Are we loosing good members?

YES

It's the nature of things. old members move on, new folks join. There are some posters I miss, others I'm glad are gone. People take vacations or get involved in other things. Until yesterday, i hadn't dropped by since late January. Shyam and cnpower were both on the site last week. not sure about Sparkstation. He hasn't been around since just after new years.

Elvis put it pretty well. We've been running this site since December 2004, and yes, users have come and gone. It is the nature of a site like this. Are we poorer for their loss? In most cases, yes. At the same point, CR4 is busier now than it ever has been. We have more posts daily, more comments and more users joining then ever. Some of the new users will stay and become part of the community, others will move on.

But busier does not mean the site is better, nor does it mean its worse, for that matter.

I'm curious Rakesh, you joined back in 2006. Do you feel the site is somehow "less" than it was when you joined? If so, why? What do you feel has changed? If you do think the content is poorer, what content in particular? The user posts and responses? The blog entries? We're always looking for ways to improve CR4, so any opinions on this subject are important.

Chris -- I'm a newby here; a bit over 5 months. So I can't make comparisons very well. CR-4 is pretty good in my opinion though I'll admit it can be a bit of a time sponge. Life has me in a position where I have the time and it is a lot of fun. May not be that way next month. We all come and go from our recreation depending on higher level responsibilities. Just the way life goes.

Some fascinating people in this community. Interacting with them is a real mind sharpener. But the best part for me is being able to actually help some real folks with real questions.

The other thought is that the engineering world like most everything else is in a slowdown this year. Time for introspection and looking about. Time to clarify our thinking and for catching up. CR-4 is a nice place for that. Maybe a bit more philosophy and fewer urgent engineering problems. The former are likely to bring more heated debates than the latter. And such exchanges are not to many participants tastes. But the pendulum will swing back.

Ed Weldon

Chris,

I've been on for about 18months...Time flies when you're having fun.

I think we all have times when the peaks & troughs of our workload will dictate the time we can spend reading and\or answering questions or adding input.

I quite often will rate or put in a GA if the answer or thread is what I would put in anyway, rather than comment. Doesn't mean that they aren't around.

They could just be browsing and as the numbers grow the answers are generally getting better. But I do miss the comments that are in the "Off Topic". that was originally part of the attraction.

Regards,
Sapper

As the site gets more recognition and more popular the number of posters increases, this includes the number of poor quality posts (such as badly asked questions, simple repeat questions and internet trolls wasting peoples time). This is inevitable (just look at the google news groups). Even thou CR4 is quite an open forum (any guest can post without a login), CR4 is very well regulated (quite in part to the self-regulating nature of the site by its users) so hopefully the poor quality posts will be limited. A small price to pay.

We are all part of the solution after all.

I think one of the reasons you don't see as many replies from the old folks is due to the typical post: "I want complete blah, blah, blah. Explain perfectly."

You're always going to have dumb posts. Happens on any forum. Do what i do..ignore them. I outright ignore any post from a guest and i ignore anyone who asks for "a project" to do and anyone who has a significant problem but can't bother to write more then two sentences to explain it. I don't post questions back trying to coax the question out of them. If they can't explain it intelligently in the first place, it's on to the next one.

Once you've ignored the dumb posts, there are still many good questions and informative posts to enjoy.

I do ignore 99.9% of them, but I get some small amount of pleasure out of ridiculing about 0.1% of them.

If you look at todays list of posts/questions, for example, you can see that a large portion aren't worth reading, much less answering.

So should someone be deciding what is and what isn't a good question?

I suppose one could go crazy just reading them all, but I think the members of CR4 do a fair job of deciding which ones are and which ones are not good questions. Easy to tell by looking/comparing of # readers vs # replies.

of cause!!! if i ask good question, you also give good answer!!! is CR4 for chat only???

Thanks to all for their enlightened views.

Regards

Hi, rakesh semwal!

Every once in a while, if I haven't 'seen' somebody on CR4 and miss them, I'll drop them a line via the internal eMail. I always get a reassuring message that they're well and doing something else that's taking up their time. Why don't you drop a line to one or two of the folks you miss. Then, let me know how they're doing, as well. In fact, this would be a good site to publish their responses or at least a summary of them to let us all know how they're doing.

For example, I eMailed Masu about a month ago and got filled in on the new projects he's been working on that have kept him very busy.

Mark