Low traffic

Don:

I'd be curious as to how many members of the group were using AOL to read the newsgroup? This might have had some impact?

Or perhaps everyone is doing their taxes?

Or maybe they've all taken a page from Julian's last topic and are even now arranging a trip to Northern Germany?

;-)

Rick Fluke

Top reasons for this group shrinking

1) Too much political talk 2) Way too much "OT" in general 3) Car and Ship builders will tell you that this is mostly airplane discussion There just isn't enough discussion of their interest 4) Maybe they are actually building something interesting instead of internet cruising??

I may have something to do with AOL pulling the plug on newsgroups.

I just got on here and found only 28 messages. It could be the AOL factor but I've seen this coming for a while. The trolls/off-topic stuff has increased, folks get tired of answering the same questions again and again, etc. There are a lot of genre-centric websites/message boards and I'd wager that is the biggest draw away from RMS. I, myself have taken a backseat to things and have enjoyed it as I'm actually building more. Well, okay, I've also gone to a lot of my kid's basketball/soccer/etc. games and activities. It's not the same RMS of five or six years ago, when I'd come in on Monday morning and fine 500-600 messages in the queue...

Frank Kranick

I read it 10 or so times a day. Don't post as much as I'm not building now....

Craig

I was on aol.I've had bad luck with some of the readers that were recommended in here so here I am on Google,but I'm not fond of the interface.And I've been doing more modeling. An old Smer 1/48 Fiat CR-32 in Austrian markings and a heavily modified Testors Dauntless are currently on the workbench.It has a scratchbuilt interior,and I am working on backdating it to a SBD-1 in Marine markings. It's also snowing here in Md so I have time to work in between shoveling.

D> I had thought that the low traffic on the group was a weekend

membership

proposed

Don:

I suspect many got turned off by all the political BS that accompanied the recent election. Me, I have made a New Year's resolution to ignore political threads in the future. They are mostly just chest thumping sessions for idiots anyway.

Bill Shuey

D>

Yeay!! I'm also sitting here watching the hogwash come down. I've got two Hasegawa Hawker Hurricanes on the bench, just about to the painting stage. Tricky nose assembly on those kits, basically to accommodate the ability to make different versions. This was what was commented on in reference to Hase's new 1/48 P-40E last week.

Bill Shuey

The volume of messages has been steadily shrinking for at least three years. It has almost reached the level now that I would not be surprised to see the problem accelerate to the point that the ng is almost useless.

I doubt the political OT stuff has had that much impact--the ng has always had a lot of that, and the ebbs/flows of that stuff by itself doesn't really explain the decline. I do notice that some of the bright lights of the past now show up only occasionally, probably because they are getting their on-line fix in a more concentrated dose elsewhere, and because traffic is so low they only have to check once a week to catch it all.

The criticism that the ng is mostly airplane dominated doesn't quite explain the problem; I find myself skipping over a lot of stuff because it is cars, figures, sci fi, armor, etc. (I do read some of those posts, though not most). Further, most of the correspondents I really miss were posting on aircraft topics.

The essence of the problem is a lack of content. There are a lot of messages that are OT, a lot that are essentially personal, and a lot that are repetitious. I have no problem with any of the above, since this is an unmoderated ng, but the only thing that is going to drive an ng to high subscribership and posting is original on-topic content, and a lot of it. Maybe those of us who give a damn ought to consider what we can do to increase relevant content, whether it's to post in-box reviews, discuss new materials or tools, raise research questions that either have us baffled or which we have resolved by unexpected luck, or anything else that can be considered interesting to as many people in the hobby as possible.

Mark Schynert

I got so annoyed by the political blather that I killfiled most of the combatants. It made for a pleasant, but sparse newsgroup. When it seemed the storm was over a while back, I kicked the killfile barrel over and all these old familiar names came pouring out. It was nice to see everyone again! The traffic nowadays reminds of the levels I saw during the killfile days. The level of animosity is similar too. It's almost downright pleasant around here! Maybe it's like those cowboys staring out into the night from inside the circle of wagons. "It's awful quiet out there." "Yeah, a little too quiet..."

Doug Wagner

in article snipped-for-privacy@individual.net, Don Stauffer in Minneapolis at snipped-for-privacy@usfamily.net wrote on 2/24/05 8:50 AM:

At the moment I'm showing over 790 messages. Admittedly, that includes everything and I don't frequent the group as often as I once did.

There's more than I care to read.

MB

I agree that the volume has been decilining for a couple of years. I posted something to that effect "Is RMS dying" about a year or so ago-- I got several responses of people that agreed with me.

Personally-- I used to be hooked on this group- reading it all the time. Over the last 2+ years, I 've gotten hooked on Modeling Madness and Hyperscale. That's where the content is, and without the SPAM and OT postings. One triggering event was when my old company lost usenet access for a while when they switched ISPs-- I never liked reading the posts via dejanews.

I still think it is a shame that rms is dying, as usenet is more searchable, so you have a better chance of finding old posts. But then again, if I think about it, I hardly ever search for old posts anymore. The other big loss is the fragmentation of material. I used to read rms in the old days-- now I need to read MM, hyperscale, ARC, SteelNavy, and the armor sites to get the same sort of topic variety.

For me, volume has dropped to the point where I check in once or twice a week, and have no trouble keeping up with the volume.

"unimodeler" wrote

Has anyone actually crunched the numbers to see if it's the number has increased or the proportion that has increased?

KL

I check the group daily from my work computer. There are about 50 - 70 new messages per day. Takes about 15- 30 minutes to check the new messages. I just ignore/skip OT/political messages.

There does seem to be a bit of repetitive posts but I find the people in the group generally helpful and friendly.

I would be sad to see the NG disappear.

Cheers Ultan Rooney

in article BE43CBD9.2071% snipped-for-privacy@austin.rr.com, Milton Bell at snipped-for-privacy@austin.rr.com wrote on 2/24/05 6:27 PM:

From the time I posted the note above, the message count has gone up to 808. Someone seems to be posting. It's now 10:10 PM.

MB

At which point the owl hoots.

Bill Banaszak, MFE

it's 8:45 in the REAL world. (g)