Great Western Coffee Shop

Happy New Year for 2017.    This forum was conceived in the very early days of 2006, and was born with a first post two posts on 28th January that year.  So we're celebrating our 10th birthday the month. 

Annual posts:

2007: 7330
2008: 25211
2009: 25925
2010: 24293
2011: 21836
2012: 18682
2013: 22285
2014: 22869
2015: 20711
2016: 18007

Annual new topics:

2007: 1320
2008: 2747
2009: 1892
2010: 2111
2011: 1807
2012: 1657
2013: 1533
2014: 1705
2015: 1421
2016: 1174

And it astonishes me that we still find so much new to talk about.

Posts per topic have steadily risen from 5.5 in 2007 to 11.5 in 2010, 14.5 in 2013 and 15.3 in 2016; that shows a good continuation of development of existing topics and / or much more of an active set of discussions on what was bound over time to become fewer subjects.

In addition to posts, there are 19,598 "likes" registered many of which in the earlier years would have resulted in a post to confirm agreement with a previous post; I have no measure of how this has skewed the figures, but can tell you that there were 9,030 likes last year.

Big "thank you" to our members and readers for the success of this forum.   Big thank you to the moderator and admin team who do a superb job in the background (and this "background" is the real trick with forums - so many fail on being run by a too-controlling team), and big "thank you" - though this one with a tongue in cheek element - to the public transport industry in its widest sense for providing us with so much to talk about.

Graham has clearly been on the drink, firstly:

hmmmm, maths not quite right here

and secondly:
Apart from the 'the' as identified above, the rest of the post is flawless, no spelling mistakes at all!

Completely agree Graham, I think you and the rest of the background team are great at running this forum, I have read other forums that I simply would not join because of the, as you put it, 'too-controlling team'.

I also think the members on here are great as well, very knowledgeable, pleasant and humorous. Whilst we do have our own opinions, it is rare, if ever, that full blown arguments occur on here. I am very pleased to have joined this forum 2 years ago and am very much looking forward to being part of the next 10 years*.

Happy New Year to everyone!


*Looking forward to being part of the forum, not life in general as its my big 3-0 today  :-\

......yes, and a big thank you Grahame for setting it up in the first place (and keeping it all running in the meantime). :D ;D

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Yes, as a newbie, thanks very much Graham. It would be interesting to know how many forum users join each year. Presumably there was a spike at the beginning but now a steady trickle?

Just one bit wrong.    Thought about as an idea in answer to "what the heck can be do" when the passenger service changes on the ex-Wessex routes fell apart in late 2006, but then set up indeed in the early days of 2007.


Apart from "posted in error" stuff / deleted at the request of the original poster, I can only see a handful of post / thread deletions last year - and those that I've spotted relate to a re-organisation of boards triggered by the transfer of Oxford to Bicester to Chiltern leaving


The joy - for me / us on the admin and moderation team of having a forum that's naturally self maintaining, answering, informing and stable.




Diary note for 1st January 2027 to say "happy 40th".  

That's not an easy figure to research - I can count the number of signup requests received:

2007: 175
2008: 328
2009: 429
2010: 1116
2011: 25758
2012: 66684
2013: 15502
2014: 14750
2015: 10698
2016: 11932

but as you can see we're very selective in who we approve.  If you can't get the question about "what do we talk about here?" right, if you've browsing the forum from a country half the globe away from the Great Western area, and if you've been reported by other forums as someone who signs up to post adverts for pharmaceutical products, Russian brides or pyramid money making schemes, then you'll find your request to join is rejected.  The reason for the big drop in 2012 is that I automated the checking procedure so that a lot of requests get knocked out by a spam filter before they "make" the numbers.

I would indeed describe signups these days as a "trickle" ... it was never much more than that, but over time even a trickle of water can fill a mighty big container.   

In early 2008, we had a surge in registrations from people with a tremendous hobby interest in trains and esoteric knowledge, with a significant number of them actively letting it be known that they thought very little of people who knew less than they did. That lead to a peak of over 3,500 posts in the February largely fuelled by this 'gang' - term carefully chosen, as they were co-ordinated.   Requests to tone it down a bit and restrain from personal attacks weren't heeded (indeed the personal attacks were turned onto the person requesting it be toned down) and it got a bit unpleasant.  There were a couple of things around that time which meant that uptime was as low as 98.5% which resulted in a lot of resources needed for firefighting, with one of two of the less positive members seemingly doing all that they could to waste moderator's time and damage the board's reputation, without actually breaking the rules and getting warned then banned.  Net result was that by July 2008 we were down to just 1,000 posts in the month.  Not all such bad news, as the intent when the forum was set up wasn't to provided an train spotter / enthusiast's board that would scare off the day to day observant commuter or traveller with a question that was kinda hard to get answered elsewhere ... and I regret using the term "train spotter / enthusiast" there because I'm tarring the whole of that community who do so much to act as extra eyes, ears, and critical friends with a brush that needs to be applied to just a few.

