Nidge2 wrote:
People have moved on and so have the times, you've got Facebook Taxi Groups, Wattsapp Taxi Groups. Web based Taxi Forums will die off in a few years IMO, they're like football forums, it's like putting lipstick on a pig.
But are any of them any good?
Facebook is just a glorified version of this kind of forum, and the software is utterly horrendous and presentation awful. Takes ages to load for me as well, and it often seems to get stuck while loading. I tend to avoid it unless I have to visit for some reason (our council's licensing section uses a Facebook page, for example). If I was to set up a site Facebook would be the last platform I would use
Twitter seems to be the other big one these days, but there's a word limit of about a couple of dozen words per post (tweet), so absolutely useless for posting articles, or for long-winded types like Edders
Or me
TaxiPoint is a great idea, and I'm not sure how long the likes of PHTM will last. Of course, PHTM has always been free and presumably depends on advertising revenue, so if it depended on people actually buying it I suspect it would have fallen by the wayside by now, or be teetering on the brink.
So TaxiPoint is basically the modern incarnation of the like of the old Taxi Talk magazine and one or two similar publications (not sure if any of them still exist, but it's a while since I've paid that much attention).
But to a degree TaxiPoint is also little more than a glorified forum like this, and the software it uses and/or the amount of bandwidth-hungry crap on its pages and/or because it's using a very slow server all mean that from a useability perspective it's utterly dire.
I mean, you click on the homepage, wait an eternity for it to load, then just when you think it's useable, it freezes again, and then you wait for the pop-up. Then it appears, and you've seen it a million times, so you didn't want to see it again anyway, but you can't get rid of it
Then when you do manage to get rid of it, and find an interesting article, you click on the link and then you have to go through the whole rigmarole again to get the article loaded, including the pop up again
So typically I wouldn't be surprised if it sometimes takes five minutes to get from clicking on the TaxiPoint homepage to getting an article up in a readable form. OK, my broadband connection isn't the fastest, and my laptop isn't state-of-the-art, but I mean...
And I think TaxiPoint also has comments or discussion/forum-based options, but seems to be very little interest there either.
So if it was up to me I'd go for a TaxiPoint-style idea, but obviously less London-oriented, and using less a less bloated/more useable platform.
But I can't ever see any of these things generating much in the way of interest, so 10 out of 10 for effort from the TaxiPoint crew, but personally I don't think it would be worth all the effort.
(Presumably most people are aware that they've also got a magazine format that can be downloaded now, which is to a degree just a rehash of the daily news updates, but they also seem to have some extra opinion pieces and the like, but I've never had the time to have a proper look.)
So although the forum software here is very primitive, it does the job, and the likes of Facebook just makes things a whole lot messier in my opinion, without adding much in the way of benefit.
(And all the above demonstrates why Twitter is absolutely useless for this kind of thing - this post would have to be spread over several dozen 'tweets'. And I don't have a clue about WhatsApp
)