This month we’ve reached a pinnacle of website traffic. We’ve gone past 850,000 unique users & displayed over 8 million page impressions. That’s our best performance ever. With 85% of our traffic being in the forum I’m not sure there’s any evidence for the argument the forum is becoming stale and isn’t as good as it once was. The traffic figures have been rising for 12 years, with a rapid period of growth over the last 2. There is no discernible effect in any of the stats we have to show that the presence or otherwise of an individual makes any difference at all. We provide the forum for the general population of mountain bikers at large. Our continued success is dependent on maintaining the forum and the site for as wide a section of the population as possible. That means no one person (or minority group) can be allowed to dominate the forum in a negative way as this puts off a huge number of potential users from posting anything at all. I have evidence here that shows the behaviour of forum individuals has directly lead to the canceling of subscriptions and the loss of revenue to us. My job is to take that seriously and no matter what the opinions of long standing regulars or otherwise to act to prevent that from happening in the future.
If you contribute nothing but argument.. If you enjoy winding up other forum users.. if you are abusive, rude or generally disrespectful of other forum users then you will not be welcome here. This is our long standing attitude and we believe sticking to that principal has gained us the following and the popularity that we currently enjoy.
This forum is an amazing place. It is unquestionably supportive and generous when we are presented with genuine need for help. It is hilarious on a daily basis and the vast, VAST majority of the thousands of daily posts are respectful and positive. The vast majority of arguments are done with thought and respect. But a minority of users come here principally to find an argument. They enjoy taking the opposite or pedantic standpoint and they pursue that in order to try and break their ‘opponent’ or to boost their own fragile egos. These people are not welcome here. These people are easy to spot, principally because they are vocal but also, thankfully, because there are very few of them. But they have a voice loud enough to taint the entire forum with their negativity. The people I am describing will all recognise themselves and they should think very carefully about what they contribute to our community in the future as their lead has now become very short, as SEVERAL have already found out in the last 24 hours.
Here endeth the thread.