posted on these forums.
Sam - Posted a bit when on PHP but stopped posting after the work to convert over the database.

Their email will be in the system. First point of call to see if they want to start posting again is the question - Why did they go?
For each one why did they go?
Sam for me, a great guy started to get a lot more adgertated(spelling?), I bumped heads with him over Web stuff but I know others in other areas as well. Who still keeps in touch?

Then if with their emails, someone who is a mod/admin flicking off some emails, ask how they are etc. Maybe tell them some plans of whats to come etc see if they want to come back.

I miss eggonline!

He is still posting isn't he? Just not as much?
How many mods/admin do we have on here still active?

Egg doesn't post these days.
Enough mods are active and posting.

i dont post because its dead on here :oP
Thats the reason I stopped posting.
You look at the people who used to keep the subforums active, they dont post anymore.

I still browse every few days - more so to keep an eye on what people are doing
with the HP microservers + im very busy with work n stuff (about to start building a reprap http://reprap.org/ if I can
can make up enough free space in one of the spare bedrooms) - but the truth is, this forum was started
for PC modding & overclocking, etc. - not many members still do that - I have not upgraded
my PC for about 4 years - just a few new graphic cards.

Im not into cars & to busy for photography so not much worth posting about

I banned redneck some time ago, I'm surprised people forgot how he started being abusive to everyone.

I don't know if people are still using the IRC channel, I haven't been on it in a long time so have no idea, I tend to keep in touch with people on MSN. There is a Twitter and Facebook group - some of us are friends on there - but that isn't really used.

YGPM Emeztastico

I just had a look through the member list, and there are so many recognisable names that just aren’t around anymore. 

It is sad, especially when a lot of them it seems just stopped posting for no apparent reason or somehow haven't found their way back. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be moving the forums onto a new pro hosting account so they should be far more reliable than with GoDaddy currently, at the minimum I'm going to mailshot all the members and see who we can drag back again but I'm going to try and think of some other ideas too.

- At one stage the site was up but for server reasons it was put under a stupid port and a load of people could not access it. So they moved on.
- Other people had a large post history and a lot of old cool posts which were all wiped. A number of people were not happy and left.
- Just amount of downtime for a period and on off and lack of forum features were also factors for some leaving.

- There was a really dark period where 4/5 people just attacked everyone. Abuse non stop. It was quite a surprise how some people just turned nasty. That put people off, couple of people were banned and others did not want to hang around for abuse.

- There was another period (not so bad though) of abuse and I know people even though they did leave, just got put off a bit again.

Another core factor was everyone grew up. The modding and what not which was a big part of the site went away, people have got married and had kids. Sam sold Tekheads and things just moved on for everyone.

That is why the forums need to be just part of something bigger and better and hopefully we can do that. It would be nice to do a mail out and let people know.
I have always thought that Tek should properly set up a paypal account fund and people chip into it when they can so things like a perminant game server could be formed. It could have  BF3 on it, Minecraft, Team Fortres etc and a ventrilo channel for people to use for those and to just chat.
An MMO to pick for MMO tek fans and a proper guild to continue to tap into etc. Properly flesh out the fan page, google + Circle... Youtube Channel...

Properly build up a community and a site which is the portal to it all and lead to the forums. So the forums will just be one aspect of something much bigger.