100 Members!

[Joe]

Congrats to Nik and also our 100th member frank_in_oz. Other forums I've been on generally have an exponential curve upwards once they hit 100 members...i kinda hope these ones stay close to their roots...but it has been great to watch this forum develop into such a nice little community.

Wonder how many members we will have by time our 1st aniversary comes about...

[Son of a Beach]

100 members in 8 months is really quite a feat, considering the small audience we serve (most forums have an international audience for an internationally popular topic). It's certainly gone ahead better than I expected. We're now a long way from the early days, where I would sign on as two different users and talk to myself, to make it look like there was some activity here in the hope of attracting other members.

And it's a long time since I've felt compelled to answer every question myself, even the ones that I know nothing about, just to make sure new members got some sort of answer.

However, I guess now is the time to confess... the first 3 members are me, and the next three signed up under direct coercion from me. But that's what it takes to to get started. Nobody wants to join a forum with 1 member, and no activity. The next approximately 20 signed up after a post to a fly fishing forum pointing to here (written by one of those I coerced to join who frequents that fly fishing forum). That was a big boost for us, and it also explains why we have a large population of fly fishers here.

A competition? Could be a good idea. What should the prize be? A special rank in the forums for a year? If it was anything more substantial, we'd have to figure out a way of making the result less easily rigged by signing up under multiple names.

[ben.h]

Well, it's the start of a new (financial) year and the members list has blown out to 344!
100 in November 07
160 when I joined in January 08
210 in March 08
344 on July 1 08

If only I could find a bank that offered me such a compounding rate
Congrats