A new year approaches

As the new year approaches we look back at the last year and do a stock check.

All in all I found this year very good both personally and from a site perspective.

Personally, because I got a new job and a very good one too which enabled me to replenish the stores I have used whilst unemployed and also buy myself some of the kit I have been looking for. With the replenishment of my food stores I am now back to where I was proir to losing my job. Plus I have a lot of new toys and new friends to play with.

Site wise things have been just as good. I made a few more contacts and was able to gain some more experiences which will help in an event. I even managed to upgrade my FAC thanks to one of the members being in a position to help. That was greatly appreciated although expensive. The site has settled down a lot with some good quality articles and discussions taking place and we have a good core of memebers who are contributing some very good advice and experiences. It isn’t perfect and I’m making some changes which will be mentioned later to improve it slightly.

Stat wise we have 1050 users of the main site with a further 450 taking the main site by RSS daily. We also have a dozen regular contributers and commenters to the main site. There are 161 users registered in the contact database and I know that people have been using it to make contact, which is what it was for. On the forum stats are more difficult to work out as each thread read is a set of hits depending on what pics and how many replies are there but it looks like around 1100 users with 320 registered to write threads or reply to threads while 106 of those have not done so for some strange reason. There are 3,434 threads with 39,230 posts most of which contribute towards our knowledge base and aid us in our prepping needs. Some have been very informative and introduced many people to new ideas and ways of doing things. We are growing at the rate of 4 new people a week and about 3% on threads and posts. All in all a very good year for us. Pat yourself on the back because it is all down to you.

Of course nothing is perfect and we still continue to be persecuted by our government who want to demonise us and turn us all into sheep. The reality is that more and more sheeple are actually waking up. There will be moves afoot to stop that in the usual knee jerk action of banning things. No big shock there.

In addition there were a couple of minor spats on the forum. Nothing too exciting but even so they were in discussions that were little to do with prepping and more to do with politics and religion. Both of these areas are areas that touch on prepping in a minor way which gives the reason for posting, but soon degenerates into personal attacks. It happens on the other threads as well as peoples beliefs and decisions are questioned but a lot less frequently. So because of this I’m going to reduce the News area to just one forum called News and I’m going to ruthlessly moderate it by culling duplicates by simply deleting the duplicate thread and closing off any threads that go off topic. This means that I’m not interested in a thread saying ‘Iran is being attacked because of X’ and another later to say the ‘US has moved into position to attack Iran’ is the same thing as far as preppers are concerned. Add the update in the comments under the first post. In addition I want peoples opinions on the threads so when someone says ‘Tesco’s Beans are the best’ and someone else says ‘Asda’s beans are the best’ then that is OK but the second it reduces to attacks I’m going to delete any post attacking anyone else, close the thread and the person(s) who are attacking will get sanctioned, the sanction can be a warning or a ban depending on what it is and I don’t care if you think you are defending yourself. Play nice. People are here to learn and their opinions are just as valid as yours.

Finally, people have requested that the Humour section stays. I was going to remove it but I’m OK with leaving it but I want it kept relevant to prepping. Any non prepping jokes will be removed and the poster may have their rights to post there removed.

I’ll make these changes on the 1st January 2013.

The bottom line is that you are all adults. I don’t have the time to moderate the forum and so far it has worked out fine. Everyone has kept to the rules but some subjects are just too extreme to touch although there have been very few issues and those were quickly resolved so I don’t see the need to moderate posts or perform any sort of censorship. If you think that keeping posts on topic is censorship then you are wrong. I make no money from this site, I put it here to help others, make contacts and help educate people who still have blinkers on. It is for all our benefits really. If you really want to post about non prepping things then there are plenty of web sites out there who will be happy for you to post there.

Keep doing what you are doing and I’ll have time to make the site more relevant with some suggestions from our contributors. I should even be able to keep some of the files up to date. If we all stick to prepping then we will all get something useful out of the site.