Absent Members

Lee Willis decided to leave the Forum.

I have no info about CANDO .

Chris

Mr. Willis is frequenting another site. 

The name CANDO does not appear on their member list.

Lee Willis is home polishing his Ferrari and cleaning the simple green off his track.  If I remember right CandO had some health problems and fell off the radar

Gilly@N&W posted:

Mr. Willis is frequenting another site. 

The name CANDO does not appear on their member list.

C&O Keith uses the screen name "MOVL"  ( Michigan & Ohio Valley Lines). He kinda comes and goes, over there.

Jim

John Meyncke posted:

There was an unfortunate rift sometime ago. Folks left, most remained. I had hoped for a long overdue reconciliation. Maybe some,who have more knowledge of the specifics, will extend the olive branch to those missing former members, and say the welcome mat is out.

Also, where is Bob C.?( Coniglio)... I hope he is well...

John

This is a toy train forum, for Pete’s sake, not a Supreme Court vote. Folks ought to lighten up and go with the flow.

Lee is doing well on another Forum posting some great and very interesting info.

   Bill T.

I really miss some folks, not so much others.

 Negativity can be contagious... Not my house, not my rules.... I at least owe a host an attempt to follow them.

In the end I will visit where I feel the least hostility reading, i.e. the most comfortable.

However you look at it, that is the bottom line. It's how I ended up here, it's why I stay.

I'm not posting elsewhere during my absences and reading elsewhere hasn't impressed me. It's only reafirmed some thoughts.

Lee sold the Ferrari and has a Jag now.

What about forum members who have gone on to that great train station in the sky? I miss those guys and gals as well like N. Q. D. Y., The Rancocas Kid, and Y6bAlan just to name a few that come to my mind. I am sure there are many others. I wish we had something like a wall to honor those folks. 

OK....we get one of these posts every so often.  It was policy in the past to delete them because most of the time they go downhill...just like this one since I have had to delete a couple of posts.  Now that there is some (I emphasize "some") lessening of certain policies, I will make a comment here but will also close this thread after I have made my post.

For those of you that like to post on what you think is why Lee left, it would be nice if you knew all of the facts.  What was posted here by Matt was not accurate...that is why I deleted his post.  Plain and simple:  the reason was more because there were certain folks that didn't like our moderation and certain policies.  Some felt that we were interfering with their freedom of speech.  By the way, private forums like this are not bound by the FOS laws.  So . . .  when we would not change our rules or agree to their demands to change, they left.  A couple of them made it clear in emails to us that their posts on the forum were the only reason why most people came here.  Rather than just leaving, some made quite an effort to contact as many of our forum members as possible to ask them to join the other forum referenced in posts above.  A few of them, because of their tactics also got banned from our forum.  There were posts about this on the other forum many of which not only didn't tell both sides of the story but were quite slanderous and personal as well as stretching the truth ... and the moderator(s) allowed those posts to go on and on ... even participating in them.  Our policy at the time was no comment as we would not allow such threads to exist (knowingly) on our forum of that kind of nature.  All in all, we have moved on but there still seems to be an effort to hang on to this petty "situation" by a handful of folks....  And yes I know, it is probably petty of me to respond to this thread.

So...with that said, if any of you want the finer details, just contact me via my email as I am not going to post about that here...but you need to know that their are two sides to the story if you are interested.  The bottom line, we would like to get along with everyone but our moderation, terms of service, for sale rules, etc., even though they are not perfect and heavens knows won't make everyone happy, are in place so that we have as safe and friendly a place as possible for our members.  Our forum has been growing by leaps and bounds...averaging during this past summer between 250 and 300 plus new members per month.  This is the fastest growth rate in its history so there is still interest in the hobby and this forum.  We have top contributors on this forum and anyone that is a member can become one of those contributors!  Our traffic numbers remain the highest of any forum of its kind in the O gauge hobby according to the major search engines that report to us.  Between 6 and 10 million page views and almost 80 thousand IP addresses visit this forum each month on average with a peak of over 12 million page views occasionally.  This means that there are likely more than 3 times the number of registered members viewing the forum during any one month.

One last point:  For those of you that have asked, complained, requested, suggested, you name it ... for us to offer the ability to talk about something other than trains such as politics, each other, general current topics, cars, planes, dogs, cats, your neighbor, ebay, and thousands of other topics .... well, I have thought about this for a long time and now have the ability in my position to fill those requests.  I have a survey going on right now found within the featured topics.  Read the details of the survey and then place your vote.  This forum costs OGR a lot of money to bring to the membership and believe me, if it were not for the forum sponsors and your support of them, the forum would have ceased to exist in its current form years ago.  Our reader subscriptions support the general operations of our business but before we got our current group of forum sponsors, those subscriptions were not enough to support the costs of this forum.  We pay for bandwidth and page views.  A general topics forum would likely be so popular that the costs would go up and we would not have the revenue to support those costs.  But, I am willing to consider what is proposed in the survey.  So far, almost 90% of those that have participated will not support an open forum that may cost them some money.  It seems spending 12 bucks a year or perhaps less is too much even though it would be earned back several times by the offerings I proposed.

Thanks to all of you that have allowed me to express the above and have taken the time to read it with an open mind.  I invite everyone to participate on our forum and share with one another. 

Thanks for your support!

Alan

John Meyncke posted:

...Also, where is Bob C.?( Coniglio)... I hope he is well...

I hope Alan will not be too upset that I re-opened this thread in order to post this single response.

In this forum's formative years, Bob Coniglio posted HUNDREDS (maybe thousands?) of solid, informative posts. He was here every day, day in and day out, authoring thought-provoking posts full of ideas and asking questions that made you think. In a way, Bob made this forum what it is today by posting so many great posts and ideas yesterday. He was a good writer and his posts were enjoyed by everyone here.

I correspond with Bob via email about once a month. His health is not the best, but he is getting by. He is living in an assisted living center and is doing as well as can be expected. He is not able to post to this forum any more, but he can do short emails. If anything significant happens with Bob, I will let you all know.