Can anybody explain the usefulness of the friend funtion of the forum?
Other than serving as an address book of sorts for private messages among friends, I’ve never had any use for such a feature at message boards.
With forums that use vBulletin software, one way to use the friend function is as a shortcut to see all posts that your friends have made.
By clicking on your own member name, you navigate to your “profile”, which shows your posting activity. And if you have friends, the posting activity listing is a combination of all of your friends posts. There are “tabs” that allow viewing of just your own activity, or a combination of yours and your friends activity.
My guess is that the forum software that this forum is using probably works in a similar manner, but I have not verified that.
Here is a link to this forum’s Help section regarding friends:
Hmmm. “Won’t you be my friend?” Sounds like a line from Hunter Harrison to CSX.
And Trains could have prevented all the frustrations users of this forum have experienced over the past decade by having adoped vBulletin software in the first place, rather than continually reinventing defective wheels.
I agree that vBulletin is excellent forum software and I am sometimes frustrated with the clunkiness[:$] of what Trains is using.
But I suspect that there are other considerations at work in this case. It may be that the Trains print/web paid subscriber database and customer service functions is integrated into the current software. Doing so would probably limit the options for choosing forum software, and may preclude utilizing vBulletin.
From a business standpoint, Kalmbach’s primary focus must be to drive revenue to the bottom line, and that dictates what forum software is most suitable for their purpose.
I always thought it was to see if you were popular enough to sit at the cool kids table during lunch.
I was somewhat surprised to discover that I have four “friends” on this “friend” function and only one of them is a familiar name. The rest, I am ashamed to say, I no longer recall at all. But I think it dates back to when things like this Forum were new and different and even sort of “exciting” – we had “Trains Forum Member” T shirts and we would have get togethers at Galesburg RR Days, various train shows, and elsewhere. Photos would be posted. For the last few years the last hold out of all that has been a little group photo of Forum members at Trainfest in Milwaukee. That group has gotten smaller over the years.
Seemingly the thought was that a true community was being created and thus the Friends feature was a way of keeping track of persons you perhaps exchanged private messages with (in a few cases I sent surplus train stuff to guys who posted that they needed a certain part or whatever).
It is in short a holdover from an idealistic past when the world was fresh and new. But now it is driving me nuts who those other three friends are ,
Dave Nelson
You should be able to click on their names and see what threads they have posted in.
If they have not made any posts in several years they may have gone on to Grand Heavenly Station or maybe to the other end of the line… (or maybe just on to bigger and better things).
If you find some posts from them, maybe those posts will jog a few synapses into place.
Won’t you be my neighbor?
I thought I have gotten bigger over the years…[:O]
We need a trains.com forum members get together…
Hmmmmm…Where to have it???
In Lombard, at Carl and Pat’s favorite cafe? They serve excellent food (with fine desserts) there.
You could have had it on my sailboat, but I took it out of the water Sunday. Do you want to use the yacht club’s facilities? It’s just a few blocks from SEPTA’s Trenton line Torresdale station.
Heh … well we had a Trains Forum Member get together years ago in Galesburg IL during Railroad Days. Jeaton and I wore our t-shirts if I recall correctly.
Trains magazine had a tent for a display and just as all got to chatting the tent blew down and copies of Trains and Classic Trains went flying through the air as folks scrambled to hold the tent down. I think that was the last time we saw Kalmbach down at Galesburg … so beware there might be a Forum Members curse of some sort.
Dave Nelson
Sorry, I can’t help it–is there something about the name “Galesburg” that makes it windy?[:)]
Sounds like the plot for a B- rated horror movie.
When the monster chases you, always run upstairs.
You mean you don’t hide behind the wall of chainsaws?