Well...I was waiting for the changes to be met with plenty of push back and I was not disappointed. I had planned yesterday to make an announcement right after the changes BUT this topic was almost immediately started so I decided to wait for some feedback.
Let me give you some history about these changes. They were offered by another forum member that participated in an earlier thread a few weeks ago concerned about how the mods were deleting misplaced posts and the mix mash of categories we have. I chimed in and gave some reasons why this was happening and asked that if anyone had some suggestions to make the descriptions better, to contact me. I got exactly ONE response! The changes you see are verbatim from the suggested changes. Interesting that many of you that are posting your dislike for these changes also participated in the earlier thread but didn't take me up on submitting CONSTRUCTIVE suggestions on how we can make these categories easier to understand.
We have all of the categories because over the years forum members wanted them and asked to have specialized places where they could participate in their area of interest. This is not OGR's fault, we were just trying to make as many people happy as possible but as the old saying goes, one can not please everyone!
OK...so I am very open to CONSTRUCTIVE suggestions. I have no problem with reducing the number of categories because frankly I also believe we have too many! Keep in mind we contract this site with Crowdstack so certain things we can not do on our own and have to ask if Crowdstack is willing to make those changes we want. MOST of the time they won't or can't. Also, there may be the problem of whether or not we can combine categories. In other words, during the reduction of categories, we may not be able to combine them which means we would PERHAPS have to do away with or close topics that you all like which would mean you would have to just start over in the new consolidated category.
With all of the above said, the intention of the changes were to try to distinguish between toy traditionally sized trains and more modern scale sized trains. Tinplate trains whether they can be run on 3-rail, 2-rail, or windup seemed to me to obviously go into the tinplate category but heck, what do I know. I didn't want to over analyze this. Basically, if a train was produced and it is traditionally sized, runs on traditional track and doe not have modern electronics I see as going into the traditional 0-27, etc. category. If a train is scale sized and has modern electronics then we have individual manufacturer categories for those. I however do see some of the confusion and agree with many of the comments above.
Lets work together on this. I would like you to take time to really come up with a plan for our categories. After all, I want this forum to flow easier and make sense as far as categories. I don't like the fact that topics get deleted because we have precious little time and resources to move them all over the place to make sure they are in the correct forum. SO....PLEASE submit in this thread REAL plans for the categories you want keeping in mind all of the possible topics that generally come up. By the way, we are not going to have a general category for discussion about things other than trains. It always becomes a problem with comments and "opinions" that go beyond the purpose of this forum.
Alright everyone, submit your plans and lets see what we can do. We will take suggestions for one week. Next weekend I will go through them and then give an update.
I really appreciate you all!
Alan
