Stewart wrote:
I only contribute to this forum as I consider it to be the only independant forum in the UK and when I do a post on our own forum it is little or no effort to cut and paste the content to this one. Without a diverse set of contributions from industry a forum becomes nothing more than a glorified chat room.
Considering the size of the Taxi industry in the UK I am somewhat surprised by the lack of contributors to TDO as it really is the only independant.
You may be as familiar with the regulatory side of the industry as I am with your technical knowlege Stewart, but in any case you may have noticed that the site generally challenges some of the vested interests in the trade, unlike most (all?) other sites and publications which tend to represent the vested interest view.
To that extent the site was never intended to win any popularity contests, and the relatively poor readership figures bear this out.
Also, what is equally clear is that the taxi 'net community' is relatively small in relation to the total trade, with the core contributors either flitting from one site to another in the past two to three years, or confining themselves to more specialist sites such as your own support-type site or London trade-oriented ones.
Combining the two factors has resulted in relatively poor readership figures, and even poorer ones in terms of contributions, and you are correct that some of the more strident (to put it mildly) contributions may put a lot of people off, but historically sites of this type (not just trade-related ones) have demonstrated a difficulty in striking a reasonable balance between free speech and civilised discussion.
There is perhaps some consolation in the fact that the site is the busiest of its kind, at the moment at least, and readership figures for the articles featured on our homeage are considerably higher than for the forum.
Apart from TTFUK at its peak this forum is probably as busy as all the other similar sites in the UK put together, including the several sites aimed at local trades.
Sad but true.