Well we seem to have reached 400 members on our little phoney island in the sun! While not all are active by any means, a lot are, and it amazes me how this forum continues to grow and thrive. Big stuff has been breaking news here first even this year, the 1948 and 49' model 500s were first documented by forum members, as well as the historic conference call on the 48' And it remains a nice place to hang out on the web, the members really try hard to be polite and respectful to all, a rarity on the WWW as we all know.
Congrads to us.
Well said, never had any flaming on this board, what an utterly unselfish and helpful group ladies and gentlemen, no matter how daft some of my queries.
"Lang may yir lum reek" as we say here in Scotland.
Wi' ither folks coal! ;)
Quote from: McHeath on June 26, 2010, 03:25:09 PM
Well we seem to have reached 400 members on our little phoney island in the sun! While not all are active by any means, a lot are, and it amazes me how this forum continues to grow and thrive. Big stuff has been breaking news here first even this year, the 1948 and 49' model 500s were first documented by forum members, as well as the historic conference call on the 48' And it remains a nice place to hang out on the web, the members really try hard to be polite and respectful to all, a rarity on the WWW as we all know.
Congrads to us.
That last sentence is the biggest reason I come here pretty much exclusively for phone help. Another thing that helps is the visual. I much prefer a V-Bulletin type of setup where the subjects are organized into different areas and you can attach pics, edit, or delete your posts.
;D congratulations! :)
dsk
I love this site !!! Don`t post very often but I always open up my day here while enjoying my morning coffee. Great bunch of people and no hassles or complaining like I`ve seen on other groups. Keep up the good work. Jiggerman
The listsevers were getting stuffy and sometimes rude.
That is the reason I switched to the forum. I don't think I am the only listserver member to switch for those reasons.
I consider the forum a legitamite telephone "club". Whenever there are special offers for club members, I try to get the forum included on the deal. (Don Walton's book)
The clubs have been recoginizing members "of the other club" as telephone collectors, and will let them attend shows at members rates and times.
I suspect they will extend this courtesy to forum members.
JMO,
Jim
I agree with the previous positive comments about this forum. The other listservers, while informative, can wander off into the Central Office switching, area code cutovers, phone directories, ringing generators and other non-telephone set / collecting topics. They frown strongly on off topics and can get non-friendly. This site offers a great mixture and has everything categorized. This makes starting an off topic easy and non-offensive - I have learned a lot about collectable radios. The capability of adding photos in the message quite easy. With the listservers you have to provide a link and even pulling some photos or files can get cumbersome.
This site is the best by far and I now spend 99% of my time here.
Oh, and the best thing are the friendly people!
Russ....
Remember when we had 300 a couple of months ago
To add to the point of the growing interest from the established phone collecting community at large, here is a little tidbit.
I received a call from a collector and avid switcher that I know. He works in the telecom industry and has a large e-Bay presence. He was not aware of this forum before, but has been recently reading it and he was largely complimentary of the activity here and the potential that exists. He was also very complimentary of the look and feel of the forum as compared with the listserves.
One good point he made is that it would be nice to have some educational articles on what makes phones work. Ralph Meyer's book "Old Time Telephones, Design, History and Restoration" is an excellent resource, but I think his point was that maybe something should be available to all via the forum. This might be a next step beyond wiring diagrams if people are interested in persuing the "how it works" angle.
He also said that he has recently come into a rather large lot of ITT phones, and that in the lot are a bunch of parts. He said he will have parts for 500's and 554's such as networks, ringers, switches, handsets and the like. Since this forum has a high degree of interest in the 500's and equivalent phones, he thought there would be interest.
He goes by the handle of cougarvalleyhwt on e-bay. The link to his store is http://stores.ebay.com/cougarvalleyphonesandmore
He will be posting those parts some day soon, I am told. If anyone is interested in a 1A2 keysystem, he sells those too and I see that he currently has a couple up for sale. I bought my first 1A2 system from him.
I hope I haven't taken this thread too far off its intended subject.
Not a problem at all Bill, one of the nice things about this forum is that conversations can evolve as they do naturally and no one gets mad. When we are talking with a person face to face the conversation moves around, covers a lot of ground, and the forum does as well.
I've bought a part or two from cougarvalleyphones on E-Bay, nice stuff and good service.
To me it's important that we have these self congrad threads every so often were we pat ourselves on the back because it keeps us thinking about how nice this forum is and how we all have a part in keeping it that way.
