Most Bizarre Model Railroad Behavior

[ezdays]

I am the owner/moderator of a Yahoo group for Samoyed owners. I have 72 worldwide members, a select group and all friends. Many of us have met and had parties in person. We talk about anything and everything except religion and politics. The group is 6 years old and we average 4000 posts a month, and we come from all walks of life and beliefs. The same thing that makes The Gauge work is what makes our group work.
I have lost some new members because they thought discussing off topic things were out of line. The ones that hang on and start to contribute learn quick.
We do love our dogs though.

Charlie

The thing is, that I think a lot of forum owners, admins and mods think they control the world that they've created. They don't, the members do that, and within reason, we allow our members to take us in the direction they think we should go. We not only learn and share things about the things we have in common, like trains and modeling, but we get to know more about these people. We become friends and we want to talk about other things and we don't always need to stay on topic either. We have forums and threads where all of our topics are usually not related to the main focus of Big Blue. I want to know what the weather is like in other parts of the planet and I like knowing more about our member's daily life. and seeing pictures of their other hobbies. Off topic discussions like, "what's the best bread slicer made by man" turn out to be interesting since by the end of the thread, we wind up talking about boats, cars and going to Disneyland. :o That's good, that's healthy and most of all, it's fun.

Look at this thread, it started talking about stupid people smashing model trains just to show on YouTube, and went on to talk about destroying other property. We talked about the messes and vandalism that people create. then about target shooting, and on to using model trains to carry targets. It continued with a discussion on how we frequently wind up off topic, and who know where it goes from there. But we've learned a few things, we were serious for a bit, and we had a bit of light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek fun along the way. If this is the direction our members want us to go, so be it, we just want everyone to be happy and to continue coming back.