Dumped after 11 years free service and a hat trick of locked boxes says it all.

Wonder who will be next.

What a way to go I hope the FE sleeps well tonight.

Probably just a matter of time till this one gets locked as well.

Sorry bremner for going off subject but I just noticed the last locked thread of morddwyd's.

Rather Pathetic I thought.

Removing the option to yellow envelope other forum members was a serious flaw in the new design.

Now chit chat between members is construed as meaningless drivel from the hierarchy.

buteman

has it about right.

FE has head in sand and whistles to drown out the rumblings from the lower ranks.

A social networking site is an entirely separate entity - it isn't something that can simply be tacked onto a computer magazine website.

What I think you mean when you refer to a place where "posters can discuss their personal, social and medical problems" is a kind of chat-room, and we've done that before. People who have been with us for many years will remember that time, and they'll probably remember the problems we had with endless personal abuse and bad behaviour. It got so bad that we had to call a halt to it. After a while I backed calls to have a forum area where we could discuss things that weren't always computer-related, and Speakers Corner was born.

One of the problems with any kind of discussion forum is that if you're not careful they invariably end up as a sort of club, where a smallish group of people believe that they have the right to special treatment. It's almost inevitable, and it always ends in tears at some point.

For a forum like ours to work - and it has worked, for over a decade - it must be run along fairly formal lines, and everyone must adhere to a code of conduct, either written or unwritten. There will be arguments, and at times they'll be very heated - people lose their tempers, and they say things in haste that they may later regret. It's human nature, and I've become used to weathering the storms. I've had all kinds of comments directed at me over the past ten years, some of them extremely unpleasant, and I've seen many people come and go. I've been involved with several web forums in my time, and all of them except this one have ultimately failed because a few regular users thought they could dictate how things should be run.

There's no reason to believe that a social network style of forum would do any better here now than it did in the past, and we're not considering adding another forum at the moment.

ed-0

"Now chit chat between members is construed as meaningless drivel from the hierarchy."

Really - where did you get that idea from? I invite you to point out where anyone from 'the heirarchy' has mentioned meaningless drivel.

"FE has head in sand and whistles to drown out the rumblings from the lower ranks"

Something else you've imagined. FE is here,responding to your inaccurate comments.