You Must Validate Your Membership By Posting

[threegee]

All BBs are plagued by people who join but don't post. Some just lurk, for most their joining is just a fleeting interest, and they never bother to visit again. But, in the process, they clog up membership lists and make handles unavailable to genuine contributors. They make the moderators job more difficult too.

Well... not here and no more! We've just had a cull of people who joined but never introduced themselves, or even had the courtesy to say hello. All non-contributing members who joined before August are already gone. If you are reading this then you're not one of those, and your membership is still active.

If you joined more recently than July 31st, haven't contributed anything, and want to keep your access, e-mail and personal messaging rights, etc. then you must have a non-zero post count. Members who joined in August have up until the end of this month to illustrate that they are still active. From then on we'll be tightening up on the grace period. This board is for active members only, and we are not looking to display over-inflated membership figures like most.

On-going, members will need to contribute at least once a year to keep their membership alive. Hardly a problem for some!

[threegee]

Another large cull of timewasters and lurkers earlier in the week. So far well over a thousand registrations using the new software, over 900 of which have been culled because they didn't even bother to say hi!

I will be e-mailing people who haven't logged-in for at least 6 months quite shortly. Probably the only e-mail from the board they will ever get! Reducing the inactivity period to 6 months (plus a bit of grace) seems a reasonable step.

We are also opening the Northumberland forum to non-members as an experiment. Posts will not appear until moderated though, to counter spamming. Moderation may take a few hours.

Use it or loose it! This domain is for active citizens of Bedlington and district only, we are not in the biz of collecting inactive members.

[Vic Patterson]

The main reason that many of the people who register and do not post is because of a few immature people who constantly attack, belittle or are just downright rude!

I believe most visitors to the site wish to discuss Bedlington, its people, past and present and the world affairs in general, at present I certainly would not recommend to my children, grand children or G, Grand children visit this site, which is their mom's birthplace, and where I lived for several years.

I like to look at the gallery and read some of the normal posts but there are the few who choose to make it more like a porn site, I'll keep visiting and appreciate the good side of the site.

Vic

[threegee]

The main reason that many of the people who register and do not post is because of a few immature people who constantly attack, belittle or are just downright rude!

I don't believe this at all, and it's certainly not the case now. That - in any case - is not what I was getting at.

Simply saying hello in the Introduce Yourself forum takes only a few seconds and is the polite thing to do.

Many thanks for your continued support.