It is great to see our forum grow and prosper!
Congratulations, 400 members strong:-) Keep up the good work as it will just keep on getting better. Just the same success when Henry Dreyfuss designed our much-beloved 500 in the 1940's and became a huge success in the decades to follow.
Next stop, 500 members:-)
Excellent! Three cheers for our forum! HIP HIP HOORAY!
I have not been a member here long but I do prefer this over the lists which I have been a member of for a while now. This is a much more down to earth atmosphere with a bunch of really nice people. Heres to continued growth and not straying from the format. If it works don't fix it!
On another note this milestone may be a good excuse for the idea I posted here:
http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=2957.0
Our 400th Member Worldwide Memorial Poster Signing!
401 now
Good points made by all about the Forum with discussion on where it may evolve. As a side-note I will take the opportunity on this topic to mention what I do when new members join.
I get an e-mail notification that a new member has joined the forum. I am provided with the user name and a link to his/her profile. The first thing I do with each one is click on the I.P. Address. I'm looking for suspicious activity such as spammers. I then go to this web address:
http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup
There I (and anyone) can plug in the I.P. address and see where that member is located. Often their location will give a clue as to the legitimacy of the person joining. Often the spammer will show his location as being somewhere in the U.S.A. (I remember one that put Tampa, Fl) when in fact they were in Latvia. In fact many of the spammers do come from Latvia.
If I determine right then and there this person joined for reasons other than to discuss or read about telephony, I will ban the I.P. address (so they can't join under another name) and then delete the account. When I delete an account the forum count drops. So if currently there are 400, we probably would have over 500 if I hadn't deleted the accounts.
If I am unsure I will often do a Google search on the user name. You'd be surprised to find that the same user name will join dozens of forums. They register and never post. I don't know what their ultimate motive is, or how they plan to do what they do but they join forums that entail a multitude of interests. I pull the plug on them right now.
Recently there have been many members that have joined from a place called Gurenesy which appears to be in the UK. Not wanting to turn away any of our friends from the U.K. I have not deleted any of those accounts although none have been active nor have any of them logged in since their initial registration. I suspect an issue there but for now I'm going to just wait and see. One of those member names is douglas mays and yet another, Altonnewton. Altonnewton's I.P. also comes back from Gurensey. A Google search shows him/her joining other forums with no posts.
I keep a folder of banned I.P.s and user names for future reference. It's not uncommon to get two or three new members in a particular day.
If I pull the plug on someone by accident that you know, please let me know. I'm trying to keep out the riff-raff. I do realize that many legit members create an account and never post. Some may never be back. We have a ton of members that have joined and never returned....but may some day.
Thanks again to all of YOU for it is all of you that make this forum what it is. We can only get better.
I'm open to suggestions. If anyone wants a new "board" created or a new "category" just let me know and it will be done.
Sorry for the long post but I wanted to let you all know that I pay attention to people who join up...trying to avoid problems before they happen. In fact I deleted one account once while the person was still adding to their profile. They had already made about four links to gambling web sites and the I.P. was from India or someplace.
Where do you find the I.P.Address.,
D/P
Dan, it's probably a function of the "Administrator" but when I click on the members/guests it displays their I.P. Address along side their name.
It also shows on the member's "profile page".
Quote from: Dennis Markham on June 27, 2010, 10:56:04 PM
I get an e-mail notification that a new member has joined the forum. I am provided with the user name and a link to his/her profile. The first thing I do with each one is click on the I.P. Address. I'm looking for suspicious activity such as spammers. I then go to this web address:
http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup
Great tool! I just looked up the source of an email that had responded to an ad I had on CL. Somebody in eastern Europe.
Geo-Location Information
Country Slovakia
State/Region 02
City Bratislava
Latitude 48.15
Longitude 17.1167
Dennis - do you mean "Guernsey" its part of the Channel Islands, off the French coast.
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&cr=countryUK|countryGB&client=firefox-a&hs=VzM&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&channel=s&q=guernsey&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Guernsey&gl=uk&ei=7xopTNfTC6KksQbLsJXEBA&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ8gEwAA
Slight tax haven, improbable location for spammers though?
Yes, that's what I meant. I obviously misspelled the name. We've had at least five members join from there. I thought it seemed unlikely that that many people from there would join the telephone forum, but I suppose it is possible.
we're all jolly good fellows! ;D a very special thanks to all the topic moderators & our ever vigilant administrator. :D