Post numbers are now around 1,500 per month (I say that for comparison to the figures in the last paragraph) and I have tried to find rhyme or reason for the ups and downs.   Undoubtedly, post counts rise when there are major things going on with "the trains" - I can tell that the Dawlish problems were in Febuary 2014 by looking at the surge in posts.  And post numbers have perhaps dropped away as FGW / GWR have got a very great deal more right in 2016 than they did in 2007.  People post to complain, less to ask and even less to congratulate!

My own involvement - and indeed that of the other who were or are on the admin team - has moved from protest to partnership.   In those early days, there was an identified need to "sabre rattle" somewhat to help persuade none-passenger people with association with rail, especially in management and direction positions, that the passengers were customers, and that the community of which I / we are members can /could actually be helpful if they gave us a chance.  Unfortunately, such sabre rattling brings the fact that there are problems to a wider audience including those who's attention we were looking for, but it also "turns off" those people who go into something of a defensive mode.   The following step - and it was a long process - was to have those people become aware that we're pragmatic and wanted to understand their issues too so that we could work together / partner.   That's a tough thing to do - some people have long memories indeed.   It's confirmation of just how far forward we've come on this with the trial service on the TransWilts that's become permanent now, and the consultation amongst industry stakeholders on the designation of the TransWilts as a community rail service.  Such consultations require near-unanimous support from respondents to be accepted; we had one adjustment to make at that point to answer a single concern expressed by one consultee.

With the move from protest to partnership, we have lost some members / support along the way. Partnership involves some compromises, and whilst we never have (and don't plan) to restrict negative posts, there have been a few people who have felt we've become too much 'establishment'.  And I would confirm that we now understand far better the aims of the various organisations in the rail industry, and the constraints under which they operate (sometimes to their frustration), so find ourselves explaining their point of view to the extent that to some we appear to be the industry's mouthpiece.  But where we lose such members from being active posters, we always look to do so in such a way that they are welcome to become active again, and that we can once again use their posts that bring up serious issues as the basis of threads which cover the topic in question from both sides.

I started writing this with the intent to look forward ... initially giving background ... but I seem to have gone on rather a lot.   I'll post now and follow up after a cup of coffee.





Edit by FT, N! - unloosening.

Looking forward.

Firstly, an issue I'm aware of.  "This forum is provided by a customer of Great Western Railway (formerly First Great Western), and the views expressed are those of the individual posters concerned.".   And in detail we say it's not run by any rail industry organisation or employees thereof, nor does it accept paid advertising, to maintain its independence.   However,  over recent years I've become more than just a customer of GWR, in that as a director of a Community Rail Partnership, and of TravelWatch SouthWest, I have interests in the success of organisation which work very closely with GWR and both of which receive sponsorship income from GWR to promote our mutual objectives.   This sponsorship makes huge sense for all concerned; I can point you to independent research which suggests that for every pound of income generated by a CRP in this way, there's £4.20 of benefit generated - and I believe the TransWilts figure would be very much better even than that.   However, it does mean that I need to be careful to protect the independence here and at times I pass on moderation / admin requests to other who are not directors of any such organisations.

Now ... our member base is a tiny proportion of GWR passengers. As well as members, we have a huge number of visitors here - for December, Google Analytics suggests that's 8,138 people ... it was 9,521 in November (not a surprise at a higher figure due to Christmas not bringing new searches from passengers) and for the year as a whole 104,139 ... suggesting to me that we have between 10,000 and 15,000 returning visitors during the year, and 75,000 to 80,000 one-visit-wonders.  Visitors came here 3 times on average, and each visit averaged just over 5 pages viewed.    Those numbers may look good, but they still represent only a tiny proportion of the people traveling on GWR services and I conjecture that if you were to get on an average train (if such a thing exists) and ask people "Have you come across the Great Western Coffee Shop" you would be lucky to find more than a handful who had.  And from that handful, very few might have visited us.   While most of those passengers may not be interested, I wonder what proportion would be, and whether there's something we should do in the future in consideration of significant numbers, and yet low penetration.  I'll leave that as an open question for thoughts ...

Updated chart of posts over the years thanks to Chris from Nailsea at

http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=10596.0

You can see the story told above in graphics.

On the subject of forum statistics, this one from the homepage has occasionally piqued my interest:


I assume this had something to do with the weather events that were experienced towards the end of 2010, but if anyone can recall what caused this number of people to be online at the same time (it was a fairly antisocial time of day too!), I'd be quite interested to know (I'm not sure if it is possible to do a forum search for a specific date/time in order to find out for myself...)

I took a look at that one soon after it happened ... I think it was a rogue spider and (no) there's no war for you to find out, nor for me unless I could dig up the older server log files for that day.  We see rogue automated browsers from time to time that pull silly amounts of resource; this particular one happened to have characteristics that made each of its many threads show up as a user!

I'm going to suggest that the First Post was on Jan 28th 2007 as Wessex Trains died as from April Fools Day 2006 (and didn't FGW make a mess of things in the early days of the GreatER Western franchise.

so it's 10 year party time on Jan 28th.

Anyway round Well Done.

Smokey (still Smoking)

Hi, smokey!  ;) :D ;D