Don't be afraid, this is a forum of film lovers, we are the ONLY forum that is solid film, no talk of video or dvd, just the slippery stuff, the bootlace and bigger, just FILM. We Welcome you. put in your views. You Know you want to. As an addition, where are our American cousins, to which we owe a tremendous lot to many 8mm editions to the amateur film scene. Are they scared?

LOL, thought you were talking about IE; Firefox and Chrome :-)

Me and Doug W. are American citizens. I don't know about anyone else who has joined.

Accepted you lads, but there are surely more out there, c'mon you guys out there, America is a big place,
we have a following of just film lovers, Tim & Doug are hopefully the vanguard to the American gang, remember
film only.

We are getting plenty of guests on a daily basis who are clearly interested in our forum and its chat but for whatever reason are not committing to joining just yet?

It's not something I personally agree with, but if Vidar and Robert etc want the number of members to swell quickly here with this one, I feel the only way this may happen is to make the forum non readable to guests until they sign in by becoming a member.

As I say, not a tactic I'd usually agree with but in the short term at least, I feel it would have the desired effect.

It is something we had considered Andrew, but was worried it might have the reverse effect. In the past I have signed up to groups because I saw a post from someone needing help and I could supply the answer. I am happy to go with what ever Vidar decides.

This is democracy and we can have a vote on it. I see some pros and some cons both ways
One con to lock it, you might not attract people just browsing around and not sure what happens in a search engine (google and so on)
Pros being that we get more members, but really, we are not in it for the numbers, we want the film loving people in that hopefully comes with posts too

What do you all think?

Vicar,
I agree with you on your thoughts about locking the forum, as the numbers are not so important as the quality of members registering. A browser that can see our posts can decide for themselves whether we are a group that they would enjoy conversating with or not.

As I said initially, it is a way of probably getting guests to join when maybe they wouldn't otherwise but overall I am definitely not a fan of locking the forum. I think it's a good thing that people can sample the goods so to speak.

If I were to vote, I'd vote for things to stay as is and hope the numbers increase naturally if we keep this forum interesting and friendly for film lovers throughout.

I think we should stay as we are for now, we can always change things at any time in the future. Hopefully people will read our posts and decide they want to be a part of it.

Or they just read our posts and not become part of it :-) Pros and cons either way

Unless anyone has objections, we leave it as is, for now.

Nicely put Mr Olavesen!

If someone is really serious about joining this forum they should have no problem registering to it if it were "locked"
If they find they don't like it they can always leave if they choose. Now that's Democracy in action.

Furthermore there are at least 17 members who have registered with us and posted nothing so far. So why are they here ?

I don't think we can make people post anything. It's not always one has something to say. I do however miss a few people I thought would be here too. Nothing wrong belonging to multiple forums. And where are the German and Italian film fans? There is a lot of them on facebook. In any case, I am delighted with our members, thanks to all of you

It's not just that these 17 people aren't posting, if you look at the members list you will probably find that the last time they logged in was the day they joined. We have been running a few weeks now. We don't know if this 17 have even read any of our posts without logging in.

I think it's typical of most hobby forums.Many tend to be lurkers,while a regular few will post often.I've seen the same thing many times over on different sites.Still,it would be nice if more folks joined on the conversations.

That's true Douglas. You find that in Facebook groups. Ihave a group (non cine) and sometimes we remove people who haven't visited for months.